Keeping our users safe

Keeping our users safe

To everyone in Cloudflare, account security is one of our most important tasks. We recognize that to every customer on our platform, we are critical infrastructure. We also know that the simplest attacks often lead to the most devastating of outcomes. Most people think that if they are going to get hacked it will be by some clever ”zero day”. The reality couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Attackers are smart and they have realized that even in 2018, the human is still the weakest link in the chain. The 2017 Verizon breach report identified that 81% of hacking related breaches occurred as a result of weak credentials or credential theft, an increase from the 63% reported in 2016’s breach report.

Keeping our users safe

Source: Verizon 2017 data breach report

Your credentials are as important as your house or car keys. If someone copies or steals them, the repercussions can be catastrophic. If you suspect someone has access to your house keys you change your locks. If you aren’t fast enough, someone might break in.

Likewise if you realize that someone might have access to your password, the remedy is to change it. Too often, as with house keys, we are slow to Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Comparing global internet access services for SD-WAN: huge differences in pricing and quality

All too often, IT teams make the mistake of thinking about Internet access as a commodity, failing to consider how well connected a provider is with the rest of the Internet. Picking the right Internet service, especially internationally, can be extremely important when evaluating SD-WAN solutions from companies like Aryaka, Cato Networks, Cisco (Viptela or Meraki), Open Systems, Silver Peak, Versa or VMware (Velocloud).To better understand why looking at the quality of an Internet service is so important, I gathered global pricing and configuration information from my friends at GlobalInternet, a global aggregator of Internet access connections. Here’s what we found.To read this article in full, please click here

Weekend Reads 180216: Skimmers and MITM and x509 Covert Channels, oh my…

When you realize how easy it is for thieves to compromise an ATM or credit card terminal with skimming devices, it’s difficult not to inspect or even pull on these machines when you’re forced to use them personally — half expecting something will come detached. For those unfamiliar with the stealth of these skimming devices and the thieves who install them, read on. @Krebs on Security

Here is a short blog post that explains how you can make your own Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) setup for sniffing the traffic between a SIM card and the backend server. This is NOT a new research but I hope this will help anyone who doesn’t have a telco background to get started to play with mobile data sniffing and fake base stations. This is applicable to many scenarios today as we have so many IoT devices with SIM cards in it that connects to the backend. —Priya Chalakkal @The Insinuator

He got the idea while analyzing the Vawtrak malware after discovering that it read multiple fields in the X.509 certificate provided by the server before proceeding. Jason initially thought these fields were used as a C2 channel, but then realized that Vawtrak performed a Continue reading

What it means to be an “automation first” enterprise

We’ve previously discussed how automation can give engineers some well-deserved extra free time. So how do those benefits extend to helping the company as a whole? Well, according to TechTarget’s article analyzing Gartner’s recent report about network innovation, there are some pretty obvious indicators that a company is putting automation first and achieving success. All a business has to do is take advantage of the automation practices used by hyperscale data centers. While it may sound impossible to operate on the same level as cloud giants like Amazon and Facebook, Gartner’s report states that there is a remarkable increase in efficiency and agility enterprises mimic from even 1% to 10% of the practices in hyperscale data centers. In this post, we’ll discuss what it looks like to be an “automation first” enterprise. And from what we can tell, it looks pretty good!

Reduced costs

Adopting automation doesn’t just save you time — it also saves you money. Let’s start with the fact that proprietary solutions are incredibly expensive on their own. In addition to steep initial costs, proprietary vendors prevent additional savings by not allowing customers to take advantage of automation tools like Ansible, Puppet and Chef. However, these capabilities Continue reading

Supercomputing At The Crossroads

The supercomputing business, the upper stratosphere of the much broader high performance computing segment of the IT industry, is without question one of the most exciting areas in data processing and visualization.

It is also one of the most frustrating sectors in which to try to make a profitable living. The customers are the most demanding, the applications are the most complex, the budget pressures are intense, the technical challenges are daunting, the governments behind major efforts can be capricious, and the competition is fierce.

This is the world where Cray, which literally invented the supercomputing field, and its competitors …

Supercomputing At The Crossroads was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Network Engineer Certification in 2018


Last week I was in Mountain View, in a room full of senior Network Engineers, and we were talking about the skills that need to be developed by more junior Network Engineers. Suddenly someone shouted from the back "CCIE!" and the whole room started laughing.

So CCIE is a laughing stock now?

No need to get offended. You have to understand the context here:
These group of people have been working for the best company in the world. They have been working on the most advanced network infrastructure. The company's undersea cables connect all contingents, to delivers 25% of worldwide Internet traffic.


These people didn't develop their skill through certification. They developed their skills by building the real stuff. When these group of Network Engineers realized the network capacity in the company's data centers has grown so fast that conventional routers and switches can't keep up to meet the requirements of its distributed systems, they decided to build its own instead. These Network Engineers build and operate software-defined networking, before the world invented that terminology. They've been automating network operation in Data Center, WAN, Internet Peering, all the way to Wifi and Enterprise networking, to support 7 company's Continue reading

Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of NDSS

This year we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). NDSS is a premier academic research conference addressing a wide range of topics associated with improving trust in the Internet and its connected devices. A key focus of the Internet Society has long been improving trust in the global open Internet. In order to promote this trust, we need new and innovative ideas and research on the security and privacy of our connected devices and the Internet that connects them together.

NDSS 2018 is about to get underway in San Diego, CA (18-21 February). It will be the biggest NDSS symposium yet, featuring 71 peer-reviewed papers, 20 posters, 4 workshops, 2 keynotes, and a co-located research group meeting. Record registration numbers are a key indicator that NDSS 2018 is featuring vital and timely topics. Below are some of the highlights expected in the coming week.

Workshops

This year’s program officially starts with four workshops on Sunday, 18 February. NDSS workshops are organized around a single topic and provide an opportunity for greater dialogue amongst researchers and practitioners in the area. Each of this year’s workshop have dynamic agendas.

The Workshop on Binary Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 16th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

 

Snow? Last march of the faeries? Nope. It's 1218 of Shooting Star drones forming the Olympic symbol. *chills*

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And I'd appreciate if you would recommend my new book—Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10—to anyone who needs to understand the cloud (who doesn't?). I think they'll learn a lot, even if they're already familiar with the basics.

  • 63.2%: Americans with one and only one cable provider; $1.5 billion: spend on chip startups last year; $7.5 billion: Uber sales; $4.5 billion: Uber loss; 180 TFLOPS: computation accessible via the TensorFlow programming model from a Google Cloud VM; 10x: computational capabilities of the human brain than previously thought; 10 million: went live on Facebook sharing 47% more Live videos than the previous year; 1.7 million: HQ players during Superbowl; 1/400: power to perform public-key encryption; 8 bit: custom CPU build from scratch; $8,500: daily take from mining Monero with your botnet; 10,000: datasets shared on Kaggle; 41%: NVIDIA revenue growth; 14x: real world 4G LTE vs. 5G Continue reading

Requests for Cisco Catalyst 9300 are up … what’s the intent?

My project engineering staff has been getting more and more information requests for Cisco’s new line of Catalyst 9000 switches, especially the 9300 switch. That has me wondering why.Cisco touts the Catalyst 9300 Series as the next generation of the industry's most widely deployed stackable switching platform that’s built for security, the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing. It’s part of a line of network switches that form the foundation for Cisco's Software-Defined Access, its leading enterprise architecture.One reason for the increased interest could be Cisco’s recently announced new intent-based networking system. Cisco believes that by adopting an intent-based approach, networks will be able to deliver a solution that introduces an onslaught of applications and devices that provide greater efficiency and address new security threats.To read this article in full, please click here

Requests for Cisco Catalyst 9300 are up … what’s the intent?

My project engineering staff has been getting more and more information requests for Cisco’s new line of Catalyst 9000 switches, especially the 9300 switch. That has me wondering why.Cisco touts the Catalyst 9300 Series as the next generation of the industry's most widely deployed stackable switching platform that’s built for security, the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing. It’s part of a line of network switches that form the foundation for Cisco's Software-Defined Access, its leading enterprise architecture.One reason for the increased interest could be Cisco’s recently announced new intent-based networking system. Cisco believes that by adopting an intent-based approach, networks will be able to deliver a solution that introduces an onslaught of applications and devices that provide greater efficiency and address new security threats.To read this article in full, please click here

Making Alexa Tech Demos Useful

Technology always marches on. People want to see the latest gadgets doing amazing things, whether it be flying electric cars or telepathic eyeglasses. Our society is obsessed with the Jetsons and the look of the future. That’s why we’re developing so many devices to help us get there. But it’s time for IT to reconsider how they are using one of them for a purpose far from the original idea.

Speaking For The People

By all accounts, the Amazon Echo is a masterful device. It’s a smart speaker that connects to an Amazon service that offers you a wider variety of software programs, called skills, to enhance what you can do with it. I have several of these devices that were either given out as conference attendance gifts or obtained from other giveaways.

I find the Echo speaker a fascinating thing. It’s a good speaker. It can play music through my phone or other Bluetooth-connected devices. But, I don’t really use it for that purpose. Instead, I use the skills to do all kinds of other things. I play Jeopardy! frequently. I listen to news briefings and NPR on a regular basis. I get weather forecasts. My son uses Continue reading

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