The Embiggening Bite That GPUs Take Out Of Datacenter Compute

We are still chewing through all of the announcements and talk at the GPU Technology Conference that Nvidia hosted in its San Jose stomping grounds last week, and as such we are thinking about the much bigger role that graphics processors are playing in datacenter compute – a realm that has seen five decades of dominance by central processors of one form or another.

That is how CPUs got their name, after all. And perhaps this is a good time to remind everyone that systems used to be a collection of different kinds of compute, and that is why the

The Embiggening Bite That GPUs Take Out Of Datacenter Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Shadow Brokers teases more Windows exploits and cyberespionage data

A group of hackers that previously leaked alleged U.S. National Security Agency exploits claims to have even more attack tools in its possession and plans to release them in a new subscription-based service.The group also has intelligence gathered by the NSA on foreign banks and ballistic missile programs, it said.The Shadow Brokers was responsible for leaking EternalBlue, the Windows SMB exploit that was used by attackers in recent days to infect hundreds of thousands of computers around the world with the WannaCry ransomware program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Shadow Brokers teases more Windows exploits and cyberespionage data

A group of hackers that previously leaked alleged U.S. National Security Agency exploits claims to have even more attack tools in its possession and plans to release them in a new subscription-based service.The group also has intelligence gathered by the NSA on foreign banks and ballistic missile programs, it said.The Shadow Brokers was responsible for leaking EternalBlue, the Windows SMB exploit that was used by attackers in recent days to infect hundreds of thousands of computers around the world with the WannaCry ransomware program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Data center network monitoring best practices part 3: Modernizing tooling

Implementing your strategy using modern tooling

In the previous two posts we discussed gathering metrics for long term trend analysis and then combining it with event-based alerts for actionable results. In order to combine these two elements, we need strong network monitoring tooling that allows us to overlay these activities into an effective solution.

Understanding drawbacks of older network monitoring tooling

The legacy approach to monitoring is to deploy a monitoring server that periodically polls your network devices via Simple Network Management Protocol. SNMP is a very old protocol, originally developed in 1988. While some things do get better with age, computer protocols are rarely one of them. SNMP has been showing its age in many ways.

Inflexibility

SNMP uses data structures called MIBs to exchange information. These MIBs are often proprietary, and difficult to modify and extend to cover new and interesting metrics.

Polling vs event driven

Polling doesn’t offer enough granularity to catch all events. For instance, even if you check disk utilization once every five minutes, you may go over threshold and back in between intervals and never know.

An inefficient protocol

SNMP’s polling design is a “call and response” protocol, this means the monitoring server will Continue reading

The Latest Docker Certified Container and Plugins for March and April 2017

The Docker Certification Program provides a way for technology partners to validate and certify their software or plugin as a container for use on the Docker Enterprise Edition platform.  Since the initial launch of the program in March, more Containers and Plugins have been certified and available for download.

 Docker Certified containers

Certified Containers and Plugins are technologies that are built with best practices as Docker containers, tested and validated against the Docker Enterprise Edition platform and APIs, pass security requirements, reviewed by Docker partner engineering and cooperatively supported by both Docker and the partner. Docker Enterprise Edition and Certified Technology provide assurance and support to businesses for their critical application infrastructure.

Check out the latest Docker Certified technologies to the Docker Store:

WannaCry makes me want to cry!

As I read about the WannaCry ransomware attack, my brain is racing with thoughts about the causes and effects of this global incident. Here are my two cents:1. Ransomware continues to be a growth business, and a bit of work can provide a serious return. The FBI estimated that ransomware payments topped $1 billion in 2016, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw 100 percent year-over-year growth. 2. For those of us who’ve been in cybersecurity for a while, WannaCry brings back memories of the internet worms we saw back in the 2000s (i.e. Code Red, Conficker, MSBlast, Nimda, etc.). Once one person on a network was infected, WannaCry simply went out and infected other vulnerable systems on the network. I knew that worm techniques would come back, but I always thought they’d be used as a smokescreen for other attacks. Looks like ransomware and internet worms can be as compatible as chocolate and peanut butter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WannaCry makes me want to cry!

As I read about the WannaCry ransomware attack, my brain is racing with thoughts about the causes and effects of this global incident. Here are my two cents:1. Ransomware continues to be a growth business, and a bit of work can provide a serious return. The FBI estimated that ransomware payments topped $1 billion in 2016, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw 100 percent year-over-year growth. 2. For those of us who’ve been in cybersecurity for a while, WannaCry brings back memories of the internet worms we saw back in the 2000s (i.e. Code Red, Conficker, MSBlast, Nimda, etc.). Once one person on a network was infected, WannaCry simply went out and infected other vulnerable systems on the network. I knew that worm techniques would come back, but I always thought they’d be used as a smokescreen for other attacks. Looks like ransomware and internet worms can be as compatible as chocolate and peanut butter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WannaCry Makes Me Want to Cry!

As I read about the WannaCry ransomware attack, my brain is racing with thoughts about the causes and effects of this global incident.  Here’s my two cents:1.      Ransomware continues to be a growth business, and a bit of work can provide a serious return.  The FBI estimated that Ransomware payments topped $1 billion in 2016, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw 100% year-over-year growth. 2.      For those of us who’ve been in cybersecurity for a while, WannaCry brings back memories of the Internet worms we saw back in the 2000s (i.e. Code Red, Conficker, MSBlast, Nimda, etc.).  Once one person on a network was infected, WannaCry simply went out and infected other vulnerable systems on the network.  I knew that worm techniques would come back but I always thought they’d be used as a smokescreen for other attacks.  Looks like Ransomware and Internet worms can be as compatible as chocolate and peanut butter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why WannaCry won’t change anything

The tally of damage from the WannaCry ransomware attack keeps growing, but it’s still not even close to bad enough to force real changes in cybersecurity. According to The New York Times, more than 200,000 machines in more than 150 countries around the world have been infected, but the responses being discussed still center around patches and passwords, updates and antivirus, backups and contingency plans. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why WannaCry won’t change anything

The tally of damage from the WannaCry ransomware attack keeps growing, but it’s still not even close to bad enough to force real changes in cybersecurity. According to The New York Times, more than 200,000 machines in more than 150 countries around the world have been infected, but the responses being discussed still center around patches and passwords, updates and antivirus, backups and contingency plans. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cray Supercomputing as a Service Becomes a Reality

For a mature company that kickstarted supercomputing as we know it, Cray has done a rather impressive job of reinventing itself over the years.

From its original vector machines, to HPC clusters with proprietary interconnects and custom software stacks, to graph analytics appliances engineered in-house, and now to machine learning, the company tends not to let trends in computing slip by without a new machine.

However, all of this engineering and tuning comes at a cost—something that, arguably, has kept Cray at bay when it comes to reaching the new markets that sprung up in the “big data” days of

Cray Supercomputing as a Service Becomes a Reality was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Shadow Brokers announce monthly data dump service

The Shadow Brokers are back once again, offering buyers not just exploits, but also “compromised network data from Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or North Korean nukes and missile programs.”Seemingly capitalizing on the success of WannaCry ransomware, which used EternalBlue and DoublePulsar – tools developed by the NSA’s Equation Group – the Shadow Brokers want to sell new exploits every month to people who pay a membership fee.The hacking group dubbed its new monthly subscription model “TheShadowBrokers Data Dump of the Month;” the service kicks off in June. The Shadow Brokers claim not to care what Data Dump of the Month service members do with the exploits. The group teased:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here