NetworkingNexus.net

Hacker dumps, magnet links, and you

In an excellent post pointing out Wikileaks deserves none of the credit given them in the #MacronLeaks, the author erroneously stated that after Archive.org took down the files, that Wikileaks provided links to a second archive. This is not true. Instead, Wikileaks simply pointed to what's known as "magnet links" of the first archive. Understanding magnet links is critical to understanding all these links and dumps, so I thought I'd describe them.

The tl;dr version is this: anything published via BitTorrent has a matching "magnet link" address, and the contents can still be reached via magnet links when the original publisher goes away.

In this case, the leaker uploaded to "archive.org", a popular Internet archiving resource. This website allows you to either download files directly, which is slow, or via peer-to-peer using BitTorrent, which is fast. As you know, BitTorrent works by all the downloaders exchanging pieces with each other, rather getting them from the server. I give you a piece you don't have, in exchange for a piece I don't have.

BitTorrent, though still requires a "torrent" (a ~30k file that lists all the pieces) and a "tracker" (http://bt1.archive.org:6969/announce) that keeps a list Continue reading

Using a Makefile with Markdown Documents

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of using Markdown (specifically, MultiMarkdown) for the vast majority of all the text-based content that I create. Over the last few years, I’ve created used various tools and created scripts to help “reduce the friction” involved with outputting Markdown source files into a variety of destination formats (HTML, RTF, or DOCX, for example). Recently, thanks to Cody Bunch, I was pointed toward the use of a Makefile to assist in this area. After a short period of experimentation, I’m finding that I really like this workflow, and I wanted to share some details here with my readers.

First, if you’re not familiar with make and its use of a Makefile, check out this introduction. There’s a ton of power and flexibility here, of which I’ve only scratched the surface so far. The basic gist behind a Makefile is that it provides a set of instructions to the make command. Each set of instructions is tied to a target, which has one or more dependencies. In the “traditional” use cases for make, this is to allow programmers to define how a set of files should be compiled as well Continue reading

iPhone 8 Rumor Rollup: Tim Cook cites rumors; LTE shortfall; envisioning a function area

If you think you’re sick of the iPhone 8 rumors, pity Apple CEO Tim Cook, who acknowledged during a Q&A following the company’s earnings results announcement this past week that “earlier and much more frequent reports about future iPhones” did in fact “pause” purchases of current models.451 Research, issuing smartphone demand survey findings this week, concurred with Cook's assessment, noting that while Apple remains the preferred manufacturer among planned smartphone buyers surveyed, much fewer of them are planning purchases in the next 90 days as they anticipate iPhone 7s, iPhone 7s Plus and possibly a 10th-anniversary premium phone. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 8 Rumor Rollup: Tim Cook cites rumors; LTE shortfall; envisioning a function area

Anonymity and Abuse Reports

Last Thursday, ProPublica published an article critiquing our handling of some abuse reports that we receive. Feedback from the article caused us to reevaluate how we handle abuse reports. As a result, we've decided to update our abuse reporting system to allow individuals reporting threats and child sexual abuse material to do so anonymously. We are rolling this change out and expect it to be available by the end of the week.

I appreciate the feedback we received. How we handle abuse reports has evolved over the last six and a half years of Cloudflare's history. I wanted to take this opportunity to walk through some of the rationale that got us to this point and caused us to have a blindspot to the case that was highlighted in the article.

What Is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is not a hosting provider. We do not store the definitive copy of any of the content that someone may want to file an abuse claim about. If we terminate a customer it doesn’t make the content go away. Instead, we are more akin to a specialized network. One of the functions of the network that we provide is to add security to the content Continue reading

HandBrake mirror server hacked to serve up Proton RAT for Macs

If you recently downloaded the HandBrake app for Mac, then there’s a good chance your system is infected with a nasty Remote Access Trojan (RAT).On Saturday, the HandBrake team posted a security alert after learning one of the mirror download servers was hacked. The attacker replaced the Mac version of the HandBrake client with a malicious version.In case you don’t know, HandBrake is an open source video transcoder app which allows users to convert video to other formats.The HandBrake team said an attacker compromised the download mirror server at download.handbrake.fr and replaced the HandBrake-1.0.7.dmg installer file with a version infected with a new variant of the Proton RAT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HandBrake mirror server hacked to serve up Proton RAT for Macs

Top Reasons To Attend AnsibleFest London 2017

I remember the first AnsibleFest I attended – it was San Francisco 2014. I had been with Ansible for a week and had flown out to meet some of my new colleagues.

As a user of Ansible for the past year, I'd discovered how cheery and helpful the community was. "Newbies" dropping by the IRC channel on Freenode were always helped out, no matter how simple the question. The community spirit is something many people comment on when first using Ansible.

I remember meeting core engineer Brian Coca for the first time at that AnsibleFest too, also a recent joiner to the company. Brian was asked that morning if he'd give a talk, a request he calmly accepted as if he'd been asked to make a cup of tea. Top tip – never miss a talk given by Brian, you will learn something new!

Later, during the happy hour, I talked with lots of attendees, many just wanting to tell us how much they'd enjoyed the day. It was great to see the open source community feel extending to our full day conferences.

Two and half years later and I still see that community spirit day in, day out. Only now it's Continue reading

OpenVPN TAP adapter MTU in Windows

Recently I was in need of setting up some windows clients to connect to my OpenVPN server. This server running on Linux, uses a specific MTU value (let’s say 1400) to ensure maximum compatibility with different clients over different links.

In addition to the OpenVPN process itself, the kernel must also know about the correct MTU so packet size could be adjusted before reaching the tun/tap interface.

This is very easy to do in Linux. In fact you most likely do not need to do anything at all. OpenVPN will adjusted the MTU of the tun/tap interface while creating it. You can check the interfaces effective MTU by using ip link show or ifconfig command.

The same however can not be said about Windows. In a typical scenario, OpenVPN is not even directly responsible for creating the said interface. Instead, it requires the interface to be already in placed (which is achieved by calling tapinstall.exe during the initial setup) and then it would connect to it.

So even though you have specified your MTU settings in the OpenVPN profile, at least at the time of writing, this does not reflect the MTU of the interface that Windows kernel would Continue reading

HPC System Delays Stall InfiniBand

Enterprise spending on servers was a bit soft in the first quarter, as evidenced by the financial results posted by Intel and by its sometime rival IBM, but the hyperscale and HPC markets, at least when it comes to networking, was a bit soft, according to high-end network chip and equipment maker Mellanox Technologies.

In the first quarter ended March 31, Mellanox had a 4.1 percent revenue decline, to $188.7 million, and because of higher research and development costs, presumably associated with the rollout of 200 Gb/sec Quantum InfiniBand technology (which the company has talked about) and …

HPC System Delays Stall InfiniBand was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Rambus, Microsoft Put DRAM Into Deep Freeze To Boost Performance

Energy efficiency and operating costs for systems are as important as raw performance in today’s datacenters. Everyone from the largest hyperscalers and high performance computing centers to large enterprises that are sometimes like them are trying squeeze as much performance as they can from their infrastructure while reining in power consumption and the costs associated with keeping it all from overheating.

Throw in the slowing down of Moore’s Law and new emerging workloads like data analytics and machine learning, and the challenge to these organizations becomes apparent.

In response, organizations on the cutting edge have embraced accelerators like GPUs and …

Rambus, Microsoft Put DRAM Into Deep Freeze To Boost Performance was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Some notes on #MacronLeak

Tonight (Friday May 5 2017) hackers dumped emails (and docs) related to French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron. He's the anti-Putin candidate running against the pro-Putin Marin Le Pen. I thought I'd write up some notes.

Are they Macron's emails?

No. They are e-mails from members of his staff/supporters, namely Alain Tourret, Pierre Person, Cedric O??, Anne-Christine Lang, and Quentin Lafay.

There are some documents labeled "Macron" which may have been taken from his computer, cloud drive -- his own, or an assistant.

Who done it?

Obviously, everyone assumes that Russian hackers did it, but there's nothing (so far) that points to anybody in particular.

It appears to be the most basic of phishing attacks, which means anyone could've done it, including your neighbor's pimply faced teenager.

Update: Several people [*] have pointed out Trend Micro reporting that Russian/APT28 hackers were targeting Macron back on April 24. Coincidentally, this is also the latest that emails appear in the dump.

What's the hacker's evil plan?

Everyone is proposing theories about the hacker's plan, but the most likely answer is they don't have one. Hacking is opportunistic. They likely targeted everyone in the campaign, and these were the Continue reading

Email dump hits French candidate Macron ahead of election

Another political campaign has been hit by an email dump. This time, the target is French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron.On Friday, his campaign said a massive and coordinated hack had breached the email inboxes of several staffers. This came after a mysterious user named “EMLEAKS” apparently dumped the stolen data through torrent files on text storage site Pastebin.It’s unclear if the information in the dump is genuine. Allegedly, the dump contains a 9GB trove of emails and photos. The torrent files, which were hosted on Archive.org, are no longer available there.But Macron’s campaign said the leaked files have been spreading over social media as the country prepares to vote for a new president on Sunday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Email dump hits French candidate Macron ahead of election

Q&A with Sean Boulter, Technical Solution Architect at Big Switch

Patch to fix Intel-based PCs with enterprise bug rolls out next week

Next week, PC vendors will start rolling out patches that fix a severe vulnerability found in certain Intel-based business systems, including laptops, making them easier to hack. Intel on Friday released a new notice urging clients to take steps to secure their systems.The chipmaker has also released a downloadable tool that can help IT administrators and users discover whether a machine they own has the vulnerability.In addition, vendors including Fujitsu, HP, and Lenovo have released lists showing which products are affected and when the patches will roll out. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Patch to fix Intel-based PCs with enterprise bug rolls out next week

Red Hat nicely positioned for the turn to cloud

Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst kicked off the company’s Summit meeting in Boston this week, which attracted more than 6,000 people, up 20% from last year. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with Whitehurst at the show for an update on the company’s position and prospects. One of your keynote speakers said 84% of Red Hat customers have cloud deployment strategies. Is the shift to cloud accelerating your business?I do think the shift to cloud is helping. We have data that shows our customers who use cloud actually grow faster in total with us than ones who don’t. The promise of cloud accelerates the Unix-to-Linux migration as people modernize applications to be able to move to cloud -- whether they move immediately or not -- because clouds primarily run Linux. In general, anything that makes people move to a new architecture is good for us because we have a high share of new architecture relative to old. I think that’s a big, big driver.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Commodifying words

Words (and by extension their constituent letters) are as free to utter and use as is the air sustaining life. No one owns them. There is no toll fee to be paid to dictionary makers who curate them. There are, however, two carve-outs from this public domain, namely words and letters businesses use as designations of origin for their marketplace presence, protected by trademark law; and words and letters arranged expressively by authors, protected by copyright law. The rights accruing to persons under these carve-outs — trademark more ancient than copyright (circa 1610) — have their roots in statutory and common law. —CircleID

The post Worth Reading: Commodifying words appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Are next-generation firewalls legacy technology?

A few years ago, next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) came out of nowhere to become a network security staple. These devices combined traditional L3/L4 packet filtering with deep packet inspection, IPS, and other network security services along with knowledge about users and applications. This broad functionality packaging changed the network security paradigm—everyone needed, or at least wanted a NGFW at the perimeter or within the internal network.Fast forward to 2017, and the bloom is coming off the NGFW rose for several reasons: Requirements have changed. NGFWs followed in the footsteps of earlier firewalls—physical appliances installed inline to protect private networks from the public Internet. Back then, mobile and remote office workers VPNed into the corporate network and traffic was backhauled for Internet ingress/egress. This model is changing rapidly, however. As cloud computing, SaaS, mobility and broadband networks evolved, mobile and remote worker connection are often dual homed, offering direct connections to the public internet. Once this happens, NGFWs lose their usefulness, offering no visibility or control of network traffic. Software is eating the world. Remember Marc Andreessen’s famous essay about the rise of software? Ironically, his publication doesn’t dedicate a single word to cybersecurity, but make no mistake, software is eating Continue reading

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