IP theft: Declining, or just more stealthy?

Eighteen months ago, President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced, with considerable fanfare, an agreement aimed at curbing economic espionage.According to the Sept. 25, 2015 White House press release, “neither country’s government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information, with the intent of providing competitive advantages to companies or commercial sectors.”So, with Xi due to meet with President Trump in early April, an obvious question is: Has the agreement been effective?The reviews on that are mixed, but there is general agreement that while it hasn’t stopped, the theft of intellectual property (IP) by the Chinese against the US is not as rampant as it was several years ago when The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property estimated total losses, including jobs, competitiveness, stock value, market share, in the hundreds of billions, and former National Security Agency director Gen. Keith Alexander famously called it, “the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10 Creators Update: The 5 biggest changes

Windows 10 just keeps getting bigger and better.Microsoft just announced that the Windows 10 Creators Update will start rolling out on April 11, building upon the foundation laid by vanilla Windows 10 and its subsequent “November” and “Anniversary” updates. While not every feature that Microsoft promised at the Creators Update’s reveal last fall actually made the final cut, it’s still overflowing with helpful new extras that polish rough edges and just plain make things more fun.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Open-source developers targeted in sophisticated malware attack

For the past few months, developers who publish their code on GitHub have been targeted in an attack campaign that uses a little-known but potent cyberespionage malware.The attacks started in January and consisted of malicious emails specifically crafted to attract the attention of developers, such as requests for help with development projects and offers of payment for custom programming jobs.The emails had .gz attachments that contained Word documents with malicious macro code attached. If allowed to execute, the macro code executed a PowerShell script that reached out to a remote server and downloaded a malware program known as Dimnie.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Open-source developers targeted in sophisticated malware attack

For the past few months, developers who publish their code on GitHub have been targeted in an attack campaign that uses a little-known but potent cyberespionage malware.The attacks started in January and consisted of malicious emails specifically crafted to attract the attention of developers, such as requests for help with development projects and offers of payment for custom programming jobs.The emails had .gz attachments that contained Word documents with malicious macro code attached. If allowed to execute, the macro code executed a PowerShell script that reached out to a remote server and downloaded a malware program known as Dimnie.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware patches critical virtual machine escape flaws

VMware has released critical security patches for vulnerabilities demonstrated during the recent Pwn2Own hacking contest that could be exploited to escape from the isolation of virtual machines.The patches fix four vulnerabilities that affect VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation Pro and Player and VMware Fusion.Two of the vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2017-4902 and CVE-2017-4903 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database, were exploited by a team from Chinese internet security firm Qihoo 360 as part of an attack demonstrated two weeks ago at Pwn2Own.The team's exploit chain started with a compromise of Microsoft Edge, moved to the Windows kernel, and then exploited the two flaws to escape from a virtual machine and execute code on the host operating system. The researchers were awarded $105,000 for their feat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware patches critical virtual machine escape flaws

VMware has released critical security patches for vulnerabilities demonstrated during the recent Pwn2Own hacking contest that could be exploited to escape from the isolation of virtual machines.The patches fix four vulnerabilities that affect VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation Pro and Player and VMware Fusion.Two of the vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2017-4902 and CVE-2017-4903 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database, were exploited by a team from Chinese internet security firm Qihoo 360 as part of an attack demonstrated two weeks ago at Pwn2Own.The team's exploit chain started with a compromise of Microsoft Edge, moved to the Windows kernel, and then exploited the two flaws to escape from a virtual machine and execute code on the host operating system. The researchers were awarded $105,000 for their feat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Encryption is key for a trusted Internet

One of the few regrets of Vint Cerf, who is often referred to as the 'father of the Internet', is the fact that encryption using public cryptography was not baked in the original ARPANET design. While the early Internet was meant to meet a number of requirements such as resilience and openness, encryption was not one of them. Some of this was because of the high cost associated with encryption, and some if it was for other reasons.

Walid Al-Saqaf

Arista EOS telemetry

Arista EOS switches support industry standard sFlow telemetry, enabling hardware instrumentation supported by merchant silicon to export hardware interface counters and flow data. The latest release of the open source Host sFlow agent has been ported to EOS, augmenting the telemetry with standard host CPU, memory, and disk IO metrics.

Linux as a Switch Operating System: Five Lessons Learned identifies benefits of using Linux as the basis for EOS. In this context, the Linux operating system made it easy to port the Host sFlow agent, use standard Linux package management (RPM Package Manager), and gather metrics using standard Linux APIs. A new eAPI module automatically synchronizes the Host sFlow daemon with the EOS sFlow configuration.

The following sflowtool output shows the additional metrics contributed by a Host sFlow agent installed on an Arista switch:
startDatagram =================================
datagramSourceIP 172.17.0.1
datagramSize 704
unixSecondsUTC 1490843418
datagramVersion 5
agentSubId 100000
agent 10.0.0.90
packetSequenceNo 714
sysUpTime 0
samplesInPacket 1
startSample ----------------------
sampleType_tag 0:2
sampleType COUNTERSSAMPLE
sampleSequenceNo 714
sourceId 2:1
counterBlock_tag 0:2001
counterBlock_tag 0:2010
udpInDatagrams 1459
udpNoPorts 16
udpInErrors 0
udpOutDatagrams 4765
udpRcvbufErrors 0
udpSndbufErrors 0
udpInCsumErrors 0
counterBlock_tag 0:2009
tcpRtoAlgorithm 1
tcpRtoMin 200
tcpRtoMax 120000
tcpMaxConn 4294967295
tcpActiveOpens 102
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PodPi makes STEM education exciting!

When I was a kid, the way science was taught was, on the whole, pretty boring … well, except for chemistry where the class chemistry wiz would “accidentally” blow things up or make horrible smells every now and then. Science was a class to get through with gritted teeth and even today, getting kids interested in STEM education (Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics) is still difficult. The problem is how to make topics that appear dry and complicated into something kids can get excited about. Five years ago, Stéphane Côme, the founder, chairman, and chief technology officer of LCS Technologies, a consulting firm specializing in Oracle database wrangling, decided that he wanted to give back to the community and that his focus should be on inspiring children to get involved with computers and software. Côme told me he started off by establishing a Meetup group to teach children and their parents through hands-on technology projects:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump extends Obama executive order on cyberattacks

U.S. President Donald Trump is extending by one year special powers introduced by former President Barack Obama that allow the government to issue sanctions against people and organizations engaged in significant cyberattacks and cybercrime against the U.S.Executive Order 13694 was introduced on April 1, 2015, and was due to expire on Saturday, but the president sent a letter to Congress on Wednesday evening informing it of his plans to keep it active."Significant malicious cyber-enabled activities originating from, or directed by persons located, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States, continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States," Trump wrote in the letter. "Therefore, I have determined that it is necessary to continue the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13694 with respect to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump extends Obama executive order on cyberattacks

U.S. President Donald Trump is extending by one year special powers introduced by former President Barack Obama that allow the government to issue sanctions against people and organizations engaged in significant cyberattacks and cybercrime against the U.S.Executive Order 13694 was introduced on April 1, 2015, and was due to expire on Saturday, but the president sent a letter to Congress on Wednesday evening informing it of his plans to keep it active."Significant malicious cyber-enabled activities originating from, or directed by persons located, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States, continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States," Trump wrote in the letter. "Therefore, I have determined that it is necessary to continue the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13694 with respect to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Extreme swallows Brocade’s data center networking business for $55M

Extreme Networks continued to amass a nice nest of data center technology saying today it would buy Brocade's data center networking business for $55 million in cash from its current owner Broadcom.Broadcom bought Brocade last year for about $5.5 billion but has since sold off Brocade’s Ruckus Wireless Wi-Fi business for $800 million to Arris International and now the data center networking business to Extreme.+More on Network World: When the Internet Engineering Task Force meets this week in Chicago it will have a new chair – Cisco Fellow Alissa Cooper +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Extreme swallows Brocade’s data center networking business for $55M

Extreme Networks continued to amass a nice nest of data center technology saying today it would buy Brocade's data center networking business for $55 million in cash from its current owner Broadcom.Broadcom bought Brocade last year for about $5.5 billion but has since sold off Brocade’s Ruckus Wireless Wi-Fi business for $800 million to Arris International and now the data center networking business to Extreme.+More on Network World: When the Internet Engineering Task Force meets this week in Chicago it will have a new chair – Cisco Fellow Alissa Cooper +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Extreme swallows Brocade’s data center networking business for $55M

Extreme Networks continued to amass a nice nest of data center technology saying today it would buy Brocade's data center networking business will be sold to Extreme for $55 million in cash from its current owner Broadcom.Broadcom bought Brocade last year for about $5.5 billion but has since sold off Brocade’s Ruckus Wireless Wi-Fi business for $800 million to Arris International and now the data center networking business to Extreme.+More on Network World: When the Internet Engineering Task Force meets this week in Chicago it will have a new chair – Cisco Fellow Alissa Cooper +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

G Suite vs. Office 365 cloud collaboration battle heats up

CIOs and IT managers are increasingly adopting Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google’s G Suite for collaboration, productivity and messaging. These cloud-based productivity suites are expanding, gaining new feature sets and new apps for enterprise users. Earlier this month, both Google and Microsoft introduced chat-based collaboration apps to reposition for competition in this fast evolving and hotly contested space.Microsoft's Teams, which has been in beta since November, was released for general availability for Office 365 customers. And Google introduced a rebuilt Hangouts, which has been split into two apps — Hangouts Chat for chat-based communications and Hangouts Meet for audio and video conferencing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to fend off cyberattacks and data breaches

According to research conducted by Symantec, the number of cyberattacks against small businesses (companies with fewer than 250 employees) has been steadily growing over the last six years, with hackers specifically targeting employees (phishing). And while distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks are still a leading form of cyber warfare, ransomware and malware attacks, targeting users of smartphones and internet of things (IoT) devices, as well as PCs and systems running on Macs and Linux, are also a big threat to small businesses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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