Microsoft to NSA: WannaCry is your fault

Microsoft’s top lawyer has blamed the government’s stockpiling of hacking tools as part of the reason for the WannaCry attack, the worldwide ransomware that has hit hundreds of thousands of systems in recent days.Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer, pointed out that WannaCrypt is based on an exploit developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and renewed his call for a new “Digital Geneva Convention,” which would require governments to report vulnerabilities to vendors rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft to NSA: WannaCry is your fault

Microsoft’s top lawyer has blamed the government’s stockpiling of hacking tools as part of the reason for the WannaCry attack, the worldwide ransomware that has hit hundreds of thousands of systems in recent days.Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer, pointed out that WannaCrypt is based on an exploit developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and renewed his call for a new “Digital Geneva Convention,” which would require governments to report vulnerabilities to vendors rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Regional Internet Exits in Large DMVPN Deployment

One of my readers wanted to implement a large DMVPN cloud with regional Internet exit points:

We need to deploy a regional Internet exits and I’d like to centralize them.  Each location with a local Internet exit will be in a region and that location will advertise a default-route into the DMVPN domain to only those spokes in that particular region.

He wasn’t particularly happy with the idea of deploying access and core DMVPN clouds:

Read more ...

IBM makes leap in quantum computing power

IBM has some new options for businesses wanting to experiment with quantum computing.Quantum computers, when they become commercially available, are expected to vastly outperform conventional computers in a number of domains, including machine learning, cryptography and the optimization of business problems in the fields of logistics and risk analysis.Where conventional computers deal in ones and zeros (bits) the processors in quantum computers use qubits, which can simultaneously hold the values one and zero. This -- to grossly oversimplify -- allows a quantum computer with a 5-qubit processor to perform a calculation for 32 different input values at the same time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Getting started with Calico on Kubernetes

In the last 4 posts we’ve examined the fundamentals of Kubernetes networking…

Kubernetes networking 101 – Pods

Kubernetes networking 101 – Services

Kubernetes networking 101 – (Basic) External access into the cluster

Kubernetes Networking 101 – Ingress resources

My goal with these posts has been to focus on the primitives and to show how a Kubernetes cluster handles networking internally as well as how it interacts with the upstream or external network.  Now that we’ve seen that, I want to dig into a networking plugin for Kubernetes – Calico.  Calico is interesting to me as a network engineer because of wide variety of functionality that it offers.  To start with though, we’re going to focus on a basic installation.  To do that, I’ve updated my Ansible playbook for deploying Kubernetes to incorporate Calico.  The playbook can be found here.  If you’ve been following along up until this point, you have a couple of options.

  • Rebuild the cluster – I emphasized when we started all this that the cluster should be designed exclusively for testing.  Starting from scratch is always the best in my opinion if you’re looking to make sure you don’t have any lingering configuration.  To do that you Continue reading

BrandPost: Solving the Challenge of Multi-Factor Authentication Adoption

With the move to the cloud, and the increasingly hostile threat landscape, protecting the enterprise network using positive user authentication is more critical than ever. However, as security threats multiply and morph, and user devices and locations diversify, multi-factor authentication (MFA) has emerged as a trusted method for preventing misuse.While adopting and deploying MFA solutions requires a careful and thorough approach, with most challenges also come opportunities and potential new benefits. We reached out to influential IT leaders to understand their views regarding adoption of MFA in the cloud era. Here’s what they said:The User Comes FirstTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: Securing Remote Access to Enterprise Applications Behind the Firewall – Complex, but Solvable

In today’s digital era, a mobile, distributed workforce is common—and growing. According to IDC, the number of mobile workers will rise to more than 105 million by 2020—almost three-quarters of the U.S. workforce. While offering employees this flexibility makes it easier to recruit new job candidates, it has also made securing the corporate network and providing access to enterprise applications behind the firewall more complex than ever.The reasons for this growing complexity go beyond just anywhere, anytime, any device access to corporate data and applications, both on premises and in the cloud. The growing number of devices (employees, customers, or partners) accessing the network from beyond the traditional perimeter has increased the attack surface. The number and variety of cyber threats continue to grow. Compliance and regulations, especially for privacy and protecting customer data, are stricter than ever. Add to this the growing volume of newly connected devices, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), and the remote-access challenge becomes even more daunting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple to unveil new iPad Pro while axing the iPad Mini

Apple can try and spin it any way it wants, but the harsh reality remains that iPad sales have been slumping for years. In fact, it's been quite a few years since Apple has seen year-over-year iPad sales growth over the course of a quarter, despite Tim Cook's assertions that the iPad remains the future of computing.That debate aside, there do appear to be some shakeups comings to Apple's iPad lineup, a fact that shouldn't be all that surprising given Cook's remarks regarding the iPad earlier this year. "We've got some exciting things coming on iPad and I'm optimistic about where things are headed," Cook said about three months ago.That being the case, there are reports that Apple at WWDC this year will introduce a brand new 10.5-inch iPad Pro with an edgeless display. Now what makes this particularly intriguing is that Apple will reportedly fit said 10.5-inch display into a form factor no bigger than the current 9.7-inch iPad model. While it's perhaps too soon to say with any certainty, Apple's upcoming edgeless iPad may be Apple's last real chance at injecting a bit of life into its tablet lineup.To read this article Continue reading

Using JSONSchema to Validate input

There are a lot of REST APIs out there. Quite a few of them use JSON as the data structure which allows us to get data in and out of these devices. There are a lot of network focused blogs that detail how to send and receive data in and out of these devices, but I wasn’t able to find anything that specifically talked about validating the input and output of the data to make sure we’re sending and receiving the expected information.

Testing is a crucial, and IMO too often overlooked, part of the Infrastructure as Code movement. Hopefully this post will help others start to think more about validating input and output of these APIs, or at the very least, spend just a little more time thinking about testing your API interactions before you decide to automate the massive explosion of your infrastructure with a poorly tested script. ?

What is JSONSchema

I’m assuming that you already know what JSON is, so let’s skip directly to talking about JsonSchema. This is a pythonlibrary which allows you to take your input/output  and verify it against a known schema which defined the data types you’re expecting to see.

For example, consider Continue reading

Webinar – May 18 – WannaCry Ransomware: Why is it happening and (how) is it going to end?

What is happening with the WannaCry ransomware that has been attacking unpatched Windows computers around the world? How will it all end? What do we need to do collectively to deal with attacks like this? (Hint: Read Olaf's post.)

To learn more and pose questions to a panel of experts, you can join our partners at the Geneva Internet Platform and Diplo Foundation for a webinar on "Decrypting the WannaCry ransomware: Why is it happening and (how) is it going to end?"

Dan York

Worth Reading: IoT devices will never be secure

The biggest problem with IoT security is that most devices are going to be relatively simple and inexpensive connected things. The bandwidth consumption of these devices should be kept to the minimum to save bandwidth. Yet at the same time, security is supposed to be a continuous process. This involves a party that is responsible for keeping an eye on the various security vulnerabilities that emerge from time to time, and another one to make sure that suitable patches are being prepared and applied on timely basis. —CircleID

The post Worth Reading: IoT devices will never be secure appeared first on rule 11 reader.

IDG Contributor Network: Self-propagating ransomware: What the WannaCry ransomworm means for you

The reports came swiftly on Friday morning, May 12—the first I saw were that dozens of hospitals in England were affected by ransomware, denying physicians access to patient medical records and causing surgery and other treatments to be delayed. Said the BBC: The malware spread quickly on Friday, with medical staff in the UK reportedly seeing computers go down "one by one".NHS staff shared screenshots of the WannaCry programme, which demanded a payment of $300 (£230) in virtual currency Bitcoin to unlock the files for each computer.Throughout the day other, mainly European countries, reported infections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Self-propagating ransomware: What the WannaCry ransomworm means for you

The reports came swiftly on Friday morning, May 12—the first I saw were that dozens of hospitals in England were affected by ransomware, denying physicians access to patient medical records and causing surgery and other treatments to be delayed. Said the BBC: The malware spread quickly on Friday, with medical staff in the UK reportedly seeing computers go down "one by one".NHS staff shared screenshots of the WannaCry programme, which demanded a payment of $300 (£230) in virtual currency Bitcoin to unlock the files for each computer.Throughout the day other, mainly European countries, reported infections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Privacy and Visibility – The dichotomy of encryption and inspection

The encoding or encryption of communications and information is a very old practice. The concept is relatively simple. One of the easiest examples is simply to reverse the alphabet, A for Z, B for X and so on. The reverse function is the ‘key’ to deciphering the message. We needn’t go into the detailed but fascinating history of the evolution of cryptography and the concept and method of the key. Instead we only need to touch on a few key historical milestones and how they have impacted the world today.

Cryptography is indeed an old practice. The ancient Romans would write encrypted messages on strips of cloth that were wrapped around wooden staffs of various widths. They would then send just the cloth strip with the courier. Only if the right staff was used could the message be deciphered. Here the ‘key’ is the width of the staff. That information would either be known or communicated to the receiver ahead of time so that they would have the right staff on hand to decipher the message. Obviously if anyone intercepted the information regarding the width of the staff, they could also decipher the message if they intercepted that as well. Continue reading

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