The CSO IoT security basics survival guide

The Internet of Things – the connecting of billions of everyday and industrial devices using tiny sensors that transmit data and share information in the cloud – is revolutionizing the way we live and do business.IoT platforms are expected to save organizations money, improve decision-making, increase staff productivity, provide better visibility into the organization and improve the customer experience. Six in ten U.S. companies now have some type of IoT initiative underway – either formal or experimental, according to IT trade association CompTIA.All this potential comes with some big security risks – mainly with the unsecured devices themselves, but also with their ability to join forces to bring down systems. This can leave corporate networks vulnerable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Troubleshooting: Half Split

The best models will support the second crucial skill required for troubleshooting: seeing the system as a set of problems to be solved. The problem/solution mindset is so critical in really understanding how networks really work, and hence how to troubleshoot them, that Ethan Banks and I are writing an entire book around this concept. The essential points are these—

  • Understand the set of problems being solved
  • Understand a wide theoretical set of solutions for this problem, including how each solution interacts with other problems and solutions, potential side effects of using each solution, and where the common faults lie in each solution
  • Understand this implementation

    • of this solution

Having this kind of information in your head will help you pull in detail where needed to fill in the models of each system; just as you cannot keep all four of the primary systems in your head at once, you also cannot effectively troubleshoot without a reservoir of more detailed knowledge about each system, or the ready ability to absorb more information about each system as needed. Having a problem/solution mindset also helps keep you focused in troubleshooting.
So you have built models of each system, and you have learned Continue reading

Use a Zero Trust Approach to Protect Against WannaCry

network security iconMicro-segmentation with VMware NSX compartmentalizes the data center to contain the lateral spread of ransomware attacks such as WannaCry

On May 12 2017, reports began to appear of the WannaCry malware attacking organizations worldwide in one of the largest ransomware cyber incidents to date. The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) has reported more than 200,000 attacks in over 150 countries and in 27, with the full scope of the attack yet to be determined.  Victims include organizations from all verticals.

WannaCry targets Microsoft Windows machines, seizing control of computer systems through a critical vulnerability in Windows SMB. It also utilizes RDP as an attack vector for propagation. It encrypts seized systems and demands a ransom be paid before decrypting the system and giving back control. The threat propagates laterally to other systems on the network via SMB or RDP and then repeats the process. An initial analysis of WannaCry by the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) can be found here, with a detailed analysis from Malware Bytes here.

One foundational aspect of increasing cybersecurity hygiene in an organization to help mitigate such attacks from proliferating is enabling a least privilege (zero trust) model by embedding security directly into the data center network. The Continue reading

Google’s the latest to take on IoT management headaches

Google wants to take on what may become one of the biggest cloud-computing needs of the next few years with a service that will manage IoT devices and help developers bring the data they generate into applications that use Google's analytics platforms.Its Google Cloud IoT Core, announced in a blog post on Tuesday, may be a good use of Google's reach, number-crunching power and device OS expertise. But the problem it aims to solve is daunting, and competitors are already focused on it.The good news for enterprises is that there are several solutions to IoT sprawl already available or taking shape. Just last week, VMware introduced Pulse IoT Center, the latest broad-based platform for setting up, managing and scaling IoT infrastructure. Cloud rival Microsoft has Azure IoT Hub, with a similar mission. Cisco Systems, General Electric and Nokia are also in the game.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft, Amazon go after enterprises with new SAP cloud offerings

There are some fresh public cloud offerings on the horizon for SAP database customers, thanks to Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Both companies have announced new infrastructure services for the HANA database software aimed at giving customers tons of memory for workloads that need it.Azure customers will get access to M-series virtual machines that offer up to 3.5TB of RAM, designed for use with SAP’s database software. In addition, Microsoft announced Tuesday that it's working on new SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances to offer users between 4TB and 20TB of memory on a single machine specifically for use with software like the SAP Business Suite 4 HANA (S/4HANA).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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.

Worth Reading: A simple start to project management

Being able to track your work efficiently is a very useful skill. For years I completed my work but rarely tracked my work in a project management professional (PMP) sort of way. Sure, I’ve done the weekly reports, sticky notes, Outlook tasks, and Outlook calendar block scheduling, which are all useful. However, simple project management skills help create a consistent and straightforward approach to managing time, resources, and tasks. —Life of a Network Admin

The post Worth Reading: A simple start to project management appeared first on rule 11 reader.

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

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