Brocade Update: No Update

This blog has been quiet since my last post in November 2016, covering the announcement that Broadcom is acquiring Brocade, and selling off my part of the business. That was over four months ago, and many of you will be wondering what’s happening. Unfortunately I have no real news: we still don’t know what’s happening.

Update: We now have news: It’s Extreme Networks

Originally we were unsure if the IP business would be sold in whole, or broken into parts. We can now see that it is being broken into parts: Arris is acquiring the Ruckus Wireless and ICX Switch business unit. That does not include my part of the business.

Broadcom is continuing to seek buyers for my business unit (Data Center IP, covering SLX, MLX and VDX product families, and of course StackStorm). They are also looking for buyers for the Software Business Unit (vRouter, SDN Controller, and vADC). There are no published timetables for when this process will be complete: it will be done when it’s done.

This means that I still don’t know what’s going to happen to me. My visa is tied to my employer. A change in Continue reading

Brocade Update: No Update

This blog has been quiet since my last post in November 2016, covering the announcement that Broadcom is acquiring Brocade, and selling off my part of the business. That was over four months ago, and many of you will be wondering what’s happening. Unfortunately I have no real news: we still don’t know what’s happening.

Originally we were unsure if the IP business would be sold in whole, or broken into parts. We can now see that it is being broken into parts: Arris is acquiring the Ruckus Wireless and ICX Switch business unit. That does not include my part of the business.

Broadcom is continuing to seek buyers for my business unit (Data Center IP, covering SLX, MLX and VDX product families, and of course StackStorm). They are also looking for buyers for the Software Business Unit (vRouter, SDN Controller, and vADC). There are no published timetables for when this process will be complete: it will be done when it’s done.

This means that I still don’t know what’s going to happen to me. My visa is tied to my employer. A change in employer could mean I have to leave the United States. Continue reading

BlackBerry readies a more secure version of the Samsung Galaxy S7

Secusmart, the BlackBerry subsidiary that secures the German Chancellor Angela Merkel's smartphone, will roll out a version of its SecuSuite security software compatible with Samsung Electronics' Knox platform later this year.That means that organizations looking for smartphones offering government-grade security will be able to buy the Samsung Galaxy S7 or, soon, the S8 rather than the now-discontinued BlackBerry OS smartphones like the one Merkel uses.In addition to encrypting communications and data stored on the device, the new SecuSuite also secures voice calls using the SNS standard set by Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). Organizational app traffic is passed through an IPsec VPN, while data from personal apps can go straight to the internet. Encrypted voice calls go through a different gateway, not the VPN.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BlackBerry readies a more secure version of the Samsung Galaxy S7

Secusmart, the BlackBerry subsidiary that secures the German Chancellor Angela Merkel's smartphone, will roll out a version of its SecuSuite security software compatible with Samsung Electronics' Knox platform later this year.That means that organizations looking for smartphones offering government-grade security will be able to buy the Samsung Galaxy S7 or, soon, the S8 rather than the now-discontinued BlackBerry OS smartphones like the one Merkel uses.In addition to encrypting communications and data stored on the device, the new SecuSuite also secures voice calls using the SNS standard set by Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). Organizational app traffic is passed through an IPsec VPN, while data from personal apps can go straight to the internet. Encrypted voice calls go through a different gateway, not the VPN.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel claims storage speed record with first large-capacity Optane SSD

Intel's first Optane storage modules came out in early January, but were only 32GB. Larger Optane drives with up to 1.5TB of storage capacity are on their way, and we now have a better understanding of how they're going to perform.The first large-capacity Optane SSD drive is the DC P4800X, which has 375GB of storage and started shipping on Sunday. The $1,520 SSD is targeted at servers. (Intel didn't provide regional availability information.)Intel says an enterprise Optane SSD with 750GB will ship in the second quarter, and that a 1.5TB SSD will ship in the second half of this year.These SSDs will fit as add-in cards in the PCI-Express/NVMe and U.2 slots. That means they could work in some workstations and servers based on AMD's 32-core Naples processors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Star Trek-themed Kirk ransomware has Spock decryptor, demands ransom be paid in Monero

While you may want to live long and prosper, you don’t want to be “kirked” – an extension added to files encrypted by the new Star Trek-themed Kirk ransomware.Kirk ransomware, which was discovered by Avast malware researcher Jakub Kroustek, doesn’t want the ransom to be paid in bitcoin; Bleeping Computer said it “may be the first ransomware to utilize Monero as the ransom payment of choice.”It is not known how the ransomware is being distributed, but researchers know that Kirk ransomware masquerades as the Low Orbital Ion Cannon network stress tool; LOIC was once favored for denial of service attacks. The fake version sports the LOIC slogan, “When harpoons, air strikes and nukes fail,” and claims to be initializing once executed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Star Trek-themed Kirk ransomware has Spock decryptor, demands ransom be paid in Monero

While you may want to live long and prosper, you don’t want to be “kirked” – an extension added to files encrypted by the new Star Trek-themed Kirk ransomware.Kirk ransomware, which was discovered by Avast malware researcher Jakub Kroustek, doesn’t want the ransom to be paid in bitcoin; Bleeping Computer said it “may be the first ransomware to utilize Monero as the ransom payment of choice.”It is not known how the ransomware is being distributed, but researchers know that Kirk ransomware masquerades as the Low Orbital Ion Cannon network stress tool; LOIC was once favored for denial of service attacks. The fake version sports the LOIC slogan, “When harpoons, air strikes and nukes fail,” and claims to be initializing once executed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WD Green HDDs and excessive interrupts

Green as it’s cool, green as it’s quite, just like the trees. You’d think it’s all good and perfect. It’s also supposed to consume way less power. Yay, greener planet… Except…

When i started buying them in bulk, 500GB was a lot and a 32MB cache size seemed to be preferable to 16MB which the blue caviar offered at the time. From time to time when i was in hurry and couldn’t find a WD Green HDD, I’d settle with Blue. After couple of months a pattern started to emerge. Clients after clients started complaining about low performance. Their PCs would freeze. Sometimes as long as couple of minutes and then it would continue working again like nothing had happened. At the time I couldn’t quite figure out why after couple of months of usage, WD Green HDDs would start acting up like that.

The strange thing was that nothing was reported anywhere. Not a single suspicious system log or the so called SMART log. Even on couple of clients using Intel Raid, the “Intel RAID Chipset” seemed to be very happy with minutes of interrupts caused by the HDDs. And in a single case, one HDD suddenly died. Out Continue reading

Pranksters gonna prank

So Alfa Bank (the bank whose DNS traffic link it to trump-email.com) is back in the news with this press release about how in the last month, hackers have spoofed traffic trying to make it look like there's a tie with Trump. In other words, Alfa claims these packets are trying to frame them for a tie with Trump now, and thus (by extension) it must've been a frame last October.

There is no conspiracy here: it's just merry pranksters doing pranks (as this CNN article quotes me).

Indeed, among the people pranking has been me (not the pranks mentioned by Alfa, but different pranks). I ran a scan sending packets from IP address to almost everyone one the Internet, and set the reverse lookup to "mail1.trumpemail.com".



Sadly, my ISP doesn't allow me to put hyphens in the name, so it's not "trump-email.com" as it should be in order to prank well.

Geeks gonna geek and pranksters gonna prank. I can imagine all sorts of other fun pranks somebody might do in order to stir the pot. Since the original news reports of the AlfaBank/trump-email.com connection last year, we have to assume any further data Continue reading

VRF for Linux — a contribution to the Linux Kernel

If you’re familiar with Linux, you know how important and exciting it can be to submit new technology that is accepted into the kernel. If you’re not familiar with Linux, you can take my word for it (and I highly suggest you attend one of our bootcamps). Many networking features are motivated by an OS for switches and routers, but most if not all of those features prove useful for other use cases as well. Cumulus Networks strives for a uniform operating model across switches and servers, so it makes sense for us to spend the time and effort getting these features into upstream code bases. An example of this effort is VRF for Linux.

I joined Cumulus Networks in June 2015 to work on a VRF solution for Linux —to create an implementation that met the goals we wanted for Cumulus Linux and was acceptable to upstream maintainers for Linux as a whole. That solution was first available last year with Cumulus Linux 3.0 and because of the upstream push that solution is rolling out in general OS distributions such as Debian Stretch and Ubuntu 16.

This post is a bit long, so I start with a high Continue reading

F5 BIG-IP Plugin with Firefox 52 workaround

It’s not news anymore that Mozilla is stopping support for NPAPI (Netscape Plugin API). With the release of Firefox 52 version, I believe that only Flash plugin is enabled by default.

I’ll skip the discussion about NPAPI plugins and Mozilla’s decision to stop the support, however the reality is that for me it has a strong impact in certain areas. One of this areas is the F5 BIG-IP, specifically the APM and possibility to launch Application (like RDP) from the Webtop interface.

I’m relying heavily on a F5 BIG-IP VE machine to connect to my home lab when I’m remote. The Webtop functionality gives me the possibility to use only a Browser to connect to my applications at home, keeping me away from any F5 client installation on the machine that I use. Usually this machine is my MacBook or PC, and the F5 client installation should not be a big thing, however I like the clientless option.

The F5 Webtop functionality is possible due to a NPAPI plugin called “F5 Network Host Plugin” which usually installs in the browser when you access the F5 APM. So yes, you still need to install something, but this browser plugin is Continue reading

Some HTTPS inspection tools might weaken security

Companies that use security products to inspect HTTPS traffic might inadvertently make their users' encrypted connections less secure and expose them to man-in-the-middle attacks, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team warns.US-CERT, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, published an advisory after a recent survey showed that HTTPS inspection products don't mirror the security attributes of the original connections between clients and servers.HTTPS inspection checks the encrypted traffic coming from an HTTPS site to make sure it doesn't contain threats or malware. It's performed by intercepting a client's connection to an HTTPS server, establishing the connection on the client's behalf and then re-encrypting the traffic sent to the client with a different, locally generated certificate. Products that do this essentially act as man-in-the-middle proxies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Some HTTPS inspection tools might weaken security

Companies that use security products to inspect HTTPS traffic might inadvertently make their users' encrypted connections less secure and expose them to man-in-the-middle attacks, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team warns.US-CERT, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, published an advisory after a recent survey showed that HTTPS inspection products don't mirror the security attributes of the original connections between clients and servers.HTTPS inspection checks the encrypted traffic coming from an HTTPS site to make sure it doesn't contain threats or malware. It's performed by intercepting a client's connection to an HTTPS server, establishing the connection on the client's behalf and then re-encrypting the traffic sent to the client with a different, locally generated certificate. Products that do this essentially act as man-in-the-middle proxies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Building better ransomware

This is kind of a funny post for me to write, since it ransomwareinvolves speculating about a very destructive type of software — and possibly offering some (very impractical) suggestions on how it might be improved in the future. It goes without saying that there are some real downsides to this kind of speculation. Nonetheless, I’m going ahead on the theory that it’s usually better to talk and think about the bad things that might happen to you — before you meet them on the street and they steal your lunch money. —Cryptography Engineering

The post Worth Reading: Building better ransomware appeared first on 'net work.

A cybersecurity risk assessment is a critical part of M&A due diligence  

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  As of mid-February, the plan for Verizon Communications to acquire a majority of Yahoo’s web assets is still on, despite the announcement of Yahoo having suffered two massive breaches of customer data in 2013 and 2014. The sale price, however, has been discounted by $350 million, and Verizon and Altaba Inc. have agreed to share any ongoing legal responsibilities related to the breaches. Altaba is the entity that will own the portion of Yahoo that Verizon is not acquiring.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A cybersecurity risk assessment is a critical part of M&A due diligence  

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  As of mid-February, the plan for Verizon Communications to acquire a majority of Yahoo’s web assets is still on, despite the announcement of Yahoo having suffered two massive breaches of customer data in 2013 and 2014. The sale price, however, has been discounted by $350 million, and Verizon and Altaba Inc. have agreed to share any ongoing legal responsibilities related to the breaches. Altaba is the entity that will own the portion of Yahoo that Verizon is not acquiring.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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