Cisco Talos warns of new Cryptolocker ransomware campaigns

A number of reports are warning businesses and consumers alike that a new round of ransomware based on the infamous Cryptolocker (aka TorrentLocker or Teerac) code is making the rounds.Today Cisco Talos wrote: “Crypt0l0cker has gone through a long evolution, the adversaries are updating and improving the malware on a regular basis. Several indicators inside the samples we have analyzed point to a new major version of the malware. We have already seen large campaigns targeting Europe and other parts of the world in 2014 and 2015. It seems to be that the actors behind these campaigns are back now and launching again massive spam attacks.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco equipment Comprehsively Pwned by US Government

Tough day for Cisco. A large number of Cisco software releases and devices were comprehensively pwned by US Gov spy agencies. This isn’t surprising, thats what they are supposed to do but now the details have been published on WikiLeaks.

This LinkedIn blog post outlines some of what has been found.

When I took a quick look at Wikileaks data, the range of possibilities is substantial but require access to the device itself. The Cisco post has details on the range of exploits in their response published today: http://blogs.cisco.com/security/the-wikileaks-vault-7-leak-what-we-know-so-far which says its too early to frame a response. I agree.

Some thoughts:

  1. Waiting to hear if other vendors are impacted, not known at this time but it seems likely.
  2. Now that these vulnerabilities have been published, your networks are at risk.
  3. There isn’t much that Cisco can do yet.
  4. Cisco as a dominant vendor is a target because one exploit can be widely applied to more targets and because targets are likely to have Cisco assets.
  5. The published vulnerabilities are for older equipment but more recent documentation will be released in the next few weeks. It could get worse if newer equipment is also vulnerable.
  6. While it seems Continue reading

Supplemental Melatonin For Improved Sleep Quality

For years, my sleep has been hit or miss. Stress and projects are the big drivers that impact my sleep. If I have a lot on my mind, it’s hard to settle into steady sleep. If I wake up in the middle of the night, it’s hard to get back to sleep.

For me, quality sleep is the difference between a productive day where I move projects ahead and a terrible day where I take power naps around lethargic staring at my inbox while feeling guilty about what I’m not getting done.

Enter melatonin.

Melatonin, “is a hormone that is produced by the pineal gland in animals and regulates sleep and wakefulness,” according to Wikipedia. In other words, we make melatonin in our bodies, and it prompts us to sleep.

As I understand it, the body’s natural inclination is to release melatonin in response to night/day cycles. For instance, I have noticed that I fall into a sleep/wake cycle matching sunset/sunrise when I am on long-distance backpacking trips. When indoors with artificial light, screens holding my attention, and a work schedule that doesn’t care about what the sun is doing, melatonin production, in theory, isn’t as consistent.

Technologies like Apple’s Night Shift for Continue reading

Comey: Strong encryption “shatters” privacy-security bargain

FBI Director James Comey told a Boston audience this morning that “ubiquitous strong encryption” – the kind now available on most smartphones and other digital devices – is threatening to undermine the “bargain” that he said has balanced privacy and security in the US since its founding. Actually, he went further, declaring that such default encryption “shatters” the bargain. “This is a big deal, and I urge you to continue to engage in a hard conversation about it. I love privacy, but I also love the bargain,” he said, noting that the FBI’s inability to crack encrypted devices means the investigative “room” where the agency works is increasingly growing dark, and therefore undermining security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Comey: Strong encryption “shatters” privacy-security bargain

FBI Director James Comey told a Boston audience this morning that “ubiquitous strong encryption” – the kind now available on most smartphones and other digital devices – is threatening to undermine the “bargain” that he said has balanced privacy and security in the US since its founding. Actually, he went further, declaring that such default encryption “shatters” the bargain. “This is a big deal, and I urge you to continue to engage in a hard conversation about it. I love privacy, but I also love the bargain,” he said, noting that the FBI’s inability to crack encrypted devices means the investigative “room” where the agency works is increasingly growing dark, and therefore undermining security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How CRM buyers can negotiate the best deal

CRM software buyers should choose wisely the first time because the software becomes so embedded in the organization that switching to a different vendor is unlikely, according to procurement analysts at market research firm IBIS World Inc.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Senators push FCC to keep its net neutrality rules

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission should reverse course and keep the net neutrality rules it passed just two years ago, several Democratic senators said Wednesday.The FCC has not yet moved to repeal the regulations prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing web traffic, but the agency's new chairman, Republican Ajit Pai, has called the rules a "mistake."Broadband customers, however, still need the protections of the net neutrality rules, several Democratic members of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee said during a hearing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senators push FCC to keep its net neutrality rules

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission should reverse course and keep the net neutrality rules it passed just two years ago, several Democratic senators said Wednesday.The FCC has not yet moved to repeal the regulations prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing web traffic, but the agency's new chairman, Republican Ajit Pai, has called the rules a "mistake."Broadband customers, however, still need the protections of the net neutrality rules, several Democratic members of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee said during a hearing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft and NVIDIA partner to bring GPUs to the public cloud

The cloud has been a core component of almost every organization's IT strategy for the past five years. However, I believe we are reaching a cloud “tipping point” where it will be used for dramatically different things than it has in the past.The first wave of cloud growth was fueled by organizations looking for a cheaper alternative to running servers on premises. The next wave of cloud growth will be driven by organizations looking to fundamentally change their businesses through the use of advanced technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).Over the past year, we have seen a veritable cornucopia of AI use cases included playing poker and Go, writing news stories, filing insurance claims, driving cars and writing code. This current phase of cloud moves it from being a “nice to have” to an absolute, slam dunk, need to have as it’s almost impossible for a business to have the scale and elasticity required to power an AI platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How AMD’s Naples X86 Server Chip Stacks Up To Intel’s Xeons

Ever so slowly, and not so fast as to give competitor Intel too much information about what it is up to, but just fast enough to build interest in the years of engineering smarts that has gone into its forthcoming “Naples” X86 server processor, AMD is lifting the veil on the product that will bring it back into the datacenter and that will bring direct competition to the Xeon platform that dominates modern computing infrastructure.

It has been a bit of a rolling thunder revelation of information about the Zen core used in the “Naples” server chip, the brand of …

How AMD’s Naples X86 Server Chip Stacks Up To Intel’s Xeons was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Juniper product development chief resigns, company resets engineering makeup

Juniper is reshaping some of its top executive roles as Jonathan Davidson, executive VP and general manager of the firm’s Development and Innovation group resigned from the company.Davidson, a former Cisco executive in charge products such as the Cisco 7200 and Enterprise ASR 1000 product management team joined Juniper in 2010 to lead the company’s Security, Switching and Solutions Business Unit. He ultimately became executive vice president and general manager of the Juniper Development and Innovation group, where he replaced Rami Rahim who is now the company’s CEO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper product development chief resigns, company resets engineering makeup

Juniper is reshaping some of its top executive roles as Jonathan Davidson, executive VP and general manager of the firm’s Development and Innovation group resigned from the company.Davidson, a former Cisco executive in charge products such as the Cisco 7200 and Enterprise ASR 1000 product management team joined Juniper in 2010 to lead the company’s Security, Switching and Solutions Business Unit. He ultimately became executive vice president and general manager of the Juniper Development and Innovation group, where he replaced Rami Rahim who is now the company’s CEO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper product development chief resigns, company resets engineering makeup

Juniper is reshaping some of its top executive roles as Jonathan Davidson, executive VP and general manager of the firm’s Development and Innovation group resigned from the company.Davidson, a former Cisco executive in charge products such as the Cisco 7200 and Enterprise ASR 1000 product management team joined Juniper in 2010 to lead the company’s Security, Switching and Solutions Business Unit. He ultimately became executive vice president and general manager of the Juniper Development and Innovation group, where he replaced Rami Rahim who is now the company’s CEO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper product development chief resigns, company resets engineering makeup

Juniper is reshaping some of its top executive roles as Jonathan Davidson, executive VP and general manager of the firm’s Development and Innovation group resigned from the company.Davidson, a former Cisco executive in charge products such as the Cisco 7200 and Enterprise ASR 1000 product management team joined Juniper in 2010 to lead the company’s Security, Switching and Solutions Business Unit. He ultimately became executive vice president and general manager of the Juniper Development and Innovation group, where he replaced Rami Rahim who is now the company’s CEO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

High Times for Low-Precision Hardware

Processor makers are pushing down the precision for a range of new and forthcoming devices, driven by a need that balances accuracy with energy-efficient performance for an emerging set of workloads.

While there will always be plenty of room at the server table for double-precision requirements, especially in high performance computing (HPC). machine learning and deep learning are spurring a fresh take on processor architecture—a fact that will have a trickle-down (or up, depending on how you consider it) effect on the hardware ecosystem in the next few years.

In the last year alone, the emphasis on lowering precision has …

High Times for Low-Precision Hardware was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: The rise of the conversational interface

Eight trillion. That’s the number of text messages sent every year. For the record, that’s 23 billion texts sent every day. Or almost 16 million per minute. On July 7, 2016, Facebook reported that over one billion people now use Messenger, up 200 million since January 2016. As of February 1, 2016, WhatsApp logged one billion users on its platform. In case you didn’t know, Facebook owns WhatsApp. —A Little More Human

The post Worth Reading: The rise of the conversational interface appeared first on 'net work.

Getting Started: Tower Installer

ansible tower getting started series

Welcome to the first in our series of blog posts for Getting Started with Ansible Tower. This series covers basic installation and functions of Tower and an overview of how to use Tower to implement IT automation.

To get started with Tower, you must first learn to install and stand up a single host. Future posts will cover other types of configurations, such as a redundant installation with an external database. For this post, we’ll be highlighting RHEL 7 and Ubuntu LTS. 

Install Tower in 4 Simple Steps:

Run these steps as root (su -).

1. Download the latest Tower edition

If you haven’t already, visit this link to the trial page to have a download link sent to you. If you would like, our AMIs for AWS and our vagrant image are found there as well. If you have network restrictions, contact Ansible Sales and they can send you the bundled installer.

Note: We are currently working on a bundled installer for Ubuntu LTS, so the standard installer will install for Ubuntu.

2. Unpack the file (tar xzvf towerlatest)

 
$ tar xzvf towerlatest
ansible-tower-setup-3.1.0/
ansible-tower-setup-3.1.0/group_vars/
ansible-tower-setup-3.1.0/group_vars/all
...

-tar xzvf towerbundlelatest

 
$ tar xzvf  Continue reading

So whats next?

I’ve had a little time readjusting after my exam and I’ve given some thought on what to keep me busy next.

Basically I have 3 projects to keep me busy for the next foreseeable future.

1) CCNA-Wireless
My boss came to me a week ago and tasked me with this. He was very humble about it, which was amusing. I will be allocated some time from my normal work projects to study for the exam, which is really helpful. Fortunally some of my CCDE study friends are also going for this exam, so I wont be going down the road alone on this one either.
Im actually quite positive about this as its a technology area I have not really paid much attention to and its very different in what im used to. A shakeup is good every now and then ?

2) The IOS-XR Specialist exam
This is one I have been looking quite forward to for some time. Its basically an exam about all things IOS-XR and the platforms that supports it. I tried studying for this before I decided to go down the CCDE path, so it will be nice to pick back up.

3) Work on improving Continue reading

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