Understanding the Federal Government’s Rapid Adoption of Cloud

One of the biggest trends in the IT industry at the moment is enterprise adoption of the public cloud. It’s obvious that it’s been accelerating over the recent years, but perhaps more importantly, Federal agencies are beginning to take a serious look at the cloud in an effort to reform IT and to achieve greater agility …

Continue reading "Understanding the Federal Government’s Rapid Adoption of Cloud"

Microsoft Teams takes on Slack with enterprise bots, Office 365 tie-ins

Microsoft Teams is now live – and on by default – for Office 365 subscribers with Business Essentials, Business Premium and Enterprise plans.Teams is Microsoft’s answer to Slack, with an emphasis on Office 365 integration. Teams is automatically tied to tools such as Outlook, SharePoint, OneNote and Skype for Business. With Skype tie-ins, for example, Teams users can move from text-based chatting to a voice or video call, directly within the Teams app. RELATED: 4 reasons Microsoft Teams will kill Slack… and 4 reasons it won’tTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Acronym: M is for Malware

A malware researcher known as Antelox recently tweeted about an unknown malware sample that caught our eye. Upon further investigation, it is a modular malware known as Acronym and could possibly be associated with the Win32/Potao malware family and the Operation Potao Express campaign. This […]

Twitter accounts hacked, Twitter Counter steps forward as culprit

Twitter Counter, a third-party analytics service, appears once again to have provided a gateway for hackers to post messages to high-profile Twitter accounts.An unlikely number of Twitter users suddenly learned to speak Turkish on Wednesday, posting an inflammatory message in the language replete with Nazi swastikas.Among those posting the message were the Twitter accounts of Forbes magazine, the Atlanta Police Department, and Amnesty International, one of the few hacked accounts one might expect to speak Turkish.Fears that these accounts had all been hacked were quickly allayed, when Twitter identified a third-party app as being to blame.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Twitter accounts hacked, Twitter Counter steps forward as culprit

Twitter Counter, a third-party analytics service, appears once again to have provided a gateway for hackers to post messages to high-profile Twitter accounts.An unlikely number of Twitter users suddenly learned to speak Turkish on Wednesday, posting an inflammatory message in the language replete with Nazi swastikas.Among those posting the message were the Twitter accounts of Forbes magazine, the Atlanta Police Department, and Amnesty International, one of the few hacked accounts one might expect to speak Turkish.Fears that these accounts had all been hacked were quickly allayed, when Twitter identified a third-party app as being to blame.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: MongoDB learns cool new tricks

MongoDB 3.4 continues the trend of databases building out support for a range of conceptual data models over the same underlying data store. This multimodel approach aims to deliver a single database that can be used to store data as documents, tables, and graphs simultaneously. The benefit to the user is a dramatically simplified infrastructure when compared to a polyglot persistence model, which might entail managing three or four separate data stores to satisfy those different use cases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Spy agency, DOE, see China nearing supercomputing leadership

Advanced computing experts at the National Security Agency and the Department of Energy are warning that China is "extremely likely" to take leadership in supercomputing as early as 2020, unless the U.S. acts quickly to increase spending.China's supercomputing advances are not only putting national security at risk, but also U.S. leadership in high-tech manufacturing. If China succeeds, it may "undermine profitable parts of the U.S. economy," according to a report titled U.S. Leadership in High Performance Computing by HPC technical experts at the NSA, the DOE, the National Science Foundation and other agencies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Spy agency, DOE, see China nearing supercomputing leadership

Advanced computing experts at the National Security Agency and the Department of Energy are warning that China is "extremely likely" to take leadership in supercomputing as early as 2020, unless the U.S. acts quickly to increase spending.China's supercomputing advances are not only putting national security at risk, but also U.S. leadership in high-tech manufacturing. If China succeeds, it may "undermine profitable parts of the U.S. economy," according to a report titled U.S. Leadership in High Performance Computing by HPC technical experts at the NSA, the DOE, the National Science Foundation and other agencies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hire a DDoS service to take down your enemies

With the onrush of connected internet of things (IoT) devices, distributed denial-of-service attacks are becoming a dangerous trend. Similar to what happened to DNS service provider Dyn last fall, anyone and everyone is in the crosshairs. The idea of using unprotected IoT devices as a way to bombard networks is gaining momentum.The advent of DDoS-for-hire services means that even the least tech-savvy individual can exact  revenge on some website. Step on up to the counter and purchase a stresser that can systemically take down a company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hire a DDoS service to take down your enemies

With the onrush of connected internet of things (IoT) devices, distributed denial-of-service attacks are becoming a dangerous trend. Similar to what happened to DNS service provider Dyn last fall, anyone and everyone is in the crosshairs. The idea of using unprotected IoT devices as a way to bombard networks is gaining momentum.The advent of DDoS-for-hire services means that even the least tech-savvy individual can exact  revenge on some website. Step on up to the counter and purchase a stresser that can systemically take down a company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

More than a third of tech workers are underpaid

IT salaries continue to rise, but many tech workers are still well above the national median income, new research from compensation and salary data solutions company Paysa shows that many tech workers are still underpaid.Paysa used machine learning and AI to examine more than five million resumes of tech and engineering professionals from their salary database and compared their education, experience, skills, work history and current salary to their market value for identical available roles, says Chris Bolte, CEO of Paysa.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

8 of the weirdest, wildest, most WTF scenes from SXSW

Keep SXSW weirdImage by Caitlin McGarryAustin is already a weird place, but during South by Southwest, the weirdness grows exponentially. Big brands thirsty for attention and tiny startups looking to pitch the hot new app compete to see who can capture the SXSW audience of techies and creatives. The brand presence was more subdued this year than in the past, but that didn’t make the stunts any less bananas. Here are the 8 that made me stop in my tracks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6 apps Apple really needs to make for Android

Android and iOS may be destined to do battle forever, but when it comes to apps, the relationship is a little friendlier. Countless iOS users enjoy Google’s services on their iPhones, and in fact, the acclaimed Gboard keyboard actually began its life as an iOS exclusive before making its way to the Play Store several months later.But while Apple hasn’t been nearly as generous with its offerings, it does offer Apple Music and Beats Pill as a concession to former Beats Music subscribers. However, there’s a load of untapped potential in the Play Store. After all, Apple doesn’t just sell iPhones, and many Android users have other Cupertino-made products that they use on a regular basis. So here are some Apple apps I’d love to see show up in the Play Store:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 ways technology has changed recruitment — for better (and worse)

From professional networking sites and job boards to online applicant systems, technology has revolutionized recruitment, profoundly changing how employers and recruiters find potential candidates. For example, applicant tracking systems and new AI software can help HR departments manage the massive influx of resumes they receive daily, says Michael Fauscette, chief research officer at G2 Crowd, a business software review platform. But, while technology can offer easy solutions, it often has a way of creating new problems in the process."The new AI-powered systems can do a great job sorting through candidates, but the risk is that non-traditional candidates or candidates with unusual experience that might be a very good fit could fall through the rules-based system, even one that learns and improves with 'experience'," he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Court blocks American from suing Ethiopia for infecting his computer

An appeals court has barred an Ethiopian-born U.S. citizen from filing a civil suit against the African country, which allegedly infected his computer with spyware and monitored his communications.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday that foreign states are immune from suit in a U.S. court unless an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) applies.The person, who is referred to in court documents by the pseudonym Kidane, was born in Ethiopia and lived there for 30 years before seeking asylum in the U.S. He lives in Maryland.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Court blocks American from suing Ethiopia for infecting his computer

An appeals court has barred an Ethiopian-born U.S. citizen from filing a civil suit against the African country, which allegedly infected his computer with spyware and monitored his communications.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday that foreign states are immune from suit in a U.S. court unless an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) applies.The person, who is referred to in court documents by the pseudonym Kidane, was born in Ethiopia and lived there for 30 years before seeking asylum in the U.S. He lives in Maryland.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

To YANG or Not to YANG, That’s the Question

Yannis sent me an interesting challenge after reading my short “this is how I wasted my time” update:

We are very much committed in automation and use Ansible to create configuration and provision our SP and data center network. One of our principles is that we do rely solely on data available in external resources (databases and REST endpoints), and avoid fetching information/views from the network because that would create a loop.

You can almost feel a however coming in just a few seconds, right?

Read more ...

Killing idle TCP connections

Why

Let’s say you have some TCP connections to your local system that you want to kill. You could kill the process that handles the connection, but that may also kill other connections, so that’s not great. You could also put in a firewall rule that will cause the connection to be reset. But that won’t work on a connection that’s idle (also if one side is initiator then using this method the other side would not tear down its side of the connection). There’s tcpkill, but it needs to sniff the network to find the TCP sequence numbers, and again that won’t work for an idle connection.

Ideally for these long-running connections TCP keepalive would be enabled. But sometimes it’s not. (e.g. it’s not on by default for gRPC TCP connections, and they certainly can be long-running and idle).

You could also do this by attaching a debugger and calling shutdown(2) on the sockets, but having the daemon calling unexpected syscalls thus getting into an unexpected state doesn’t really make for a stable system. Also attaching a debugger hangs the daemon while you’re attached to it.

This post documents how to do this on a Debian system.

Continue reading

1 … 2,240 2,241 2,242 2,243 2,244 … 3,855