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New financial regulations go into effect in New York

On March 1, new regulations go into effect in New York State, requiring that all regulated financial services institutions have a cybersecurity program in place, appoint a Chief Information Security Officer, and monitor the cybersecurity policies of their business partners.It might seem a little sudden, since the regulations were only finalized a month ago. But it's actually not as bad as it sounds."There's a transitional period," said Brad Keller, senior director of third party strategy at Prevalent. "Everyone has six months to be in compliance."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Will a cyber crisis add to chaos of Trump’s first 100 days?

While plenty of controversy has surrounded President Donald Trump’s fledgling administration, it hasn’t yet faced a major crisis.But according to Forrester Research, aside from any political or military events, the new president will face a cyber crisis sometime within his first 100 days.The company made the prediction last fall, prior to the election, as part of its “Predictions 2017” brief, so it didn’t specifically focus on either Trump or Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Will a cyber crisis add to chaos of Trump’s first 100 days?

7 universal rules of threat intelligence

ThreateningImage by ThinkstockCybersecurity is a heroic task. Every day, businesses and organizations face an onslaught of attacks from malicious actors across the globe. As part of your organization’s cybersecurity efforts, it is your job to not just catch these attacks as they happen, but try to mitigate threats and prevent them before anything occurs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

7 universal rules of threat intelligence

Visa, Mastercard beef up mobile payment tech at Mobile World Congress

BARCELONA -- Mobile payments made in different parts of the globe were an important theme at Mobile World Congress this week, with leaders Visa and Mastercard announcing new services.Visa on Monday announced one of the most unusual approaches, one that relies primarily on older QR code technology through its mVisa payment service. It went live Monday for merchants and customers in India, Kenya and Rwanda and will soon be available in Egypt, Pakistan and a few other developing countries.The service allows merchants and consumers to make payments via a mobile phone and a QR code kept at each merchant's store location. Visa said the flexible nature of QR codes means that merchants do not need to invest in costly point-of-sale infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Not-so-free Flow of Data

The digitalization of human activities, from social interactions to industrial processes, has led to unprecedented levels of data collection. New data is constantly being produced, driven by the rise of user-generated content, the digitalization of industries and services, and the improvement of both machine to machine communication and data storage. As recognized in the Commission’s Communication “Towards a data-driven economy”, this trend “holds enormous potential in various fields, ranging from health, food security, energy efficiency to intelligent transport systems and smart cities”. Indeed, data has become an essential resource for societal improvement.

Frédéric Donck

Navigating Complex Data Structures in Ansible Playbooks

Have you ever tried to navigate complex data structures within Ansible playbooks using awkward looping constructs and convoluted map filters?

It might be easier to munge the data structure into a more appropriate format first and then use the munged data in subsequent tasks. Wondering how to do it?

Mixed Signals From Server Land

With a new generation of Xeon processors coming out later this year from Intel and AMD trying to get back in the game with its own X86 server chips – they probably will not be called Opterons – it is not a surprise to us that server makers are having a bit of trouble making their numbers in recent months. But we are beginning to wonder if something else might be going on here than the usual pause before a big set of processor announcements.

In many ways, server spending is a leading indicator because when companies are willing to …

Mixed Signals From Server Land was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

8 ways to make Amazon’s Alexa even more awesome

I’ve been using an Amazon Echo for a while now, yet I still find myself amazed at how well its voice assistant technology works—at least within the relatively narrow confines it has set for itself. By sticking to what she can do well, Alexa mostly avoids the common trap of heavily hyped new technology delivering a disappointing experience in real life. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Adapting IT Operations to Emerging Trends: 3 Tips

Enterprise IT must transform itself if it wants to provide the business with the agility it needs to remain competitive.

Relax: This phone measures your blood pressure

This Swiss electronics company is on a mission: to stop millions of people dying of ignorance each year.Worldwide, high blood pressure leads to around 9.4 million deaths annually according to figures from the World Health Organization. And yet, the condition is easily diagnosed and treated. In the Americas, the prevalence of high blood pressure fell from 31 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2014, but remains high in developing countries.Before high blood pressure can be controlled, though, it needs to be detected, and that's the part that Leman Micro Devices wants to make simpler. It is showing off its solution at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Some moon math

So "Brianna Wu" (famous for gamergate) is trending, and because I love punishment, I clicked on it to see why. Apparently she tweeted that Elon Musk's plan to go to the moon is bad, because once there he can drop rocks on the Earth with the power of 100s of nuclear bombs. People are mocking her for the stupidity of this.

But the math checks out.

First of all, she probably got the idea from Heinlein's book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where the rebel moon colonists do just that. I doubt she did her own math, and relied upon Heinlein to do it for her. But let's do the math ourselves.

Let's say that we want to stand at the height of the moon and drop a rock. How big a rock do we need to equal the energy of an atomic bomb. To make things simple, let's assume the size of bombs we want is that of the one dropped on Hiroshima.

As we know from high school physics, the energy of a dropped object (ignoring air) is:

energy = mass * gravity * height

Solving for mass, the equation is:

mass = energy/(gravity * height)

So Continue reading

This tiny chip could revolutionize smartphone and IOT security

Engineers at South Korea's SK Telecom have developed a tiny chip that could help secure communications on a myriad of portable electronics and IOT devices.The chip is just 5 millimeters square -- smaller than a fingernail -- and is capable of generating mathematically provable random numbers. Such numbers are the basis for highly-secure encryption systems and producing them in such a small package hasn't been possible until now.The chip, on show at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, could be in sample production as early as March this year and will cost a few dollars once in commercial production, said Sean Kwak, director at SK Telecom's quantum technology lab.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This tiny chip could revolutionize smartphone and IOT security

AT&T Picks HPE to Deliver Cloud-Based Services

HPE lends a hand to AT&T as it works to reach its goal of virtualizing its network.

The Power of Software Defined Fabric at Mobile World Congress

Feb. 28th, Barcelona – I am very excited about Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017. This year it’s not about cell...

Some notes on space heaters (GPU rigs)

So I carried my GPU rig up to my bedroom to act as a space heater. I thought I'd write some notes on it.

This is a "GPU rig", containing five graphics cards. Graphics cards have highly parallel processors (GPUs) with roughly 10 times the performance of a CPU -- but only for highly parallel problems.

Two such problems are password cracking [*] and cryptocurrency mining.

Password cracking is something cybersecurity professionals regularly need to do. When doing a pentest, or assessment, we'll get lists of passwords we need to crack. Having a desktop computer with a couple of graphics cards is a useful thing to have.

There are three popular cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ZCash. Everyone is using ASICs for Bitcoin, so you can't mine them on a GPU any more, but GPUs are still useful for Ethereum and ZCash.

The trick to building a rig with lots of GPU is to get a PCIe 1x extender, so that you can mount the card far away from the motherboard for better cooling. They cost around $10 each. You then need to buy a motherboard with lots of PCIe slots. One with lots of 1x slots will do Continue reading

Fabric Extension (FEX) Cheat Sheet Released

Here is the Cisco FEX Cheat Sheet on Nexus platform, Fabric Extender (FEX for short) is a companion to a Nexus 5K to 9K switch. The FEX, unlike a traditional switch, has no capability to store a forwarding table or run any control plane protocols. It relies on its parent 5K/6K/7K/9K to perform those functions. As the name implies, the FEX “extends” the fabric (ie, the network) out towards the edge devices that require network connectivity.