Criminals release fewer new types of malware last year, double down on ransomware

Cybercriminals have been producing fewer new kinds of malware last year -- but that's because they're so busy raking in the money from their ransomware attacks.The number of unique malware samples discovered last year was 60 million, down 6.25 percent from last year's 64 million, according to a report released this morning by SonicWall."This is the first time I've seen that the number of unique malware samples actually decreased," said Dmitriy Ayrapetov, director of product management at SonicWall, which produced the report, based on data collections from more than a million sensors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DCNM ISSU: Disaster or Triumph? Let’s Find Out.

If you’ve recovered from the shock of hearing me say something positive about Cisco’s Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) product, then you’ll want to hold on tightly to your underbritches as I tell you that I just used DCNM ISSU to perform disruptive software upgrades on eight of the switches in my ethernet fabric, and–spoiler alert–it was actually a fairly pleasant experience!

DCNM ISSU

DCNM offers management of ISSU (In-Service Software Upgrade). ISSU usually implies some kind of hitless (to the revenue ports) upgrade, historically made possible on the Nexus 7000, for example, by having dual supervisor modules and using Non-Stop Forwarding (NSF) to keep the forwarding plane intact while the supervisors failover. With the single-CPU layer-2 Nexus 5600 switches, however, the data plane can be told to continue forwarding frames while the control plane reboots with new code, allowing for an upgrade to take place without interruption.

Disruptive Upgrades

Unfortunately it’s not always possible to perform a non-disruptive upgrade. The code version I was installing included a fix to the linecard BIOS, so the linecards had to be reloaded as well as the main CPU. In other words, the switch has to be rebooted after the upgrade, and there’s Continue reading

Report: IRS-related phishing scams seen running rampant

If this year is anything like last we are in the midst of phishers’ attempts to trick taxpayers, employers and tax preparers into giving up information that will allow attackers to file bogus tax returns and collect IRS refunds, according to PhishLabs’ annual phishing report.The latest Phishing Trends and Intelligence Report, which has data about January 2016, says that the IRS phishing sites spotted in that one month totaled more than the IRS phishing attempts seen during all of the previous year. While the numbers for this January aren’t in yet, PhishLabs researchers expect yet another spike.That’s because last year, 40 businesses that phishers asked for their employees’ W2 forms actually sent them to the scammers, says Crane Hassold, a senior security threat researcher at PhishLabs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Report: IRS-related phishing scams seen running rampant

If this year is anything like last we are in the midst of phishers’ attempts to trick taxpayers, employers and tax preparers into giving up information that will allow attackers to file bogus tax returns and collect IRS refunds, according to PhishLabs’ annual phishing report.The latest Phishing Trends and Intelligence Report, which has data about January 2016, says that the IRS phishing sites spotted in that one month totaled more than the IRS phishing attempts seen during all of the previous year. While the numbers for this January aren’t in yet, PhishLabs researchers expect yet another spike.That’s because last year, 40 businesses that phishers asked for their employees’ W2 forms actually sent them to the scammers, says Crane Hassold, a senior security threat researcher at PhishLabs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A New Twist On Adding Data Persistence To Containers

Containers continue to gain momentum as organizations look for greater efficiencies and lower costs to run distributed applications in their increasingly virtualized datacenters as well as for improving their application development environments. As we have noted before, containers are becoming more common in the enterprise, though they still have a way to go before being fully embraced in high performance computing circles.

There are myriad advantages to containers, from being able to spin them up much faster than virtual machine instances on hypervisors and to pack more containers than virtual machines on a host system to gaining efficiencies …

A New Twist On Adding Data Persistence To Containers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel Atom SoC bricking more than Cisco products

Looks like the culprit in the recent Cisco debacle is the Intel Atom “System on Chip” (SoC) that Cisco used in it’s gear. My sources within Cisco won’t give up the goods, but many seem to be pointing to Cisco, although a single source at Cisco seemed to indicate there was another player included in this issue but wouldn’t comment. The real footing of these Intel accusations come from Intel itself. Back in Janurary 2017, they updated their spec document documenting an issue with the LPC clock on the Atom s2000, with no workaround and a system that is unable to boot, this depicts a grim outlook for our networking devices.

The news gets worse though, according to a recent article from The Register Cisco isn’t the only one experiencing issues.

For now, only time will tell what other devices are going to come out Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 5 things to know about Cisco and AppDynamics

On Jan. 24, I attended a Cisco Spark event in San Francisco. The day started with a keynote by Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Collaboration. He also ended the day at event receptions. However, my afternoon meeting with Rowan was abruptly canceled with little explanation.As it happens, Rowan had to skip out during his own event to spend $3.7 billion to acquire AppDynamics. Although the news broke before the day’s end, nothing was mentioned at the Cisco Spark event, which was laser-focused on its new Spark Board.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The end of net neutrality is nigh—here’s what’s likely to happen

The concept of net neutrality holds that telecom carriersmay not treat some content differently than other content, depending on who owns it, for example. The idea’s merits have been hotly debated for years, eventually coming to serve as a technological/ideological litmus test. Liberals, typically, favored the concept, believing it is necessary to ensure equal, unfettered access to all kinds of online content. Conservatives mostly disagreed with it, claiming it unfairly and unnecessarily regulated telecom carriers. Late in the Obama administration, net neutrality was codified into policy. But the new chairman of the Federal Communications Comission, Ajit Pai, a former lawyer for Verizon, is an ardent opponent of net neutrality. With the support of the Trump administration and Republican Congress, Pai has already ended enforcement of the rules and is widely expected to scuttle the entire policy as soon as possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Study Says 5G Subscribers Will Top 25M by 2021

5G will also generate 30 GB of data per month.

IDG Contributor Network: ForeScout extends to offer AWS security visibility

ForeScout is a security company that specializes in giving organizations agentless visibility and control of both traditional and IoT devices connected to the network. That's probably super-interesting if you're a IT security practitioner, but if you're not, you're probably stifling a yawn about now. But remember, if you will, that the first planned IPO of 2017 -- that of AppDynamics -- got canceled very much at the last minute when the company was acquired by Cisco. So given we're yet to see a 2017 IPO, and that ForeScout is rumored to have confidentially filed its documentation for an IPO recently, anything newsy from ForeScout's HQ gets a little more interesting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: ForeScout extends to offer AWS security visibility

ForeScout is a security company that specializes in giving organizations agentless visibility and control of both traditional and IoT devices connected to the network. That's probably super-interesting if you're a IT security practitioner, but if you're not, you're probably stifling a yawn about now. But remember, if you will, that the first planned IPO of 2017 -- that of AppDynamics -- got canceled very much at the last minute when the company was acquired by Cisco. So given we're yet to see a 2017 IPO, and that ForeScout is rumored to have confidentially filed its documentation for an IPO recently, anything newsy from ForeScout's HQ gets a little more interesting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BGP Basics: Internal And External BGP

IT Outages: The Costly Fallout

And This Is Why Relying on Linux Makes Sense

Most networking operating systems include a mechanism to roll back device configuration and/or create configuration snapshots. These mechanisms usually work only for the device configuration, but do not include operating system images or other components (example: crypto keys).

Now imagine using RFC 1925 rule 6a and changing the “configuration rollback” problem into “file system snapshot” problem. That’s exactly what Cumulus Linux does in its newest release. Does it make sense? It depends.

Cisco faces a tougher collaboration rival in updated Prysm

Collaboration has come a long way from projectors, cable adapters and that long wait for the presenter to make the slides fit on the screen.Cisco Systems made a splash last month with the Spark Board, a meeting-room screen that acts like a giant iPad running the company’s cloud-based collaboration service. But other vendors are streamlining meetings too, including Google, Microsoft, and a number of startups.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dozens of iOS apps fail to secure users’ data, researcher says

Dozens of iOS apps that are supposed to be encrypting their users' data don't do it properly, according to a security researcher.Will Strafach, CEO of Sudo Security Group, said he found 76 iOS apps that are vulnerable to an attack that can intercept protected data.The developers of the apps have accidentally misconfigured the networking-related code so it will accept an invalid Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate, Strafach claimed in a Monday blog post.   TLS is used to secure an app’s communication over an internet connection. Without it, a hacker can essentially eavesdrop over a network to spy on whatever data the app sends, such as login information.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dozens of iOS apps fail to secure users’ data, researcher says

Dozens of iOS apps that are supposed to be encrypting their users' data don't do it properly, according to a security researcher.Will Strafach, CEO of Sudo Security Group, said he found 76 iOS apps that are vulnerable to an attack that can intercept protected data.The developers of the apps have accidentally misconfigured the networking-related code so it will accept an invalid Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate, Strafach claimed in a Monday blog post.   TLS is used to secure an app’s communication over an internet connection. Without it, a hacker can essentially eavesdrop over a network to spy on whatever data the app sends, such as login information.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to set up the EVE-NG network emulator on a Linux system

EVE-NG is a graphical network emulator that supports both commercial and open-source router images. It’s graphical user interface runs in a web browser. EVE-NG runs in a virtual machine so it can be set up Windows, Mac OS, or Linux computers.

In this post, I will show how to set up an EVE-NG virtual machine on an Ubuntu Linux system. I’ll show the basic steps to creating and running a simple lab consisting of emulated Linux nodes.

To support more complex labs using open-source routers and other open-source network appliances in EVE-NG, we need to create custom templates and build router images specifically for use in EVE-NG. I will cover these topics in a future post. In this post, we’ll focus only on getting an EVE-NG virtual machine set up and running on a Linux system.

EVE-NG Overview

EVE-NG is a clientless network emulator that provides a user interface via a browser. Users may create network nodes from a library of templates, connect them together, and configure them. Advanced users or administrators may add software images to the library and build custom templates to support almost any network scenario.

EVE-NG supports pre-configured multiple hypervisors on one virtual machine. It runs Continue reading

Installing VirtualBox 5.1 on Fedora 25

Last fall, I wrote a piece about why I had switched to VirtualBox (from VMware Fusion) for my Vagrant needs. As part of my switch to Fedora Linux as my primary laptop OS, I revisited my choice of virtualization provider. I’ll describe that re-assessment in a separate post; the “TL;DR” for this post is that I settled on VirtualBox. As it turns out, though, installing VirtualBox 5.1 on Fedora 25 isn’t as straightforward as one might expect.

After a number of attempts (using a test VM to iron out the “best” procedure), here’s the process I found to be the most straightforward:

1. Run dnf check-update and dnf upgrade to pick up the latest packages. If a new kernel version is installed, reboot. (I know this sounds contrived, but I’ve run into issues where some kernel-related packages aren’t available for the kernel version you’re actually running.)

2. Install the RPMFusion repos. You only really need the “free” repository, but you can install the “nonfree” as well if you like (it won’t affect this process). I won’t go through the process for how to do this; it’s really well-documented on the RPMFusion web site and is pretty straightforward.

3. Next, use Continue reading

BrandPost: Ethernet Ports on PCs Are in for a Long Overdue Speed Boost

Every year, the processing power of the CPUs that drive our computing and gaming devices increases, enabling them to ingest, process, and churn out more data faster. When you look at the increases over time, as the folks at Expert Exchange did in 2015, the progress is nothing short of mind-boggling. They found that an Apple iPhone 5 had 2.7 times the processing power of a 1985 Cray-2 supercomputer. And a pair of 2015 Nintendo gaming systems had about the same processing power as the computer that guided Apollo 11 to the moon. We see it in the new models of workstations, PCs and laptops that come out every year, or even every six months – each one faster and smaller than the last. But, as IDC Research Director Linn Huang points out, the same is not true for the wired Ethernet ports on those machines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here