The essential guide to anti-malware tools

It's a sad fact of life in IT nowadays that some form of preparation for dealing with malware is part and parcel of what systems and network administrators must do. This goes above and beyond normal due diligence in warding off malware. It includes a proper appreciation of the work and risks involved in handling malware infections, and acquiring a toolkit of repair and cleanup tools to complement protective measures involved in exercising due diligence. It should also include at least two forms of insurance – one literal, the other metaphorical – that can help avert or cover an organization against costs and liabilities that malware could otherwise force the organization to incur.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

The essential guide to anti-malware tools

It's a sad fact of life in IT nowadays that some form of preparation for dealing with malware is part and parcel of what systems and network administrators must do. This goes above and beyond normal due diligence in warding off malware. It includes a proper appreciation of the work and risks involved in handling malware infections, and acquiring a toolkit of repair and cleanup tools to complement protective measures involved in exercising due diligence. It should also include at least two forms of insurance – one literal, the other metaphorical – that can help avert or cover an organization against costs and liabilities that malware could otherwise force the organization to incur.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Sprint takes a 33 percent stake in Tidal

Mobile phone service provider Sprint announced this morning that it has taken a 33 percent stake in Tidal, one of the few music-streaming services to offer high-resolution audio streams. As part of the deal, Sprint says its customers will get exclusive access to certain content. Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure will also join Tidal’s board of directors.“Sprint shares our view of revolutionizing the creative industry to allow artists to connect directly with their fans and reach their fullest, shared potential,” Tidal owner Jay Z (née Shawn Carter) said in a press release. “Marcelo understood our goal right away and together we are excited to bring Sprint’s 45 million customers an unmatched entertainment experience.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reports: Apple, Foxconn considering a $7 billion manufacturing plant in the U.S.

Apple is reportedly considering moving some of its iPhone production to the United States. Taiwanese iPhone producer Foxconn is considering a $7 billion joint investment in a display production facility, the company’s chairman told reporters.According to the Nikkei Asian Review, Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou said “Apple is willing to invest in the facility together” because it needs display panels for its products. The plant could create 30,000 to 50,000 jobs.But Gou said U.S.-made iPhones would likely cost more than those produced at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou, China facility, which churns out more than 100 million iPhones per year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Game over for Solaris and SPARC?

When Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems in 2010, the company inherited a venerable Unix solution that was already in decline. The Solaris operating system on Sun’s SPARC hardware was losing ground to x86 running Linux (or Windows Server) already, and IBM was cleaning its clock by stealing away SPARC customers to its Power series of servers. Larry Ellison promised to stop the bleeding. He promised investment in the line, and by and large has kept his promise, especially on the chip side. The SPARC line has seen considerable investment and some impressive new releases. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to turn things around. Solaris on Sparc continued to lose ground to competitors and Oracle’s own hardware, the x86-based Exadata and Exalogic. One thing Oracle would never own up to was SPARC sales to new customers vs. existing customers replacing aging hardware. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

33% off HP 23er 23-inch IPS LED Backlit Bezel-less Monitor – Deal Alert

IPS panel technology for ultra wide viewing, from almost any angle. 1920 x 1080 resolution for a sharp, detailed view. Bezel-less design maximizes your viewing area and makes for seamless multi-monitor set-ups. And LED backlighting enables high screen performance. Ultra slim and Energy-Star compliant design. The HP 23er 23-inch IPS LED backlit monitor is currently super-affordable ($119.99) with a 33% off deal happening now on Amazon, where it's averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 270 reviewers. See the deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dispersing a DDoS: Initial thoughts on DDoS protection

Distributed Denial of Service is a big deal—huge pools of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as security cameras, are compromised by botnets and being used for large scale DDoS attacks. What are the tools in hand to fend these attacks off? The first misconception is that you can actually fend off a DDoS attack. There is no magical tool you can deploy that will allow you to go to sleep every night thinking, “tonight my network will not be impacted by a DDoS attack.” There are tools and services that deploy various mechanisms that will do the engineering and work for you, but there is no solution for DDoS attacks.

One such reaction tool is spreading the attack. In the network below, the network under attack has six entry points.

Assume the attacker has IoT devices scattered throughout AS65002 which they are using to launch an attack. Due to policies within AS65002, the DDoS attack streams are being forwarded into AS65001, and thence to A and B. It would be easy to shut these two links down, forcing the traffic to disperse across five entries rather than two (B, C, D, E, and F). By splitting the Continue reading

Containers? What are containers?

Surveys of IT users are a dime a dozen, but every once in a while one pops with a surprising statistic. Like this one: A poll of more than 300 IT works by UBM found that 8% didn’t event know what an application container is.Containers have been the buzzword du jour for the past couple of years in cloud and application development circles. But surveys like this independent are a reminder that new technology is slow to catch on.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Oracle outlines plans to take on Amazon in the cloud +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cuba Up, Vietnam Down: Recent Subsea Cable Developments

Recent submarine cable-related developments have impacted internet connectivity in locales as diverse as Vietnam, Cuba, India, the Marshall Islands and Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.  In this blog post, we report on positive developments in Cuba and Russia and a few notable cable failures in other parts of the world.

Vietnam

The internet of Vietnam got off to a shaky start in 2017 when, on 8 January, the America-Asia Gateway (AAG) submarine cable experienced yet another of its many failures.  In September of last year, Tuoi Tre News reported that AAG had suffered its 10th failure in three years, prompting VietnamNet to ask the question: Why does the AAG underwater cable have to be repaired so often?  Over the years, we have frequently analyzed these cable breaks.  (For example, see this, this or this.)

Internet performance in Ho Chi Minh City suffers greatly during these unfortunate episodes.  For Saigontourist Cable Television (SCTV), the recent break meant a brief disruption in connectivity and the loss of NTT transit as illustrated below.

saigon_tourist
Following this year’s loss of AAG, the TGN-Intra Asia (IA) cable also suffered a failure, compounding the problems for Vietnamese internet connectivity.  Tuoi Continue reading

IBM Security to buy risk-visualization firm Agile 3 Solutions

IBM Security plans to buy San Francisco-based Agile 3 Solutions, which makes software for visualizing data risk for analysis by senior executives.The deal is expected to close within weeks, but the financial terms were not released. It will include the purchase of Ravy Technologies, an Agile 3 subcontractor based in India.Agile 3’s software identifies risks to business programs and assets, and enables actions to head off possible exploits that could affect business processes. It provides a dashboard for measuring compliance with regulations and legislation.NEWSLETTERS: Get the latest tech news sent directly to your in-box IBM Security customers will be able to buy Agile 3 technology as a service through IBM Data Security Services or as features rolled into IBM Guardian, the company’s data-protection software. The company says the addition of the software will help identify and protect critical data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM Security to buy risk-visualization firm Agile 3 Solutions

IBM Security plans to buy San Francisco-based Agile 3 Solutions, which makes software for visualizing data risk for analysis by senior executives.The deal is expected to close within weeks, but the financial terms were not released. It will include the purchase of Ravy Technologies, an Agile 3 subcontractor based in India.Agile 3’s software identifies risks to business programs and assets, and enables actions to head off possible exploits that could affect business processes. It provides a dashboard for measuring compliance with regulations and legislation.NEWSLETTERS: Get the latest tech news sent directly to your in-box IBM Security customers will be able to buy Agile 3 technology as a service through IBM Data Security Services or as features rolled into IBM Guardian, the company’s data-protection software. The company says the addition of the software will help identify and protect critical data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Year’s resolution: Donate to 1 free software project every month

Free and open source software is an absolutely critical part of our world—and the future of technology and computing. One problem that consistently plagues many free software projects, though, is the challenge of funding ongoing development (and support and documentation). With that in mind, I have finally settled on a New Year’s resolution for 2017: to donate to one free software project (or group) every month—or the whole year. After all, these projects are saving me a boatload of money because I don’t need to buy expensive, proprietary packages to accomplish the same things.+ Also on Network World: Free Software Foundation shakes up its list of priority projects + I’m not setting some crazy goal here—not requiring that I donate beyond my means. Heck, some months I may be able to donate only a few bucks. But every little bit helps, right? To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top 25 worst-of-the-worst, most common passwords used in 2016

For the sixth year in a year, SplashData has released its list of worst passwords.According to SplashData, the list is based on over five million leaked passwords, which are used by users in North America and Western Europe, that were posted for sale online.I thought it might be interesting to compare SplashData’s newest list with the top 25 most common password list released last week by rival firm Keeper Security. According to the two companies, these were the top 25 worst passwords people used in 2016:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top 25 worst-of-the-worst, most common passwords used in 2016

For the sixth year in a year, SplashData has released its list of worst passwords.According to SplashData, the list is based on over five million leaked passwords, which are used by users in North America and Western Europe, that were posted for sale online.I thought it might be interesting to compare SplashData’s newest list with the top 25 most common password list released last week by rival firm Keeper Security. According to the two companies, these were the top 25 worst passwords people used in 2016:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Master-Master Replication and Scaling of an Application between Each of the IoT Devices and the Cloud

In this article, I want to share with you how I solved a very interesting problem of synchronizing data between IoT devices and a cloud application.

I’ll start by outlining the general idea and the goals of my project. Then I’ll describe my implementation in greater detail. This is going to be a more technically advanced part, where I’ll be talking about the Contiki OS, databases, protocols and the like. In the end, I’ll summarize the technologies I used to implement the whole system.

Project overview

So, let’s talk about the general idea first.

Here’s a scheme illustrating the final state of the whole system:

I have a user who can connect to IoT devices via a cloud service or directly (that is over Wi-Fi).

Also, I have an application server somewhere in the cloud and the cloud itself somewhere on the Internet. This cloud can be anything — for example, an AWS or Azure instance or it could be a dedicated server, it could be anything :)

The application server is connected to IoT devices over some protocol. I need this connection to exchange data between the application server and the IoT devices.

The IoT devices are connected to each other in Continue reading

Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, and Kapacitor

The InfluxData TICK (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, Kapacitor) provides a full set of integrated metrics tools, including an agent to export metrics (Telegraf), a time series database to collect and store the metrics (InfluxDB), a dashboard to display metrics (Chronograf), and a data processing engine (Kapacitor). Each of the tools is open sourced and can be used together or separately.
This article will show how industry standard sFlow agents embedded within the data center infrastructure can provide Telegraf metrics to InfluxDB. The solution uses sFlow-RT as a proxy to convert sFlow metrics into their Telegraf equivalent form so that they are immediately visible through the default Chronograf dashboards (Using a proxy to feed metrics into Ganglia described a similar approach for sending metrics to Ganglia).

The following telegraf.js script instructs sFlow-RT to periodically export host metrics to InfluxDB:
var influxdb = "http://10.0.0.56:8086/write?db=telegraf";

function sendToInfluxDB(msg) {
  if(!msg || !msg.length) return;
  
  var req = {
    url:influxdb,
    operation:'POST',
    headers:{"Content-Type":"text/plain"},
    body:msg.join('\n')
  };
  req.error = function(e) {
    logWarning('InfluxDB POST failed, error=' + e);
  }
  try { httpAsync(req); }
  catch(e) {
    logWarning('bad request ' + req.url + ' ' + e);
  }
}

var metric_names = [
   Continue reading
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