IDG Contributor Network: 8 security tips for retailers and consumers this holiday season

It’s the time of year for holiday cheer. Hot chocolate, cookies, presents and other festivities abound. Shops dress up their windows in exotic displays, and festive lights can be seen everywhere. Yes, it’s the time of year when everything is grander and everyone seems happier.But it’s not always sunshine and roses during the holiday season. Trouble often lurks in the shadows—preying on both retailers and consumers. Criminals take advantage of the spike in spending, and use the opportunity to hide in the crowds and undertake fraud of various kinds.+ Also on Network World: Flash mobs the latest threat this holiday season + Financial fraud is the one that comes to mind first, but identity theft, impersonation and theft of items, among others, are all common. On top of that, every year cyber attackers improve on their techniques to steal information, money and goods.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS re:Invent 2016 Keynote with Andy Jassy

This is a liveblog of the Wednesday keynote at AWS re:Invent 2016. Today’s keynote is led by Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services. The crowd gathered for the keynote is pretty immense, despite the availability of numerous overflow locations spread across the multiple re:Invent venues.

At precisely 9am, the DJ rocking the pre-keynote music leaves the stage and AWS welcomes Andy Jassy, CEO, to the stage. This is only the 5th re:Invent conference, and Jassy confirms that this year’s attendance is 32,000 with another 50,000 listening in via the live stream.

Jassy starts with an update on the AWS business. As of Q3, AWS is a nearly $13B run-rate business with millions of active customers. Jassy says that nearly every industry segment is using AWS in a “meaningful way,” as is the public sector. He also calls out all the various AWS partners and systems integrators that have built practices on top of AWS, and the “thousands” of ISVs that have built (or rebuilt) products to run on AWS. AWS is, according to some statistics provided by Jassy, the fastest-growing enterprise IT technology company.

In 2014, AWS said the cloud was the “new normal.” In 2015, AWS said Continue reading

Study warns of human rights risks from censoring online terror content

Internet companies should not be required to monitor third-party terrorist content that they host or transmit, nor should they face direct or indirect liability from governments for such content, according to a new study. The Global Network Initiative, a group that represents academics, investors, civil society organizations and companies including Facebook, Google and Microsoft, published its study Tuesday. It's the offshoot of a policy discussion it started in July 2015, exploring key issues such as the human rights implications of government efforts to restrict online content with the aim of protecting public safety.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Study warns of human rights risks from censoring online terror content

Internet companies should not be required to monitor third-party terrorist content that they host or transmit, nor should they face direct or indirect liability from governments for such content, according to a new study. The Global Network Initiative, a group that represents academics, investors, civil society organizations and companies including Facebook, Google and Microsoft, published its study Tuesday. It's the offshoot of a policy discussion it started in July 2015, exploring key issues such as the human rights implications of government efforts to restrict online content with the aim of protecting public safety.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cool tech at AWS re:Invent

Let the show beginImage by Thinkstock/AmazonAmazon Web Service’s re:Invent conference is one of the premier showcases for new cloud technology spanning across the infrastructure, platform and software as a service markets. Check out some of the hottest products being announced or displayed at the show, from new tools for managing big data to products that help optimize your cloud use to ones that help secure your environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Finding Excuses to Avoid Network Automation

My Network Automation in Enterprise Environments blog post generated the expected responses, including:

Some of the environments I am looking at have around 2000-3000 devices and 6-7 vendors for various functions and 15-20 different device platform from those vendors. I am trying to understand what all environments can Ansible scale up to and what would be an ideal environment enterprises should be looking at more enterprise grade automation/orchestration platforms while keeping in mind that platform allows extensibility.

Luckily I didn’t have to write a response – one of the readers did an excellent job:

Wisconsin recount over suspected hacking will not be by hand

A judge in Wisconsin has refused to order a recount by hand of ballots cast in the state for the U.S. presidential elections, shooting down a petition by Green Party candidate Jill Stein that the use of automatic tabulating equipment, identified as potential targets of foreign government agents, “risks tainting the recount process.”The Wisconsin Elections Commission decided Friday to recount the votes in the state, after concerns were raised that the voting systems can be hacked. Democratic party candidate Hillary Clinton also backed the recount, including the hand count.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wisconsin recount over suspected hacking may not be entirely by hand

A judge in Wisconsin has refused to order a recount by hand of ballots cast in the state for the U.S. presidential elections, shooting down a petition by Green Party candidate Jill Stein that the use of automatic tabulating equipment, identified as potential targets of foreign government agents, “risks tainting the recount process.” The Wisconsin Elections Commission decided Friday to recount the votes in the state, after concerns were raised that the voting systems can be hacked. Democratic party candidate Hillary Clinton also backed the recount, including the hand count.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wisconsin recount over suspected hacking may not be entirely by hand

A judge in Wisconsin has refused to order a recount by hand of ballots cast in the state for the U.S. presidential elections, shooting down a petition by Green Party candidate Jill Stein that the use of automatic tabulating equipment, identified as potential targets of foreign government agents, “risks tainting the recount process.” The Wisconsin Elections Commission decided Friday to recount the votes in the state, after concerns were raised that the voting systems can be hacked. Democratic party candidate Hillary Clinton also backed the recount, including the hand count.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon cloud chief says partners should focus all on AWS

Amazon Web Services executives like to talk about customers who are going “all-in” on the company’s cloud platform, ditching their data centers and investing fully in IaaS.According to media reports, AWS CEO Andy Jassy is encouraging the company’s partners to do the same thing. Jassy reportedly encouraged partners at the re:Invent conference to focus their expertise on the AWS cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How to compare costs between Amazon, Azure and Google clouds +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft patches RHEL instances in Azure cloud

Microsoft has patched a vulnerability stemming from its configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in the Azure public cloud that a customer discovered.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How to compare costs between AWS, Azure and Google clouds +Microsoft Azure uses a process in which all instances of the RHEL operating system check back to a centralized system to ensure it is up to date. The customer, Ian Duffy in Ireland, found that he was able to access that master copy of RHEL, which could have allowed him or anyone else to implant a security vulnerability into the master copy of the program that would have propagated throughout any Azure customer using the OS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Not one, not two, but three undersea cables cut in Jersey

Sometime before midnight Monday (UK local time) a ship dropped its anchor and broke, not one, not two, but three undersea cables serving the island of Jersey in the English Channel. Jersey is part of the Channel Islands along with Guernsey and some smaller islands.

Image courtesy TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map

These things happen and that’s not a good thing. The cut was reported on the venerable BBC news website. For the telecom operators in Jersey (JT Global) this wasn’t good news. However looking at the traffic from Cloudflare’s point of view; we can see that while the cable cut removed the direct path from London to Jersey, it was replaced by the backup path from Paris to Jersey. The move was 100% under the control of the BGP routing protocol. It's a relief that there's a fallback for when these unpredictable events happen.

Here's a look at one network on the island.

The red traffic is being served from our London data center (the normal location for all Jersey traffic) and the blue traffic is coming from our Paris data center. The step could well be caused by either a delayed break in one of the cables or the Continue reading

The new Mirai strain has gone far beyond Deutsche Telekom

The latest strain of Mirai, the malware that’s been infecting internet routers from Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, has spread to devices in at least 10 other countries, according to security firm Flashpoint.The company has detected the new Mirai strain infecting internet routers and modems across the globe, including in the U.K., Brazil, Iran and Thailand.It’s still unclear how many devices have been infected, but Flashpoint estimates that as many as five million devices are vulnerable. “If even a fraction of these vulnerable devices were compromised, they would add considerable power to an existing botnet,” Flashpoint said in a Tuesday blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The new Mirai strain has gone far beyond Deutsche Telekom

The latest strain of Mirai, the malware that’s been infecting internet routers from Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, has spread to devices in at least 10 other countries, according to security firm Flashpoint.The company has detected the new Mirai strain infecting internet routers and modems across the globe, including in the U.K., Brazil, Iran and Thailand.It’s still unclear how many devices have been infected, but Flashpoint estimates that as many as five million devices are vulnerable. “If even a fraction of these vulnerable devices were compromised, they would add considerable power to an existing botnet,” Flashpoint said in a Tuesday blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel Recruits an ARM Exec to Run IoT

Tom Lantzsch makes the jump in January.

Netbox IPAM/DCIM – What all Network Engineers beg for!

We found it!!!

Have you ever sat at your desk, hoping on a miracle, that somebody somewhere will develop a fully comprehensive application for tracking network information???  I know I have, along with millions of other fellow network professional’s I have to assume.  What exactly am I referring to?  IP addresses, vlans, VRF’s, Rack Elevations and on and on and on.  We all have to keep up with this information, for most it is located in spreadsheets; some in notepads; others try to lock it all away in the vast empty space we call a brain.

So, the stage is set.  Yes, there are claims of applications that can keep track of what your CORE router IP address is and what vlan you assigned to one of your customers, or even where in the bloody rack it sits in relation to your other devices.  Some can even keep track of which VRF routing table your management lies in along with which physical port it connects to.  Going a little further, maybe the application claims to give you a basic map layout to which you can refer to…

BUT, very few paid applications actually combine most of these functions into one and very Continue reading

Netbox IPAM/DCIM – What all Network Engineers beg for!

We found it!!!

Have you ever sat at your desk, hoping on a miracle, that somebody somewhere will develop a fully comprehensive application for tracking network information???  I know I have, along with millions of other fellow network professional’s I have to assume.  What exactly am I referring to?  IP addresses, vlans, VRF’s, Rack Elevations and on and on and on.  We all have to keep up with this information, for most it is located in spreadsheets; some in notepads; others try to lock it all away in the vast empty space we call a brain.

So, the stage is set.  Yes, there are claims of applications that can keep track of what your CORE router IP address is and what vlan you assigned to one of your customers, or even where in the bloody rack it sits in relation to your other devices.  Some can even keep track of which VRF routing table your management lies in along with which physical port it connects to.  Going a little further, maybe the application claims to give you a basic map layout to which you can refer to…

BUT, very few paid applications actually combine most of these functions into one and very Continue reading

Pushing Back Against Cheap and Deep Storage

It is not always easy, but several companies dedicated to the supercomputing market have managed to retune their wares to fit more mainstream market niches. This has been true across both the hardware and software subsets of high performance computing, and such efforts have been aided by a well-timed shift in the needs of enterprises toward more robust, compute and data-intensive workhorses as new workloads, most of which are driven by dramatic increases in data volumes and analytical capabilities, keep emerging.

For supercomputer makers, the story is a clear one. However, on the storage side, especially for those select few …

Pushing Back Against Cheap and Deep Storage was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Nutanix’s First-Ever Earnings Report Bears No Surprises

Yep, still losing money (but growing mightily).

40% off WeMo Wi-Fi Smart Plug, Works with Amazon Alexa – Deal Alert

Did you forget to turn off the window A.C.? How about that curling iron? Want the living room lamp to turn on when the sun goes down—automatically? The Wemo Switch gives you control of your lamps and small appliances whenever you want, wherever you choose, with tons of options for scheduling and automation. Paired with Amazon Alexa, you can control your lamps and appliances with just the power of your voice. When Wemo works with Nest Thermostat, you can set your lights to turn off automatically when you leave the house, and on when you get home again. No central hub or subscription is required. Wemo also has an on/off switch on the unit, in case the Wi-Fi goes down. Compatible with Apple iOS 8 or higher and Android 4.1 or higher. With a list price of $49.99, this 40% discount puts the WeMo Smart Plug at just $29.95.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here