What #MadeByGoogle really means

Google announced some cool consumer electronics devices at its San Francisco event yesterday hashtagged #MadeByGoogle: Google Home personal digital assistant, two new flagship phones under the new Pixel brand, Chromecast Ultra (capable of 4K video), Google Wi-Fi, and a VR headset for the Pixel phones. The usual sales channels—Verizon, Best Buy and Google Play—will distribute them.It sounds like the consumer electronics business, but it is not.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Up To $50 off Various Amazon Kindle Models, Limited Time Discount for Prime Members Only – Deal Alert

Amazon has quietly released a good deal on its popular Kindle series of e-readers, but it's available only to Prime Members, or anyone who has an active 30-day free trial. For a limited time, Kindle's price sinks from $80 to $50, Kindle Paperwhite from $120 down to $90, and the Kindle Voyage drops from $200 to just $150. Which dovetails with the new "Prime Reading" benefit they just announced (See: "Prime Members Now Get Unlimited Reading On Any Device, Amazon Announces - Deal Alert" @ Techconnect.com). Kindle discounts applied during checkout.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hyperconverged Infrastructure Is Now A Data Center Mainstay

Worth Reading: a troubling new chapter for the ‘net

For the better part of a day, KrebsOnSecurity, arguably the world’s most intrepid source of security news, has been silenced, presumably by a handful of individuals who didn’t like a recent series of exposés reporter Brian Krebs wrote. The incident, and the record-breaking data assault that brought it on, open a troubling new chapter in the short history of the Internet. The crippling distributed denial-of-service attacks started shortly after Krebs published stories stemming from the hack of a DDoS-for-hire service known as vDOS. The first article analyzed leaked data that identified some of the previously anonymous people closely tied to vDOS. It documented how they took in more than $600,000 in two years by knocking other sites offline. A few days later, Krebs ran a follow-up piece detailing the arrests of two men who allegedly ran the service. —Ars Technica

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Guccifer 2.0 claims to have hacked the Clinton Foundation

Hacker Guccifer 2.0 now claims to have hacked the Clinton Foundation, but the documents posted show Democratic campaign data from organizations already compromised.Guccifer 2.0, believed by some security experts to be a Russian team of  hackers, posted several documents Tuesday that he claims to have taken from servers at the Clinton Foundation, the charity founded by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, husband of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.Earlier this year, Guccifer 2.0 claimed to have hacked both the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and the new documents appear to be more of the same. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Guccifer 2.0 claims to have hacked the Clinton Foundation

Hacker Guccifer 2.0 now claims to have hacked the Clinton Foundation, but the documents posted show Democratic campaign data from organizations already compromised.Guccifer 2.0, believed by some security experts to be a Russian team of  hackers, posted several documents Tuesday that he claims to have taken from servers at the Clinton Foundation, the charity founded by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, husband of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.Earlier this year, Guccifer 2.0 claimed to have hacked both the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and the new documents appear to be more of the same. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Avaya takes network management to the cloud

Historically, most non-networking professionals have considered the network to be the “pipes” or “plumbing” of the organization—something you needed, but low value.Over time, though, the network has steadily increased in value. In today’s digital era, where everything is connected and more applications and services are moving to the cloud, the network has increased significantly in value. It connects employees, customers and guests, and it is the last line of defense for securing the business.Because of the increased business value, how networks are managed must change. The legacy process of touching every device in every location is laborious and filled with errors. The 2016 ZK Research Network Purchase Intention Study showed that the highest cause (35 percent) of network downtime is due to human error from manual configuration. Traditional management is also very slow. Turning up a new location or even making simple changes often required a network engineer to be on site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yahoo calls report of secret email scanning ‘misleading’

Yahoo has called a Reuters article about a secret email scanning program "misleading," and said no such system exists. On Tuesday, the Reuters article claimed that Yahoo had created the custom software program after receiving a classified U.S. government order.  That software program is reportedly capable of scanning all incoming emails from Yahoo customers for information provided by U.S. intelligence officials.However, on Wednesday Yahoo disputed the report.“We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure. The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems," the company said in an email. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yahoo calls report of secret email scanning ‘misleading’

Yahoo has called a Reuters article about a secret email scanning program "misleading," and said no such system exists. On Tuesday, the Reuters article claimed that Yahoo had created the custom software program after receiving a classified U.S. government order.  That software program is reportedly capable of scanning all incoming emails from Yahoo customers for information provided by U.S. intelligence officials.However, on Wednesday Yahoo disputed the report.“We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure. The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems," the company said in an email. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Prime Members Now Get Unlimited Reading On Any Device, Amazon Announces – Deal Alert

Amazon has just announced one more compelling reason to consider a Prime membership -- "Prime Reading". As a Prime member, you now have unlimited access to over a thousand books, current issue magazines, comics, Kindle Singles, and more. With access from any device – including your phone, tablet, or Kindle – so you can read as much as you want, however you want, and whenever you want. Learn more about the new benefit and/or the other benefits of a Prime membership (free 2-day shipping, streaming movies & TV, unlimited music, photo storage, and more) at the Amazon Prime Home page. Prime memberships are $99/yr, but the 30-day free trial is typically where most people seem to start.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cerber ransomware kills database connections to access important data

In order to encrypt some of the most important data stored on computers and servers, the Cerber ransomware now tries to kill processes associated with database servers.The goal for ransomware programs is to affect as many valuable files as possible in order to increase the chance that affected users will pay to have them restored. For consumers these files are things like personal photos, videos, documents and even game saves, but for businesses, its usually data stored in databases.The problem for hackers is that write access to database files can be blocked by the OS if they're already being used by other processes, which prevents the ransomware program from encrypting them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cerber ransomware kills database connections to access important data

In order to encrypt some of the most important data stored on computers and servers, the Cerber ransomware now tries to kill processes associated with database servers.The goal for ransomware programs is to affect as many valuable files as possible in order to increase the chance that affected users will pay to have them restored. For consumers these files are things like personal photos, videos, documents and even game saves, but for businesses, its usually data stored in databases.The problem for hackers is that write access to database files can be blocked by the OS if they're already being used by other processes, which prevents the ransomware program from encrypting them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Level 3 blames huge network outage on human error

Level 3 Communications has cited a "configuration error" as the root cause of its nationwide network outage on Tuesday.Here's the public statement issued by the Broomfield, Colo., service provider: On October 4, our voice network experienced a service disruption affecting some of our customers in North America due to a configuration error. We know how important these services are to our customers. As an organization, we’re putting processes in place to prevent issues like this from recurring in the future. We were able to restore all services by 9:31 a.m. Mountain time. (UPDATED on Oct. 14, 2016) Level 3 got more specific with customers, issuing a Reason for Outage (RFO) Summary (shared by a Network World reader) headlined "Repair Area: Human Error Occurrence" and that read in part: "Investigations revealed that an improper entry was made to a call routing table during provisioning work being performed on the Level 3 network. This was the configuration chane that led to the outage. The entry did not specify a telephone number to limit the configuration change to, resulting in non-subscriber country code +1 calls to be releaed while the entry remained present. The configuration adjustments deleted this entry to Continue reading

Level 3 blames huge network outage on unspecified configuration error

Level 3 Communications has cited an unspecified "configuration error" as the root cause of its nationwide network outage on Tuesday.Here's the statement issued by the Broomfield, Colo., service provider: On October 4, our voice network experienced a service disruption affecting some of our customers in North America due to a configuration error. We know how important these services are to our customers. As an organization, we’re putting processes in place to prevent issues like this from recurring in the future. We were able to restore all services by 9:31 a.m. Mountain time. Social media sites such as Reddit and Twitter erupted on Tuesday morning with inquiries and complaints about the outage from Level 3 customers, as well as customers of other big carriers like AT&T and Verizon that were affected by the outage. Speculation for the outage ranged from possible fiber cuts to more outlandish theories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Operational Keys to Carrier NFV

We shouldn’t think of NFV as merely porting a cloud to the telcos. We need to understand that true NFV won't happen until we connect all the entities involved in delivering the customer a modern, virtualized service.

Juniper Ramps Up Security

DNS Specialist NS1 Raises $20M

Managing traffic with DNS visibility.

Evaluating SD-WAN Technologies

Carrier Ethernet – Definition | Service Types | Requirements

CARRIER ETHERNET DEFINITION Carrier Ethernet is an attempt to expand Ethernet beyond the borders of Local Area Network (LAN), into the Wide Area Networks (WAN). With Carrier Ethernet, customer sites are connected through the Wide Area Network. Carriers have connected the customers with ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and Frame Relay interfaces in the past. (User to Network Interface/UNI). […]

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Q&A: The myths and realities of hacking an election

Election hacking has become a key topic during this year's presidential elections, more so now that candidates and voters are being actively targeted by actors that are assumed to be acting with Russian support. In this modified edition of CSO Online's Hacked Opinions series, we explore the myths and realities of hacking an election, by speaking with a number of security experts.Q: Can the national election really be hacked? If so, how? "It’s unlikely that the national election could really be hacked to alter the outcome. Voter registration databases have recently proven vulnerable, but adding, modifying, or deleting records doesn’t produce the intended effect (changed outcome); it just raises questions about the integrity of the database on election day," said Levi Gundert, CP of Intelligence and Strategy, Recorded Future.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here