Spies planted malware on critical infrastructure, Russian security service says

Russian military networks and other critical infrastructure have been hit by tailor-made malware, according to government officials. Networks at some 20 organizations in Russia -- including scientific and military institutions, defense contractors, and public authorities -- were found to be infected with the malware, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said Saturday. The range of infected sites suggests that the targets were deliberately selected as part of a cyber-espionage operation, the FSB said. Analysis of the attack showed that filenames, parameters and infection methods used in the malware are similar to those involved in other high-profile cyber-espionage operations around the world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lumia sales plummet as Microsoft fires more staffers

Microsoft had a pretty good earnings report last month as it closed out fiscal year 2016 (its fiscal year ends June 30 of each year). Now people are digging through the financial reports to see what the company didn't disclose in its press release or earnings call, and one unfortunate number has emerged: the pitiful sales of Lumia phones.It's the latest in the sad story behind former CEO Steve Ballmer's final debacle, the purchase of Nokia's handset business. Nokia was the strongest supporter of Windows Phone, but beyond Ballmer and some Finnish shareholders, no one thought this $7.2 billion acquisition was a good idea. In the end, it cost more than $10 billion in write-downs, which means paper losses, not actual money out the door, but many employees from Nokia have been cut loose as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Securing the SDDC with VMware NSX – Light Board Series

Is VMware the first company that springs to mind when you think about securing your software-defined data center (SDDC)? It should be.

In this new light board series, learn about the unique capabilities that VMware NSX brings to your SDDC for securing your virtualized environment.

Start out with some context on why networking and security go hand-in hand with the Network Virtualization is Inevitable video. Then, move on to the NSX as a Security Platform video, to learn why VMware can offer security options not possible in tradition environments.

But how to install NSX in an environment? Check out Hadar Freehling’s Castle Security with VMware NSX video. Curious about why the firewall in NSX is special? Watch the VMware NSX Distributed Firewall video. And finally, secure a VDI environment with Hadar’s VMware NSX and VDI video.

As your SDDC evolves, stay up-to-date with NSX and how it can help secure your assets. Any burning questions on securing your virtualized environment you don’t see addressed in the videos, and want to see? Let us know; and don’t be surprised if you see it addressed in a future video.

Julie

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Google and Apple: Apple could be the next AOL

Apple announced its financial results on July 25 and Alphabet/Google on July 26. After-hours trading drove Alphabet’s market cap up over Apple’s. The chart above is a non-scientific indicator of expectations about the future of both companies. The expectations favor Google’s continued growth.Apple reported a drop in iPhone shipments and a drop in Mac shipments, both confirmed by IDC, as well as a decline in the average selling price of iPhones as the company struggles to compete with Android phones with the new low-cost iPhone SE. Every financial report places Apple’s hopes for renewed growth on the iPhone 7, which is due to be announced in September.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SIGFOX-connected fire hydrants help ensure water for firefighting

There’s nothing worse than rushing to put out a fire only to find the hydrant isn’t working. How do you make sure the hundreds of fire hydrants in a city are working properly?Typically hydrants are inspected manually, but that is a slow and costly process whose results are often out of date. It's now possible, though, to remotely monitor hydrants for malfunctions or vandalism without having to spend a fortune.Designing IoT-enabled hydrant system Consider a small city such as Des Plaines, Illinois, which illustrates the challenges involved with monitoring and repairing hydrants. The city extends over 14 square miles and has 3,600 fire hydrants. It could take a few months for a small team of inspectors to manually inspect each hydrant.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SIGFOX-connected fire hydrants help ensure water for firefighting

There’s nothing worse than rushing to put out a fire only to find the hydrant isn’t working. How do you make sure the hundreds of fire hydrants in a city are working properly?Typically hydrants are inspected manually, but that is a slow and costly process whose results are often out of date. It's now possible, though, to remotely monitor hydrants for malfunctions or vandalism without having to spend a fortune.Designing IoT-enabled hydrant system Consider a small city such as Des Plaines, Illinois, which illustrates the challenges involved with monitoring and repairing hydrants. The city extends over 14 square miles and has 3,600 fire hydrants. It could take a few months for a small team of inspectors to manually inspect each hydrant.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to solve Windows 10 crashes in less than a minute

When I began to work with Windows 10, I was able to shut the laptop down without Googling to find the power button icon; a great improvement over Windows 8. My next interest was determining what to do when the OS falls over, generating a Blue Screen of Death. This article will describe how to set your system up so that, when it does, you’ll be able to find the cause of most crashes in less than a minute for no cost. In Windows 10, the Blue Screen looks the same as in Windows 8/8.1. It’s that screen with the frown emoticon and the message “Your PC ran into a problem . . .” This screen appears more friendly than the original Blue Screens, but a truly friendly screen would tell you what caused the problem and how to fix it; something that would not be difficult since most BSODs are caused by misbehaved third party drivers that are often easily identified by the MS Windows debugger.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to detect buggy device drivers in Windows 10

When buggy third-party drivers crash a system and invoke a blue screen of death, it can be difficult to pinpoint the source among all the active running software. An alternative method to using WinDbg is to identify any device driver addition or change that occurred prior to the Blue Screen of Death event.Windows device drivers are just one part of the broader Windows operating environment function called Autorun Settings. Windows’ Autorun Settings identify Windows auto-starting software, including all Windows device drivers, during system bootup or login. In this image, AutorunCheck Forensic v1.0.1 displays the BEFORE and AFTER state of a driver. When chasing down the cause of a system crash, knowing what changed is valuable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 8.1.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.kiteworksKey features –  These new features to kiteworks provide added protection to an enterprise’s various content management systems by scanning all sent and received files to identify any viruses or malware that could lead to a data breach. Whether the files reside in on-premises or cloud-based enterprise content systems, the data within the files can now be scanned with data loss prevention (DLP) and antivirus (AV) capabilities to further safeguard enterprise content. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 8.1.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.kiteworksKey features –  These new features to kiteworks provide added protection to an enterprise’s various content management systems by scanning all sent and received files to identify any viruses or malware that could lead to a data breach. Whether the files reside in on-premises or cloud-based enterprise content systems, the data within the files can now be scanned with data loss prevention (DLP) and antivirus (AV) capabilities to further safeguard enterprise content. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPE’s DCN / Nuage SDN – Part 1 – Introduction and LAB Installation Tutorial

Nuage Networks is a spinoff from Alcatel-Lucent (now under Nokia as they acquisition Alcatel recently) and also a name of software defined network (SDN) overlay solution for datacenters and direct competitor for a bit more widely known vmWare’s NSX. However Alcatel/Nokia are not the only backers here, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) also got a vested interest in this technology and jumped on the partnership with Alcatel/Nokia generating their own spin-off called “HPE’s Distributed Cloud Networking” or HPE DCN for short. In this article I am going to quickly summarize what it should be capable of doing, and then I am going do a run down of how to install this system in a home lab environment, while trying to minimize the requirements for a home install of this beast sacrificing a few redundancies that you would normally have in a DC setup.

I am marking this article as “Part 1” because this installation will only provide the most very basic overlay solution and there will be follow-ups that will go into different aspects later (e.g. redundancy, cooperation with vmWare ESX high availability or L3 VTEPs). For now we are going to setup a simple lab, trying to minimize the Continue reading

iPhone 7 Rumor Rollup: 1 Billion reasons to care; Sept. 16 looms large

Rumors about Apple’s anticipated iPhone 7 and 7 Plus smartphones are getting awfully specific these days, as we reportedly get within 5 or so weeks of the formal announcement.Venture Beat reporter Evan Blass tweeted this week that he had confirmation Apple’s new iPhone pre-orders would begin on September 9th. He suggested followers “extrapolate the launch date from there,” and indeed, the masses have determined that Apple will likely announce its new products on Sept. 6 at a post-Labor Day event, and then make its new devices available come Sept. 16. And in fact, the reliable Blass had tweeted the previous week that Sept. 16 would be the date of Apple’s retail release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MACsec Implementation on Linux

As you noticed from the previous articles, lately I have been playing with some various tunnelling techniques and today I am presenting MACSEC. Most of the documentation resources about MACSEC implementation on the web, at this moment, are the ones showing various vendors implementation, especially Cisco's approach. Although it's not a new topic, Linux support for MACSEC was added only recently.

Initial State, powerful data capture and analytics for your IoT infrastructure

A few posts ago I reviewed Cayenne, an IoT Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that really impressed me. Today, I have a sort of competing service that has also impresses me: Initial State. But where Cayenne focusses on device management with support for shutting down, rebooting, configuration, and remote access, Initial State, is focussed on event data capture and analytics and ignores the device control aspect. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here