Qatar National Bank claims customer data released by hackers is authentic

Qatar National Bank has admitted that its systems were hacked but said that the information released online was a combination of data picked up from the attack and from other sources such as social media.The incident would not have a financial impact on the bank’s customers whose accounts are secure the bank said, without providing details of how its systems were hacked, the possible identity of the hackers, and what information was harvested.The announcement Sunday by one of the leading financial institution in the Middle East follows the posting online last week of leaked documents. The attack only targeted a portion of Qatar-based customers, the bank said, claiming the hack attempted to target the bank’s reputation rather than specifically its customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Touch Wipe: a question for you lawyers

Whether the police can force you to unlock your iPhone depends upon technicalities. They can't ask you for your passcode, because that would violate the 5th Amendment right against "self incrimination". On the other hand, they can force you to press your finger on the TouchID button, or (as it has been demonstrated) unlock the phone themselves using only your fingerprint.

So I propose adding a new technicality into the mix: "Touch Wipe". In addition to recording fingerprints to unlock the phone, Apple/Android should add the feature where users record fingerprints to wipe (erase) the phone. For example, I may choose my thumb to unlock, and my forefinger to wipe.

Indeed, I may record only one digit to unlock, and all nine remaining digits to wipe. Or even, I may decide to record all 10 digits on both hands to wipe, and not use Touch ID at all to unlock (relying solely on the passcode).

This now presents the problem for the police. They can't force me to unlock the phone. They can't get around that by using my fingerprints, because they might inadvertently destroy evidence.

The legal system is resilient against legal trickery such as this. If think you've Continue reading

Bangkok, Thailand: CloudFlare’s 79th Data Center

CloudFlare just turned up our newest data center in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand and a very popular destination with travelers in Southeast Asia. This expands our network to span 32 cities across Asia, and 79 cities globally.

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The floating market at Damnoen Saduak, just outside Bangkok (Photo source: CloudFlare's very own Martin Levy)

Thailand, with a population of 65 million, is the fourth largest country in Southeast Asia. As the central interconnection point for all Internet communications within the country, Bangkok was the natural choice for our newest deployment.

Southeast Asia expansion

Southeast Asia commonly includes the countries of Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Following Singapore and then Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Bangkok is the third location for CloudFlare in the region. We have more deployments in the works in the region; however our next data center beginning with the letter 'B' is roughly 6,000 miles away.

Online, in a massively mobile way

While only 40% of the population is online, Thailand has become a majority-mobile country very quickly, with 70% of its users accessing the Internet predominantly via smartphones. Through CloudFlare’s implementation of encryption using the ChaCha20-Poly1305 cipher suites, Continue reading

A SharePoint Conference and a South African Safari: Two great ideas to consider for June 2016

This is going to be a great week for SharePoint with the Future of SharePoint event coming on May 4. It’s not too late to register and even if you can’t watch the event live, you will be able to watch it later if you register. About 7 weeks later, from June 20-22, 2016, there is another opportunity worth considering: attending the Share Conference in South Africa.Share is a unique event sponsored by The Eventful Group. Each year, the conference producers conduct a series of focus groups to understand the critical issues and important topics for business users. Yes, that’s right – business users. Share is a business-centric conference for people who want to identify new and different ways to use SharePoint to solve business problems. This year’s hot topics include:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware attack forces Michigan utility to shut down systems, phone lines, email

Last week was a busy week when it comes to ransomware. New victims included a utility company, visitors to a toymaker’s website, pirates sailing The Pirate Bay and many more. Some cyber crooks are now demanding gift cards for ransom instead of bitcoin. While it wasn’t all bad news, there are new decryptors and detectors, the FBI published a new warning about the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated ransomware campaigns.Utility company hit with ransomware Lansing Board of Water & Light (BWL), a Michigan municipal utility, was hit with ransomware after an employee opened an email that had a malicious attachment. The ransomware spread, encrypting files on other computers on the internal network. BWL shut down its accounting system, email service for 250 employees and “phone lines,” including the customer assistance line for account inquiries and the line for reporting outages. “Printers and other technology” were also affected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware attack forces Michigan utility to shut down systems, phone lines, email

Last week was a busy week when it comes to ransomware. New victims included a utility company, visitors to a toymaker’s website, pirates sailing The Pirate Bay and many more. Some cyber crooks are now demanding gift cards for ransom instead of bitcoin. While it wasn’t all bad news, there are new decryptors and detectors, the FBI published a new warning about the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated ransomware campaigns.Utility company hit with ransomware Lansing Board of Water & Light (BWL), a Michigan municipal utility, was hit with ransomware after an employee opened an email that had a malicious attachment. The ransomware spread, encrypting files on other computers on the internal network. BWL shut down its accounting system, email service for 250 employees and “phone lines,” including the customer assistance line for account inquiries and the line for reporting outages. “Printers and other technology” were also affected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Michigan utility shuts down systems, phone lines, email after ransomware attack

Last week was a busy week when it comes to ransomware. New victims included a utility company, visitors to a toymaker’s website, pirates sailing The Pirate Bay and many more. Some cyber crooks are now demanding gift cards for ransom instead of bitcoin. While it wasn’t all bad news, there are new decryptors and detectors, the FBI published a new warning about the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated ransomware campaigns.Utility company hit with ransomwareLansing Board of Water & Light (BWL), a Michigan municipal utility, was hit with ransomware after an employee opened an email with a malicious attachment. The ransomware spread, encrypting files on other computers on the internal network; BWL shut down its accounting system, email service for 250 employees and “phone lines,” including the customer assistance line for account inquiries and the line for reporting outages. “Printers and other technology” were also affected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Michigan utility shuts down systems, phone lines, email after ransomware attack

Last week was a busy week when it comes to ransomware. New victims included a utility company, visitors to a toymaker’s website, pirates sailing The Pirate Bay and many more. Some cyber crooks are now demanding gift cards for ransom instead of bitcoin. While it wasn’t all bad news, there are new decryptors and detectors, the FBI published a new warning about the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated ransomware campaigns.Utility company hit with ransomwareLansing Board of Water & Light (BWL), a Michigan municipal utility, was hit with ransomware after an employee opened an email with a malicious attachment. The ransomware spread, encrypting files on other computers on the internal network; BWL shut down its accounting system, email service for 250 employees and “phone lines,” including the customer assistance line for account inquiries and the line for reporting outages. “Printers and other technology” were also affected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybereason gains Lockheed Martin’s Threat Intelligence to thwart cyberattacks

Given the recent sharp increase in cyberattacks of all kinds, IT operations driving enterprise scale networks need something that will effectively reduce their intelligence gathering problems and help to automate their response to be as fast as possible. What’s needed is the ability to identify and deal with attacks as they happen but there are some really significant challenges in doing this including the sheer scale of  network event data, the problem of filtering out the event "noise" and false positives, and the ability to detect zero day threats. With what must be one of the headiest combinations of hot technologies I’ve seen for a while, the security company Cybereason uses behavioral analytics, big data, and machine learning along with major league threat intelligence resources to thwart cyberattacks in, they claim, real time. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybereason gains Lockheed Martin’s Threat Intelligence to thwart cyberattacks

Given the recent sharp increase in cyberattacks of all kinds, IT operations driving enterprise scale networks need something that will effectively reduce their intelligence gathering problems and help to automate their response to be as fast as possible. What’s needed is the ability to identify and deal with attacks as they happen but there are some really significant challenges in doing this including the sheer scale of  network event data, the problem of filtering out the event "noise" and false positives, and the ability to detect zero day threats. With what must be one of the headiest combinations of hot technologies I’ve seen for a while, the security company Cybereason uses behavioral analytics, big data, and machine learning along with major league threat intelligence resources to thwart cyberattacks in, they claim, real time. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to Get Better Browsing

I have two topics that will make your browsing more pleasurable. The first is a solution for the few remaining sites that block pasting into form fields and or copying text and graphics. While some sites do this to prevent having their content used in any way that the owner might not approve of, others, such as H&R Block, do it because they think blocking the ability to paste clipboard content into form fields is a security issue (it isn’t). This blocking is particularly annoying when it interferes with a password manager. The whole point of employing a password manager is to make it easy to use strong passwords so making users retype long, complex strings is beyond annoying. My favorite password manager, LastPass, isn’t affected by this but others may have problems with sites that attempt to block pasting. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fabricpath Cheat Sheet Released

After spending 4 weeks of rereading the Cisco doc I manage to extract this information and put all the pieces together and come up with this cheat sheet, trust me it's not easy at all. Especially when you should follow certain rules for elements such as color, spacing, font and the explanation.

The source of content goes to mostly Cisco Live & Cisco Validated Designs, but offcoruse it's just an extract of those information.

Please feel free to share your idea, I'm always looking to improve this if I find any other material to add here.

Click here to download Fabricpath Cheat Sheet

Fabricpath Cheat Sheet Released

After spending 4 weeks of rereading the Cisco doc I manage to extract this information and put all the pieces together and come up with this cheat sheet, trust me it's not easy at all. Especially when you should follow certain rules for elements such as color, spacing, font and the explanation.

The source of content goes to mostly Cisco Live & Cisco Validated Designs, but offcoruse it's just an extract of those information.

Please feel free to share your idea, I'm always looking to improve this if I find any other material to add here.

Click here to download Fabricpath Cheat Sheet

GENERAL – HOW TO BUILD A NETWORK PT.3

In the previous posts I talked about why it’s important to build a network and how you can do it but there is still one component missing. Any guesses?

How do we maintain our network once we have built it?

Stay In Touch

You spent all this time and put effort into building a network. Are you going to let this effort go to waste? I hope not. It’s important to stay in touch every now and then and check in how your friends are doing. This could be by sending an e-mail, a text message, just giving them a call or going for a lunch. Don’t contact them only when you need their assistance. Don’t be a leach. Show that you appreciate them and the help you have received from them in the past.

Return The Favor

One of your contacts helped you with a technology or troubleshooting an issue which helped you move forward in a project. The next time they may require assistance from you. When this time comes, maybe you are very busy at work. Do you simply turn them down? I hope not and if you do don’t expect any help the next time you Continue reading

Installing Ansible 2.x in a Python Virtualenv on OS X

In this post, I’m going to walk you through the steps to install Ansible 2.x into a Python virtual environment (virtualenv) on OS X. There’s nothing terribly hard or unusual about this process, but I wanted to document it here for folks who might be new to the process (or who might be interested in why using this approach could be beneficial).

I’m stumbled into this process because I had been using Ansible 1.9.x and wanted to upgrade to Ansible 2.x so that I could use some of the new OpenStack-related modules. (These are modules that allow you to manipulate OpenStack-based resources, like instances or networks, using Ansible playbooks, and they were introduced with the release of Ansible 2.x.) The new modules had some additional Python dependencies, and installing these Python dependencies on OS X can be challenging at times (due to System Integrity Protection [SIP]). For example, installing the shade module on my OS X El Capitan system ran afoul of SIP.

The answer is to use Python virtual environments (aka “virtualenvs”). Virtualenvs provide a mechanism whereby you can isolate Python dependencies between different Python-based projects. You create a Python virtualenv, then Continue reading

Lizard Squad Ransom Threats: New Name, Same Faux Armada Collective M.O.

Lizard squad

CloudFlare recently wrote about the group of cyber criminals claiming to be be the "Armada Collective." In that article, we stressed that this group had not followed through on any of the ransom threats they had made. Quite simply, this copycat group of cyber criminals had not actually carried out a single DDoS attack—they were only trying to make easy money through fear by using the name of the original “Armada Collective” group from late 2015.

Since we published that article earlier this week, this copycat group claiming to be "Armada Collective" has stopped sending ransom threats to website owners. Extorting companies proves to be challenging when the group’s email actively encourages target companies to the search for the phrase “Armada Collective” on Google. The first search result for this phrase now returns CloudFlare’s article outing this group as a fraud.

Armada Collective Google Search Results

Beginning late Thursday evening (Pacific Standard Time) several CloudFlare customers began to receive threatening emails from a "new" group calling itself the “Lizard Squad”. These emails have a similar modus operandi to the previous ransom emails. This group was threatening DDoS attacks unless a ransom amount was paid to a Bitcoin address before a deadline. Based on discussions Continue reading

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