Russian DNC hack – A cybersecurity microcosm

According to ESG research, 31 percent of cybersecurity professionals working at enterprise organizations (i.e. more than 1,000 employees) believe the threat landscape is much worse today than it was two years ago. While another 36 percent say the threat landscape is somewhat worse today than it was two years ago.Why the cynicism? Look no further than the Russian hack of the DNC as this particular data breach is a microcosm of cybersecurity at large. This one incident illustrates a few important points: All data is at risk. Way back when, state-sponsored cyber attacks were government-on-government affairs, typically focused on military and intelligence.  The cyber theft of design documents for the F-22 and F-35 are perfect examples here. Unfortunately, state-sponsored attacks have gone beyond spooks and soldiers. China went after The New York Times, North Korea breached Sony Pictures, and Russia blew the lid off the DNC. When matched against sophisticated state-sponsored actors, pedestrian cybersecurity defenders are simply fighting out of their weight class. The list of adversaries continues to grow. Beyond China, North Korea and Russia, it’s fair to add Iran, the Syrian Electronic Army, and dozens of other countries investing in offensive cyber operations. There are Continue reading

Russian DNC Hack – A Cybersecurity Microcosm

According to ESG research, 31% of cybersecurity professionals working at enterprise organizations (i.e. more than 1,000 employees) believe the threat landscape is much worse today than it was 2 years ago while another 36% say the threat landscape is somewhat worse today than it was 2 years ago (note: I am an ESG employee).Why the cynicism?  Look no further than the Russian hack of the DNC as this particular data breach is a microcosm of cybersecurity at large.  This one incident illustrates a few important points:1.      All data is at risk.  Way back when, state-sponsored cyber-attacks were government-on-government affairs, typically focused on military and intelligence.  The cyber-theft of design documents for the F-22 and F-35 are perfect examples here.  Unfortunately, state-sponsored attacks have gone beyond spooks and soldiers.  China went after the NY Times, North Korea breached Sony Pictures, and Russia blew the lid off the DNC.  When matched against sophisticated state-sponsored actors, pedestrian cybersecurity defenders are simply fighting out of their weight class.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fun in the Lab: DMVPN: Per-Tunnel QoS and High Availability

Went on an customer “ride-along” with Advanced Services this week.  Customer’s requirement was that the DMVPN headend have 2 physical interfaces for High Availability.  These 2 interfaces need to be the same subnet because they are going into 2 firewalls: one active/one standby.  So now what?

2fws

Tom Kunath (Advanced Services) thought “Well…. what about using backup interface command?”  Hmmmm that does seem to be the perfect tool in the Cisco CLI toolbox for this very situation.

Time to play in the lab!!!  ?

backup

interfaces

So now let’s try it and see how per-tunnel QoS will work with it.

Class-Maps and Policy-Maps

policy

policy1

NOTE: Snuck these configs from the QoS Chapter of the upcoming CiscoPress IWAN book a super dear friend of mine (David Prall) is co-authoring.

Apply to Tunnels

hote17_tunnel100_qos

hotel16_tunnel100

pt_qos

Okay…. so far so good.  Now let’s run some traffic.  I’ll send EF and AF41.

Send Traffic

hotel17_basic

Kay… so far so good.  I also have both being sent at the same bps from the traffic generator so I wanted to check this also.

Time to Fail Primary Link! 

fail_primary

Before I congest and see if the applied PerTunnel QoS can also drop.  Let’s make sure Continue reading

U.S. cyber incident directive follows DNC hack

One wonders if it took social media to finally motivate the White House to act on cyber incidents.The Democratic National Committee (DNC) was hacked, and the emails, many quite damning of the governance of the DNC, were released by WikiLeaks. Reports link the hack to the Russian government. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, head of the DNC, resigned—one in any number of political and government officials to fall on their swords after security breach exposés.Then on Tuesday morning, President Barack Obama announced a U.S. Cyber Incident Coordination Directive. If the directive is actually followed, expect several agencies to drown in complaints, even though private citizen complaints aren’t included. Commercial and governmental complaints appear to be the only complaints covered by the directive.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco: Potent ransomware is targeting the enterprise at a scary rate

Enterprise-targeting cyber enemies are deploying vast amounts of potent ransomware to generate revenue and huge profits – nearly $34 million annually according to Cisco’s Mid-Year Cybersecurity Report out this week.Ransomware, Cisco wrote, has become a particularly effective moneymaker, and enterprise users appear to be the preferred target.+More on Network World: Security was the HOT topic at Cisco Live+“Defenders are not protecting systems in a way that matches how attackers do their work. Although defenders have evolved their strategies and tools for fighting online criminals, attackers are still permitted far too much unconstrained time to operate,” Cisco wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Unregenerate – 20160727

Looking backward at last week or forward into next week. Ir Whatever. unregenerate – adj. not reformed, unreconstructed, obstinate, stubborn   A Better Sound System I’ve been “pining” for a better audio solution for my office and around the house for quite some time. I’ve been eyeing off Sonos product for quite some time but […]

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Economics May Drive Serverless

We've been following an increasing ephemerality curve to get more and more utilization out of our big brawny boxes. VMs, VMs in the cloud, containers, containers in the cloud, and now serverless, which looks to be our first native cloud infrastructure.

Serverless is said to be about functions, but you really need a zip file of code to do much of anything useful, which is basically a container.

So serverless isn't so much about packaging as it is about not standing up your own chunky persistent services. Those services, like storage, like the database, etc, have moved to the environment.

Your code orchestrates the dance and implements specific behaviours. Serverless is nothing if not a framework writ large.

Serverless also intensifies the developer friendly disintermediation of infrastructure that the cloud started.

Upload your code and charge it on your credit card. All the developer has to worry about their function. Oh, and linking everything together (events, DNS, credentials, backups, etc) through a Byzantine patch panel of a UI; uploading each of your zillions of "functions" on every change; managing versions so you can separate out test, development, and production. But hey, nothing is perfect.

What may drive serverless more Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Cyber Security market mid-life crisis

There are now several hundred security vendors vying for advanced threat “spend” and there continues to be good demand side indicators of investment in these newer areas. There is yet more security spend overall allocated within IT budgets for reallocation from “legacy” Web filtering, AV and firewall renewals to advanced threat technologies as well as increased funding from federal and national governments worldwide on cyber. Yet the cold winds from investors have firmly set in over the past year and with good reason. Many newer security vendors who have IPO’d are having trouble building their businesses to be profitable and set for a firm foundation of growth. The exit paths are less clear and this glut of new security entrants is going to be challenged to cross the chasm from a base of known early adopter verticals and customer segments to a sustainable set of larger organizations. —Arbor Networks

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Why Belgium leads the world in IPv6 adoption

Yes, Belgium. Every time you read a story or visit a website devoted to worldwide IPv6 adoption rates, sitting atop the list of highest achievers is Belgium, otherwise better known for chocolate, waffles, beer and diamonds. Google, for example, has worldwide IPv6 adoption at about 12%, Belgium leading at 45%.For an explanation I turned to Eric Vyncke, co-chair of Belgium’s IPv6 Council. I emailed him a half-dozen questions about technology and culture and such that essentially could have been boiled down to one: Why Belgium? Here is his reply:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Belgium leads the world in IPv6 adoption

Yes, Belgium. Every time you read a story or visit a website devoted to worldwide IPv6 adoption rates, sitting atop the list of highest achievers is Belgium, otherwise better known for chocolate, waffles, beer and diamonds. Google, for example, has worldwide IPv6 adoption at about 12%, Belgium leading at 45%.For an explanation I turned to Eric Vyncke, co-chair of Belgium’s IPv6 Council. I emailed him a half-dozen questions about technology and culture and such that essentially could have been boiled down to one: Why Belgium? Here is his reply:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The 10 Most Common Questions IT Admins ask About Docker

CnNSmL1VMAAzTx9.jpgOver the past few months we have attended a string of industry tradeshow events, helping to teach the enterprise world about Docker. We were at HPE Discover, DockerCon, RedHat Summit and Cisco Live all within the past 6weeks! I had the pleasure of helping to represent Docker at each of these awesome events and got to speak with attendees about Docker for the enterprise.
Continue reading

Developers’ conscientiousness key to limiting software bugs, researchers say

University researchers have found that organizations looking to clean up their IT systems need to pay more attention to the moods and personalities of those people working on them."Organizations focus too much on the technical and mechanical aspects of IT errors, rather than the human and environmental aspects of the errors," said Sumantra Sarkar, assistant professor of information systems at Binghamton University’s School of Management, in a statement. "Our study suggests the mood and personality traits of the software development team affect how they report on self-committed errors in IT projects. A minor glitch in design or programming can have devastating consequences."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Who Let the Pandas Out? Zeus, Zeus, Zeus, Zeus

A few months ago Proofpoint released a blog post about a new banking trojan called Panda Banker. They credit Fox-IT with the discovery and both companies indicate that it is another variant based on the Zeus banking trojan source code. Under the hood Panda Banker certainly feels Zeus-like, but it has plenty to distinguish itself […]

Ten Years of Cisco Live – Community Matters Most of All

CLUS2016SignPic

Hey! I made the sign pic this year!

I’ve had a week to get over my Cisco Live hangover this year. I’ve been going to Cisco Live for ten years and been involved in the social community for five of them. And I couldn’t be prouder of what I’ve seen. As the picture above shows, the community is growing by leaps and bounds.

People Are What Matter

TomsCornerSelfie

I was asked many, many times about Tom’s Corner. What was it? Why was it important? Did you really start it? The real answer is that I’m a bit curious. I want to meet people. I want to talk to them and learn their stories. I want to understand what drives people to learn about networking or wireless or fax machines. Talking to a person is one of the best parts of my job, whether it be my Bruce Wayne day job or my Batman night job.

Social media helps us all stay in touch when we aren’t face-to-face, but meeting people in real life is as important too. You know who likes to hug. You find out who tells good stories. Little things matter like finding out how tall someone is in Continue reading

White boxes are now ready for prime time

White box switches have been around for years, but adoption has been limited to niche companies that have large engineering departments. The rise of software-defined networking (SDN) has brought them into the public eye, though, as a lower-cost alternative to traditional network hardware. In fact, some of the early messaging around SDN revolved around using white boxes as a complete replacement for all network hardware.Despite the promise that SDN brought, the use of white boxes has been limited for a couple of reasons. The first is that historically, any organization that wanted to leverage a white box switch needed to have a number of technical specialists that many enterprises do not have. This would include network programmers and engineers fluent in Linux. These skills are commonly found in companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, but not so much in your average enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

First look: Google Cloud Machine Learning soars

In the 2016 Google Founder’s Letter, CEO Sundar Pichai cited Google’s long-term investment in machine learning and AI. “It’s what allows you to use your voice to search for information,” he explained, “to translate the web from one language to another, to filter the spam from your inbox, to search for ‘hugs’ in your photos and actually pull up pictures of people hugging ... to solve many of the problems we encounter in daily life. It’s what has allowed us to build products that get better over time, making them increasingly useful and helpful.”Beyond that, the translation API is straightforward. Supply the source and target language codes, as many source strings as you wish, your API key, and optionally specify the output format. Options include HTML or plain text, pretty printing (using indentations and line breaks), and supplying a callback function.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Windows Server 2016 licensing and servicing options explained

On July 12, Microsoft announced it will release Windows Server 2016 to the world as a final RTM edition at the company's Ignite conference in late September. The software, now in its fifth technical preview, continues to mature, and this date matches the estimations previously released from Redmond regarding the OS's completion date. There were other recent announcements regarding Windows Server as well, and this piece aims to demystify them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

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