An online market that offered cheap hacked servers returns

A website that offered access to hacked servers for as little as $6 is back online.The market, called xDedic, went down last month on June 15 right after security firm Kaspersky Lab publicly exposed it. Access to more than 70,000 compromised servers from governments, businesses and universities had been sold through the site, in the two years it was in operation.Kaspersky Lab, however, reported its finding to law enforcement agencies and said that “several major” internet service providers helped shut the site down.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BRKARC-3300 – IOS-XE: Enabling the Digital Network Architecture

Presented by Muhammad A Imam, Sr Manager Technical Marketing Engineering

Brand new session!

The goal of the session is to give an understanding of IOS-XE Denali 16.x.

How many have downloaded 16.x?” — maybe 10% put up their hands

The upcoming 16.3 (target for this month) will support Cat 3850,3650, ISR, and ASR 1000.

The original operating system on the AGS, back in 1986, was simply called “Operating System”. There are still parts of Operating System in IOS today (scary!!).

IOS-XE (code name BinOS) came around in 2007 on the ASR 1000. In 2010, IOS-XE (code name Nova) was released for the Cat4k. These two editions of XE were similar, but different and were written by different engineering teams.

The vision for IOS-XE Denali is a single code base across Cisco enterprise platforms. Benefits include: similar features, consistent version numbers, consistent release schedule, consistent test and validation of releases, consistent commands (eg “show platform …”).

“We are changing the way we write code” –Muhammad; code is being pulled out of the IOSd blob and written as a subsystem within IOS-XE (over time).

Crimson database:

  • New component in Denali
  • Maintains state for subsystems
  • Holds configuration
  • Continue reading

BRKRST-2042 — Highly Available Wide Area Network Design

Presented by: David Prall, Communications Architect, Cisco For reference, David is the “father of IWAN”. This session was not what I was expecting. I was expecting design and architecture, but it was all about features in IOS and IOS-XE (eg, FHRPs, talked about routing protocol timers, PfRv3, BFD). I guess I need to pay more attention to the session code (RST == routing; ARC == architecture).

Knights Landing Will Waterfall Down From On High

With the general availability of the “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi many core processors from Intel last month, some of the largest supercomputing labs on the planet are getting their first taste of what the future style of high performance computing could look like for the rest of us.

We are not suggesting that the Xeon Phi processor will be the only compute engine that will be deployed to run traditional simulation and modeling applications as well as data analytics, graph processing, and deep learning algorithms. But we are suggesting that this style of compute engine – it is more than

Knights Landing Will Waterfall Down From On High was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

BRKNMS-2701 – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Prime Infrastructure

Presenters:

  • Lewis Hickman, Consulting Systems Engineer
  • Jennifer Valentine, Systems Engineer


Quick survey in the room: 60-70% of attendees running PI 3.x; 10-20 PI 2.x; some still on LMS.

“There are 37 different ‘Cisco Prime’ products” — Lewis

“Cisco Prime” isn’t a product; “Cisco Prime Infrastructure” is. Cisco Prime is a family of products.

PI traces its lineage back to 1996: CWSI > Cisco Works LMS > Cisco Prime LMS > WCS > NCS > Prime Infrastructure.

“1232 SysObjIds supported in PI today” — Lewis (aka, 1232 different devices supported by PI)

Two people (only!!) in the room running Network Analysis Module.

UCS Server Assurance module: enables mgmt of UCS servers; will integrate into vCenter and map VMs to physical hosts for you. 

Operations Center: manager of managers for PI

Licensing in PI 3.x:

  • One license for Lifecycle and Assurance now
  • Different license files for different device types
  • Different device types require a specific number of “tokens”
  • When a license is installed in PI 3.x, it gets converted into the appropriate number of tokens
  • As you add devices to PI, it draws down on the number of free tokens in the pool
  • Hint: You don’t Continue reading

Hacked 3D printers could commit industrial sabotage

3D printers can churn out toys, clothing and even food. But the technology also shows potential for use in industrial sabotage, researchers warn.Imagine a car maker using 3D printers to manufacture components, only to have the parts contain defects that are undetectable until it’s too late.A hacker with access to the 3D printers could make that happen, a team of researchers wrote in a recent paper. This could result in a "devastating impact" for users and lead to product recalls and lawsuits, said New York University professor Nikhil Gupta, the lead author of the paper. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hacked 3D printers could commit industrial sabotage

3D printers can churn out toys, clothing and even food. But the technology also shows potential for use in industrial sabotage, researchers warn.Imagine a car maker using 3D printers to manufacture components, only to have the parts contain defects that are undetectable until it’s too late.A hacker with access to the 3D printers could make that happen, a team of researchers wrote in a recent paper. This could result in a "devastating impact" for users and lead to product recalls and lawsuits, said New York University professor Nikhil Gupta, the lead author of the paper. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s AI is learning how to save your life

AlphaGo's uncanny success at the game of Go was taken by many as a death knell for the dominance of the human intellect, but Google researcher David Silver doesn't see it that way. Instead, he sees a world of potential benefits.As one of the lead architects behind Google DeepMind's AlphaGo system, which defeated South Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol 4 games to 1 in March, Silver believes the technology's next role should be to help advance human health.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft amps up Windows-as-a-subscription effort

Microsoft today announced that this fall its partners will start selling subscriptions to Windows 10 Enterprise, the edition that targets businesses, for $7 per month per user.Dubbed Windows 10 Enterprise E3 -- the last part of the label a nod to Office 365's nomenclature -- the subscription program will be offered from a select group of resellers already on the Redmond, Wash. company's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) list.The approved CSP resellers -- Microsoft did not identify which partners would participate -- will sell Windows 10 Enterprise E3 for $7 per user per month, or $84 per user per year.INSIDER Review: Enterprise guide to Windows 10 Yusuf Mehdi, an executive in the Windows and Devices Group, briefly mentioned Windows 10 Enterprise E3 in his time on stage Tuesday at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Toronto, and provided a bit more information in a post to a company blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Here’s how to star in Apple’s new TV show about app creation

Apple is co-producing a TV show about app design and development, and you might be able to play a starring role.On Tuesday, the production company working with Apple on the show, Propagate, announced an open casting call for people who want to be on "Planet of the Apps."The show is Apple's first foray into TV series production and is described as "a new unscripted series about the world of apps and the developers who create them."Applications are being accepted through the show's website until Aug. 26. The producers will then travel to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and New York to meet with app developers and tech entrepreneurs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pokémon Go is making people take leave of their senses

Pokémon Go, the new augmented reality smartphone game, has players showing up in some strange places looking for virtual cartoon creatures. Several players have shown up at a sex products store in the U.K., according to some news reports. In New Zealand, players have gone to the headquarters of the Hells Angels biker gang, reports the Guardian. The game is aimed at players aged 10 and up, according to information on Pokémon Go's Google Play download page. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Using brain signals instead of passwords to unlock computers

System authentication could one day be widely achieved through brainwaves, scientists say. Simply thinking of certain things, such as a person's face, or a rotating displayed cube would be enough to unlock a device.Electro-encephalography (EEC) sensors are behind the technique. That’s where electrical activity in certain parts of the brain is recorded. We know it as the wavy, graphical lines on charts created from wired electrodes placed on the scalp, as seen in hospitals and TV shows. They're used in that environment to diagnose epilepsy, among other things.+ Also on Network World: 5 things you should know about two-factor authentication +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Optimization Tests Confirm Knights Landing Performance Projections

Close to a year ago when more information was becoming available about the Knights Landing processor, Intel released projections for its relative performance against two-socket Haswell machines. As one might image, the performance improvements were impressive, but now that there are systems on the ground that can be optimized and benchmarked, we are finally getting a more boots-on-the-ground view into the performance bump.

As it turns out, optimization and benchmarking on the “Cori” supercomputer at NERSC are showing that those figures were right on target. In a conversation with one of the co-authors of a new report highlighting the optimization

Optimization Tests Confirm Knights Landing Performance Projections was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

July 2016 Patch Tuesday: Microsoft releases 11 security updates, 6 rated critical

For July, Microsoft released 11 security bulletins, six of which were rated critical due to remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities.CriticalMS16-084 is the cumulative patch for Internet Explorer, fixing a plethora of RCE problems that an attacker could exploit if a victim viewed a maliciously crafted webpage using IE. The security update also addresses spoofing vulnerabilities, security feature bypass and information disclosure flaws.MS16-085 is the monthly cumulative security update for Microsoft’s Edge browser. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow RCE. The patch also resolves security feature bypass issues, information disclosure problems and many memory corruption flaws.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

July 2016 Patch Tuesday: Microsoft releases 11 security updates, 6 rated critical

For July, Microsoft released 11 security bulletins, six of which were rated critical due to remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities.CriticalMS16-084 is the cumulative patch for Internet Explorer, fixing a plethora of RCE problems that an attacker could exploit if a victim viewed a maliciously crafted webpage using IE. The security update also addresses spoofing vulnerabilities, security feature bypass and information disclosure flaws.MS16-085 is the monthly cumulative security update for Microsoft’s Edge browser. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow RCE. The patch also resolves security feature bypass issues, information disclosure problems and many memory corruption flaws.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here