Several days ago I wrote an article about Firepower Sinkhole rules. While I was confirming this in a lab, I temporarily created a custom DNS sinkhole rule. That rule classified requests for temp.packetu.com as Command and Control and returned an IP address of 1.1.1.1. What I later noticed is that this caused my laptop to be classified with an IOC.
Indications of Compromise (IOCs) can be thought of as reasons why Firepower Management Console believes a host cannot be trusted or is otherwise affected by malware. These can be found in multiple places in the UI. I find the Context Explorer to be a good middle ground for most SecOps team members and a good place to notice whether current IOC’s exist.
My network is rather simple and I only currently have one IOC. In any case, I can use the Context Explorer to launch the host information for the impacted host.

Once the Host Profile screen is launched, I can get a little more about information about the activity that causes Firepower to believe that this is a compromised host.

Also notice that there is a garbage can icon to the right of the Indication of Compromise that was Continue reading
Introduction
There has been a lot of talking about the future of the network engineer for the last couple of years. Many articles have declared that we MUST learn to program or we will be banished from the world by the programming overlords! I definitely do not agree with this bold statement but lately I have started to learn Python. Why?
Why Learn Programming?
As a network architect I probably won’t ever write a line of code or at least very rarely so. So why bother learning?
I didn’t learn a lot of programming back in my days of school. I fiddled around a bit with Basic, some Pascal and then at the university I tried some C# and C++. I never felt connected with programming. I never felt that I was good at it. This surprised me a bit because I’ve always been good at learning things. I’m good at analyzing things, troubleshooting things and I have a strong background in maths and science in general. I had all the skills that good programmers normally have so why couldn’t I learn programming? Because I struggled I didn’t enjoy doing it so I never pushed through until it “clicked”.
Later Continue reading
Other thoughts in advance of Cisco Live.
Edsall discusses what 'application-centric' really means and how webscale players change the industry.
Edsall discusses what 'application-centric' really means and how webscale players change the industry.
Open-O elects Chris Donley as technical steering committee chair.
Todays Weekly Show is a free-wheeling discussion on a variety of topics, including network disaggregation, whether open networking actually means freedom from vendor lock-in (probably not), the rise of 25Gig switching, the end of outsourcing, and more. The post Show 296: Never Free From Vendor Lock-In appeared first on Packet Pushers.
The post Worth Reading: The lizard brain of lizardstresser appeared first on 'net work.