Zombie servers will kill you

You thought it was buried. You forgot. Someone didn’t document it. A ping sweep didn’t find it. It lay there, dead. No one found it. But there was a pulse:It’s still running, and it’s alive. And it’s probably unpatched.Something probed it long ago. Found port 443 open. Jacked it like a Porsche 911 on on Sunset Boulevard on a rainy Saturday night. How did it get jacked? Let me count the ways.Now it’s a zombie living inside your asset realm.It doesn’t matter that it’s part of your power bill. It’s slowly eating your lunch.It doesn’t matter that you can’t find it because it’s finding you.It’s listening quietly to your traffic, looking for the easy, unencrypted stuff. It probably has a few decent passwords to your router core. That NAS share using MSChapV2? Yeah, that was easy to digest. Too bad the password is the same as the one for every NAS at every branch from the same vendor. Too bad the NAS devices don’t encrypt traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zombie servers will kill you

You thought it was buried. You forgot. Someone didn’t document it. A ping sweep didn’t find it. It lay there, dead. No one found it. But there was a pulse:It’s still running, and it’s alive. And it’s probably unpatched.Something probed it long ago. Found port 443 open. Jacked it like a Porsche 911 on on Sunset Boulevard on a rainy Saturday night. How did it get jacked? Let me count the ways.Now it’s a zombie living inside your asset realm.It doesn’t matter that it’s part of your power bill. It’s slowly eating your lunch.It doesn’t matter that you can’t find it because it’s finding you.It’s listening quietly to your traffic, looking for the easy, unencrypted stuff. It probably has a few decent passwords to your router core. That NAS share using MSChapV2? Yeah, that was easy to digest. Too bad the password is the same as the one for every NAS at every branch from the same vendor. Too bad the NAS devices don’t encrypt traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

May the Fourth be with you: 4 of the best & 4 of the worst Star Wars video games

Star Wars video gamesStar Wars, as an enormous building block of nerd culture, and one that got popular right when home computing was really taking off, has an unsurprisingly huge number of video games set in its universe. Some of them are very good, and some are the opposite of very good. Here’s a look at four of the former, and four of the latter.RELATED: Cool ways to celebrate Star Wars DayTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

May the Fourth be with you: 4 of the best & 4 of the worst Star Wars video games

Star Wars video gamesStar Wars, as an enormous building block of nerd culture, and one that got popular right when home computing was really taking off, has an unsurprisingly huge number of video games set in its universe. Some of them are very good, and some are the opposite of very good. Here’s a look at four of the former, and four of the latter.RELATED: Cool ways to celebrate Star Wars DayTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Slides makes it easier to talk back to presenters

Google is trying to save presentation audiences from having to sit through long rambling questions with a new feature it added to its Slides software on Wednesday. Slides Q&A will let audiences send text questions through the Web when listening to a presentation using Google's software. As a presenter is talking, she can see the questions and respond to them, without waiting for someone to speak into a microphone. Google Google Slides Q&A's presenter view lets presenters see what people in their audience want to know. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

An inside look at Microsoft’s booming cloud business

As Director of Program Management for Azure at Microsoft, Corey Sanders heads the compute team which is responsible for the VM-based offerings on Windows and Linux, the new microservices platform, and container services, among other things. Sanders joined the Azure team about six years ago, before which he was a developer in the Windows Serviceability team.  Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently visited Sanders in his Redmond, WA, office to get a better sense of how Microsoft’s cloud business is taking shape. Corey Sanders, Director of Program Management for Azure, Microsoft To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Basic Skills: Half Split Troubleshooting

Maybe my excuse should be that it was somewhere around two in the morning. Or maybe it was just unclear thinking, and that was that. Sgt P. and I were called out to fix the AN/FPS-77 RADAR system just at the end of our day so we’d been fighting this problem for some seven or eight hours already. For some reason, a particular fuse down in the high voltage power supply kept blowing. Given this is the circuit that fed the magnetron with 250,000 volts at around 10 amps, it made for some interesting discussion with the folks in base weather, who were thus dependent on surrounding weather RADAR systems to continue flight operations.

If this sounds familiar, I’ve told this story before in a different context, but bear with me…
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So how did we miss the problem that actually caused the blown fuse, and hence the loss of our site’s weather RADAR system for more than a day? The reason is that it was, in fact, two in the morning, and we’d run out of ideas. If you want a sense of the complexity of the system we were working on, here is the troubleshooting guide, and here is Continue reading

Dan Kaminsky Will Be Taking Your Questions At Our DNS Meetup Next Week In San Francisco

Our last DNS meetup was a packed house with Paul Mockapetris, the original inventor of DNS. We learned why DNS answers have a question count but always only one question, why underscores aren’t allowed in domain names, and the history of how DNS came to be.

Our next meetup is with the infamous Dan Kaminsky –– there’s even a DNS attack named after him, the Kaminsky attack. Dan is known for his work finding a core flaw in the Internet, and then leading the charge to repair it. He is an invited expert to the W3C, the guiding organization for the Web, and co-founded the cybersecurity firm White Ops. He is even one of the seven "key shareholders" able to restore the Internet's Domain Name System if necessary.

We’ll cover how Dan discovered the Kaminsky attack, the future of DNS and privacy, how to secure email with DNS, and what are the policy implications of governments allowing DNS blocking. It’s going to be a really great event - we can’t wait to see you there. The meetup is at Gandi’s headquarters: 121 2nd Street, San Francisco at 6PM PST on Tuesday, May 10th, 2016. To claim your spot, Continue reading

How to use advanced analytics to mitigate EHR data risks

Over the past seven years, the federal government has established a set of incentives and fines — carrots and sticks — to promote and expand the use of healthcare information technology, particularly the meaningful use of electronic health record (EHR) systems.In a recent report, PwC's Advanced Risk & Compliance Analytics practice found that due to the government's carrot and stick, EHR implementation initiatives usually concentrated on the core challenge of meeting tight timelines while managing costs. After all, these initiatives are often the largest projects these organizations undertake.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to use advanced analytics to mitigate EHR data risks

Over the past seven years, the federal government has established a set of incentives and fines — carrots and sticks — to promote and expand the use of healthcare information technology, particularly the meaningful use of electronic health record (EHR) systems.In a recent report, PwC's Advanced Risk & Compliance Analytics practice found that due to the government's carrot and stick, EHR implementation initiatives usually concentrated on the core challenge of meeting tight timelines while managing costs. After all, these initiatives are often the largest projects these organizations undertake.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco’s John Chambers shares Top 7 Mistakes Enterprises Make While Talking Drones

It looks as though Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers is really getting into this commercial drone stuff. We wrote in late March that the former longtime Cisco CEO had invested an undisclosed amount in a hot startup called Airware that promotes itself as providing "the operating system for commercial drones." Chambers, who also joined Airware's board, was quoted at the time saying: "The commercial drone industry is poised to throw many markets into transition." Now we see that Chambers was among the speakers kicking off this week's Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's big Xponential 2016 conference in New Orleans.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA, FAA showoff wireless aircraft communication technology

NASA said that for the first time it has demonstrated that a wireless  system can communicate – sending route options and weather information for example -- with a jet on the ground.NASA said it tested a demonstration system known as Aircraft Access to System Wide Information Management (SWIM), to wirelessly send aviation information to an FAA Bombardier Global 5000 test aircraft taxiing 60 to 70 miles per hour on the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport runway. They sent the information over a prototype wireless system called Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communications System, or AeroMACS, developed by Hitachi.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA, FAA showoff wireless aircraft communication technology

NASA said that for the first time it has demonstrated that a wireless  system can communicate – sending route options and weather information for example -- with a jet on the ground.NASA said it tested a demonstration system known as Aircraft Access to System Wide Information Management (SWIM), to wirelessly send aviation information to an FAA Bombardier Global 5000 test aircraft taxiing 60 to 70 miles per hour on the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport runway. They sent the information over a prototype wireless system called Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communications System, or AeroMACS, developed by Hitachi.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cool ways to celebrate Star Wars Day

May the Fourth be with youImage by Flickr/Josh HallettMay 4 is International Star Wars Day, the unofficial holiday where we celebrate the Force, X-wings, Ewoks and women wearing their hair in the shape of their favorite breakfast pastries.  But how do you give your week that particular galaxy-far-far-away flavor? Some suggestions follow.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is Interop Dead?

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I’m at Interop this week talking all things networking with a great group of people. There are quite a few members of the community here presenting, listening and discussing. There’s a great exchange of ideas flowing back and forth. Yet one thing I keep hearing in quiet corners of the room is a hushed discussion of the continued viability of Interop as a conference. Is it time to write the Interop obituary?

Only Mostly Dead

Some of the arguments are as old as tech itself. People claim that getting vendors to interoperate today is an afterthought thanks to protocols like OSPF. All of the important bits in a network are standardized now. Use of APIs and other open technologies are driving vendors to play nice with each other. The need to show up in a faraway place and do the work has long passed.

There’s also the discussion around the bigger conferences out in the world. Vendor conferences like Cisco Live and VMworld draw tens of thousands. New product announcements are dropping left and right during these events. People also want to fracture into tool-specific events like OpenStack Summit or DockerCon. Or the various analyst events or company days that Continue reading

Mothers Day Miracle: How 1800Flowers uses the cloud to handle the holiday rush

For most retailers, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the holiday rush. For 1800Flowers, it’s Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.Complicating efforts in recent years has been the venerable online flower shop’s extended reach: The parent company acquired the Harry & David brand 18 months ago, which 1800Flowers CIO Arne Leap called a “watershed moment.”“We had a real need to change our order management to support omni-channel, and tie together our commerce platforms,” Leap said of the new combined companies.Through a partnership with IBM, 1800Flowers went to the cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 25 Mother's Day gifts with geek appeal +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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