IDG Contributor Network: Skull-produced sounds could replace existing biometric authentication

Are you happy with your on-device biometric fingerprint scanner? I’m not. The scanner on my most recent tablet has failed to unlock the device. The cause then was probably dirty hands coming in from the garage. I disabled that biometric experiment—likely never to be used again.I'm not the only one who sometimes disregards security in favor of ease of use. Half of passwords are more than 5 years old, a report found last year. And three-fourths of those surveyed then said they use duplicate passwords. Clearly not secure. The more complicated and consequently secure one makes the password, though, the harder it is to remember.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Skull-produced sounds could replace existing biometric authentication

Are you happy with your on-device biometric fingerprint scanner? I’m not. The scanner on my most recent tablet has failed to unlock the device. The cause then was probably dirty hands coming in from the garage. I disabled that biometric experiment—likely never to be used again.I'm not the only one who sometimes disregards security in favor of ease of use. Half of passwords are more than 5 years old, a report found last year. And three-fourths of those surveyed then said they use duplicate passwords. Clearly not secure. The more complicated and consequently secure one makes the password, though, the harder it is to remember.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Hitachi forms unit to drive IoT opportunities

News today from Hitachi is that the company is forming a new, standalone Silicon Valley-based unit to explore and execute upon opportunities within the Internet of Things.This is interesting, since the parent group, Hitachi Limited, has a dizzying variety of business units, many (if not most) of which have their own IoT opportunities. Indeed, when attending a Hitachi Data Systems conference last year, I was amazed at the variety of businesses that fall under the Hitachi moniker. Many of those businesses were demonstrating in the expo hall, and a huge number had an IoT bent to what they were doing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The vendors that got you here may not get you there

IT departments eager to meet their goals for digital transformation should evaluate whether their traditional IT vendors are adapting to new technologies fast enough or whether to enlist a new crop of more innovative vendors, says research and advisory firm IDC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Where to cut corners when the security budget gets tight

Whenever creating a budget, there is always the rainy day fund or the contingency account in case of unexpected circumstances. But what if those circumstances are a data breach that is bigger than you could have ever imagined? And you don’t have cyberinsurance? Sure you might be up the proverbial creek without a paddle but fear not as some security pros are willing to throw out a lifeline to help you at least get your head above the water with some sage advice. The common theme when asked about where to cut corners was to make sure your policies and procedures are sewn up tight. There are really no corners to cut but more about having solid policies in place.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Where to cut corners when the security budget gets tight

Whenever creating a budget, there is always the rainy day fund or the contingency account in case of unexpected circumstances. But what if those circumstances are a data breach that is bigger than you could have ever imagined? And you don’t have cyberinsurance?Look to open sourceTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Attackers are probing and exploiting the ImageTragick flaws

Over the past week security researchers have seen increasing attempts by hackers to find servers vulnerable to remote code execution vulnerabilities recently found in the ImageMagick Web server library.The flaws were publicly disclosed last Tuesday by researchers who had reason to believe that malicious attackers already had knowledge about them after an initial fix from the ImageMagick developers proved to be incomplete. The flaws were collectively dubbed ImageTragick and a website with more information was set up to attract attention to them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Attackers are probing and exploiting the ImageTragick flaws

Over the past week security researchers have seen increasing attempts by hackers to find servers vulnerable to remote code execution vulnerabilities recently found in the ImageMagick Web server library.The flaws were publicly disclosed last Tuesday by researchers who had reason to believe that malicious attackers already had knowledge about them after an initial fix from the ImageMagick developers proved to be incomplete. The flaws were collectively dubbed ImageTragick and a website with more information was set up to attract attention to them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bangladesh central bank hack may be an insider job, says FBI

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has found evidence that at least one employee of Bangladesh’s central bank was involved in the theft of US$81 million from the bank through a complex hack, according to a newspaper report.The number of employees involved could be higher, with people familiar with the matter suggesting that a handful of others may also have assisted hackers to negotiate Bangladesh Bank’s computer system, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.Bangladesh Bank officials could not be reached for comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bangladesh central bank hack may be an insider job, says FBI

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has found evidence that at least one employee of Bangladesh’s central bank was involved in the theft of US$81 million from the bank through a complex hack, according to a newspaper report.The number of employees involved could be higher, with people familiar with the matter suggesting that a handful of others may also have assisted hackers to negotiate Bangladesh Bank’s computer system, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.Bangladesh Bank officials could not be reached for comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM’s Watson is going to cybersecurity school

It's no secret that much of the wisdom of the world lies in unstructured data, or the kind that's not necessarily quantifiable and tidy. So it is in cybersecurity, and now IBM is putting Watson to work to make that knowledge more accessible.Towards that end, IBM Security on Tuesday announced a new year-long research project through which it will collaborate with eight universities to help train its Watson artificial-intelligence system to tackle cybercrime.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM’s Watson is going to cybersecurity school

It's no secret that much of the wisdom of the world lies in unstructured data, or the kind that's not necessarily quantifiable and tidy. So it is in cybersecurity, and now IBM is putting Watson to work to make that knowledge more accessible.Towards that end, IBM Security on Tuesday announced a new year-long research project through which it will collaborate with eight universities to help train its Watson artificial-intelligence system to tackle cybercrime.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Getting Traffic to a Virtual Firepower Sensor

I wanted to jot down some quick notes relating to running a virtual Firepower sensor on ESXi and how to validate that all the settings are correct for getting traffic from the physical network down into the sensor.

Firepower is the name of Cisco's (formerly Sourcefire's) so-called Next-Gen IPS. The IPS comes in many form-factors, including beefy physical appliances, integrated into the ASA firewall, and as a discrete virtual machine.

Since the virtual machine (likely) does not sit in-line of the traffic that needs to be monitored, traffic needs to be fed into the VM via some method such as a SPAN port or a tap of some sort.

The Oracle-Google jury includes at least one person with an aversion to tech

A lawyer, an accountant and a retired CFO are among the eight women and two men who were selected Monday to decide Oracle’s huge copyright infringement case against Google. With the 10-member jury sworn in, lawyers for each side will make their opening statements Tuesday morning, kicking off a high-profile trial that’s expected to last four weeks. It's a technical case, and at least one of the jurors seems likely to have trouble keeping up. She’s a retired woman from Berkeley who said she struggles with technology and thought the case would not be a good one for her to hear.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google And Friends Add Prometheus To Kubernetes Platform

There are a lot of moving parts in a modern platform, and in this regard, they are no different from the platforms made a generation earlier. But a modern platform has a lot more automation and is handling more dynamic workloads that are popping into and out of existence on different parts of a cluster like quantum particles, and it takes a higher level of sophistication to monitor and manage the stack and the apps running on it.

Frustration with existing open source monitoring tools like Nagios and Ganglia is why the hyperscaler giants created their own tools – Google …

Google And Friends Add Prometheus To Kubernetes Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

python-cloudflare

Using the CloudFlare API via Python

Very early on in the company’s history we decided that everything that CloudFlare does on behalf of its customer-base should be controllable via an API. In fact, when you login to the CloudFlare control panel, you’re really just making API calls to our backend services. Over time that API has matured and improved. We are now on v4 of that API.

The current CloudFlare API is documented here and it’s used by both the CloudFlare control panel and directly by umpteen customers every minute of every day. The new API is designed with a clean naming structure and consistent data representation for data. It’s also extensible.

This blog entry introduces python-cloudflare, a Python wrapper providing full access to the CloudFlare v4 API.

An example

Let’s get right into the thick-of-it with the simplest coding example available to show python-cloudflare in action. This example lists all your domains (zones) and also checks some basic features for each zone. 

#!/usr/bin/env python
import CloudFlare  
def main():  
    cf = CloudFlare.CloudFlare()
    zones = cf.zones.get(params={'per_page':50})
    for zone in zones:
        zone_name = zone['name']
        zone_id = zone['id']
        settings_ipv6 = cf.zones.settings.ipv6.get(zone_id)
        ipv6_on = settings_ipv6['value']
         Continue reading
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