Surveillence outfit Hacking Team may have released a new piece of OS X malware

Security researchers have identified a new piece of OS X malware that may come from Hacking Team, the controversial Italian company that sells surveillance software to governments.The malware is a "dropper," which is used to plant other software onto a computer. In this case, it appears intended to install Hacking Team's Remote Control System (RCS)."The dropper is using more or less the same techniques as older Hacking Team RCS samples, and its code is more or less the same," wrote Pedro Vilaca, an OS X security expert with SentinelOne, on his blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Understand MTU and MRU – The Full Story

MTU or Maximum transmission unit is a topic that pops up every once in a while in different discussions. Although it’s a simple concept, it causes a lot of confusion specially for those who are new to the field. MTU typically becomes an issue of concern during network changes, like adding new vendors equipment or […]

Gmail for Work gets improved digital loss protection features

Google has expanded the digital loss protection features in Gmail for Work, to help ensure that employees don't share confidential information outside the company they work for. The service can now use optical character recognition on attachments, so administrators can ensure that employees aren't sharing mounds of confidential data in images (whether intentionally or not). That adds to existing features such as the ability to look inside common attachment types, including documents and spreadsheets. The OCR capabilities integrate with content detectors, so administrators can do things like prevent members of the accounting department from sending an email with a credit card number in it to someone outside the organization. It's a key feature for businesses worried about confidential information leaving the company, even if employees don't mean to do anything wrong.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Midokura’s MEM 5.0 Adds Insight To Their Virtual Networks

Network automation is a nascent discipline with the annoying problem of having to deal with legacy network devices designed in a bygone era while at the same time keeping up with the requirements of modern compute infrastructure. I see Midokura's MEM as one reasonable answer to the divide found between networking and automation.

The post Midokura’s MEM 5.0 Adds Insight To Their Virtual Networks appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Midokura’s MEM 5.0 Adds Insight To Their Virtual Networks

Network automation is a nascent discipline with the annoying problem of having to deal with legacy network devices designed in a bygone era while at the same time keeping up with the requirements of modern compute infrastructure. I see Midokura's MEM as one reasonable answer to the divide found between networking and automation.

The post Midokura’s MEM 5.0 Adds Insight To Their Virtual Networks appeared first on Packet Pushers.

How to securely bridge on-premise and cloud-based storage services

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Cloud storage revenue is forecast to grow more than 28% annually to reach $65 billion in 2020.  The driving force is the substantial economies of scale that enable cloud-based solutions to deliver more cost-effective primary and backup storage than on-premises systems can ever hope to achieve.

Most IT departments quickly discover, however, that there are significant challenges involved in migrating and synchronizing many thousands or even millions of files from on-premise storage systems to what Gartner characterizes as Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) services in the cloud. According to Gartner, “by 2019 75% of enterprises will have deployed multiple EFSS capabilities, and over 50% … will struggle with problems of data migration, up from 10% today.”

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Musing: Why Oracle Bought Ravello ? Its the Network, Stupid

Takeaway: Ravello lets Oracle uses any underlying cloud but effectively hide that completely from the customer thus Oracle gets to “manage” any cloud, gives customers “any cloud” and yet maintain full control of the customer account by hiding the underlying services. But it was the networking features that really made Ravello unique. Oracle Scorned Its […]

The post Musing: Why Oracle Bought Ravello ? Its the Network, Stupid appeared first on EtherealMind.

N.Y. prosecutor wants Apple to turn back security clock to 2013

A New York prosecutor tomorrow plans to urge Congress to write legislation that would require Apple to roll back iPhone security to the model of 2013's iOS 7, according to prepared testimony published today.Cyrus Vance Jr., the District Attorney for New York County, will testify before the House Judiciary Committee tomorrow as one of three witnesses at a hearing to discuss encryption. The others include Bruce Sewell, Apple's general counsel, and Susan Landau, a professor of cybersecurity policy at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass.+ WHAT DO OTHERS THINK? Apple v. FBI – Who’s for, against opening up the terrorist’s iPhone +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA wants to get supersonic with new passenger jet

NASA wants to put a supersonic passenger jet back in the sky that promises to a soft thump or supersonic heartbeat as the agency called it -- rather than the disruptive boom currently associated with such high-speed flight.The “low-boom” aircraft known as Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST) will be built by a team led by Lockheed Martin Aeronautics which will get $20 million to develop baseline aircraft requirements and a preliminary aircraft design.+More on Network World: NASA: What cool future passenger aircraft will look like+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IP is running out of gas. It’s time for the New IP

Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not promote a product or service and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.

The technology industry operates on micro and mega cycles of innovation. Micro cycles happen every hour, day, week and year. Mega cycles are far more rare, occurring every 20 years or so, like the leap from mainframes to client-server computing.

We are now entering the next mega innovation cycle. As with the previous seismic shifts, the benefits will be massive for those who adapt and potentially catastrophic for those who do not.  We all know the compute layer is moving to the cloud – we’ve been watching this shift for years. Big Data, mobility, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are well on their way. Security, which seems to grab all the headlines lately, is still clearly a work in progress.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IP is running out of gas. It’s time for the New IP

Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not promote a product or service and has been edited and approved by Network World editors. The technology industry operates on micro and mega cycles of innovation. Micro cycles happen every hour, day, week and year. Mega cycles are far more rare, occurring every 20 years or so, like the leap from mainframes to client-server computing. We are now entering the next mega innovation cycle. As with the previous seismic shifts, the benefits will be massive for those who adapt and potentially catastrophic for those who do not.  We all know the compute layer is moving to the cloud – we’ve been watching this shift for years. Big Data, mobility, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are well on their way. Security, which seems to grab all the headlines lately, is still clearly a work in progress.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why you should care about complexity

If you look across a wide array of networking problems, you will see what is an apparently wide array of dissimilar and unrelated problems engineers deal with on a daily basis. For instance—

  • Should I split this flooding domain into multiple parts? If so, where should I divide it?
  • Which routing protocol should I use on this network topology, and to solve this set of problems?
  • How should I configure the Quality of Service parameters on this network?
  • Should I use MPLS on my data center fabric, or straight IP?

Over my years as a network engineer, I’ve always treated these as separate sorts of problems, each with their own tradeoffs, concepts, and models. In fact, I’ve been a kindof “collector of models” over the years, trying to find different models to address each situation. In the Art of Network Architecture, there’s an entire chapter on the models Denise and I have run in to over the years, where they seem to be useful, and where they seem to be limited. complexity-model

But keeping all of these models in my head didn’t help me generalize the problems I faced in building and troubleshooting networks. For instance, in the flooding domain instance Continue reading