Enterprise WLAN market is hot, but it’s all relative

Wireless LAN purchases aren't exactly going gangbusters these days, but relative to other enterprise infrastructure product sales, WLANs are where it's at.Synergy Research Group's latest figures show that WLAN sales grew 5% over the last 4 quarters vs. 2.3% for 7 segments measured overall (the others being data center servers, Ethernet switches, unified communications apps, routers and the slowest-growers -- voice systems and telepresence).Synergy Res Synergy Research Group While you might think that the general availability of faster and more flexible 802.11ac Wave 2 products from WLAN market leader Cisco, #2 HP/Aruba and others has sparked WLAN purchases, Synergy Chief Analyst and Managing Director John Dinsdale says that isn't necessarily the case.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PlexxiPulse—Our CEO on “Cloud Builders”

The future of IT is rapidly changing. The transition to private and public clouds is forcing the need for integrated and elastic infrastructure. These changes are the impetus of a new role (and customer) called the Cloud Builder or Cloud Architect. Cloud Builders look at applications and data requirements from the perspective of business goals, not static technology silos. CEO Rich Napolitano details the parameters and implications of this new role in a blog post, and also outlines how Plexxi’s tools enable Cloud Builders to drive agility and workflow integration across what were once disparate compute, storage and network domains. Give it a read.

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week.

ITBusinessEdge: Converging Your Way to a New Data Center
By Arthur Cole
Vested interests in the IT industry have a lot riding on the hope that the enterprise will want to keep some of its infrastructure in-house rather than push everything onto the cloud as the decade unfolds. But this is only likely to happen if on-premises hardware is low-cost, highly scalable and maintains a tight footprint. This is why so many designers are touting converged and hyper-converged Continue reading

Network Security Sandboxes Driving Next-Generation Endpoint Security

Remember advanced persistent threats (APTs)? This term originated within the United States Air Force around 2006.  In my opinion, it gained more widespread recognition after the Google “Operation Aurora” data breach first disclosed in 2010.  This cyber-attack is attributed to groups associated with China’s People’s Liberation Army and impacted organizations like Adobe Systems, Juniper Networks, Northrop Grumman, Symantec, and Yahoo in addition to Google.APT visibility got another boost in 2013 when Mandiant released its now famous APT1 report documenting several cyber-attacks emanating from a PLA group known as Unit 61398.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Little Rock, Tampa, and St. Louis hardest-hit by malware among U.S. cities, study finds

Little Rock, Tampa, St. Louis, Orlando and Denver were the five American cities most affected by malware on a per-capita basis in 2015, according to a study released today by Enigma Software.Those five municipalities suffered malware infection rates, the company said, roughly eight or nine times the national average for 2015. Little Rock’s rate was 1,412% above the U.S. average, Tampa’s 842%, while the other three all had rates around 650% of the overall mean.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Hyatt hackers hit payment processing systems, scooped cards used at 250 locations + State CIOs agenda targets cybersecurity + To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Automakers will collaborate to try to stop car hacks before they happen

Major automakers plan to work with the U.S. government to try to deter hacks of connected cars before they become a major issue. To date, there haven't been any major cyberattacks on cars, but a number of security researchers demonstrated potentially serious attacks in 2015, and that has the government worried. So the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is hoping it can get the auto industry to mirror proactive safety work that already takes place in the aviation industry. The agreement has been signed by all major automakers that operate in the U.S. "Real safety is finding and fixing defects before someone gets hurt, rather than just punishing after the damage is done," U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said Friday when he announced the initiative at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 15th, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:


Space walk from 2001: A Space Odyssey? Nope. A base jump from the CN Tower in Toronto.

 

If you like this Stuff then please consider supporting me on Patreon.
  • 13.5TB: open data from Yahoo for machine learning; 1+ exabytes: data stored in the cloud; 13: reasons autonomous cars should have steering wheels; 3,000: kilowatt-hours of energy generated by the solar bike path; 10TB: helium-filled hard disk; $224 Billion: 2016 gadget spending in US; 85: free ebooks; 17%: Azure price drop on some VMs; 20.5: tons of explosives detonated on Mythbusters; 20 Billion: Apple’s App Store Sales; 70%: Global Internet traffic goes through Northern Virginia; 12: photos showing the beauty of symmetry; 

  • Quotable Quote:
    • @WhatTheFFacts: Scaling Earth's 'life' to 46 years, the industrial revolution began 1 minute ago -- In that time we've destroyed half the world's forests.
    • David Brin: The apotheosis of Darth Vader was truly disgusting. Saving one demigod—a good demigod, his son—wiped away all his guilt from slaughtering billions of normal people.
    • Brian Brazil: In today’s world, having a 1:1 coupling between machines and services is becoming less Continue reading

State CIOs agenda targets cybersecurity

The association representing state CIOs has an ambitious policy agenda in the nation's capital this year, when members and their advocates will be appealing to Congress for help in securing critical infrastructure and for relief from a thicket of federal regulations.At the top of the list is cybersecurity, perhaps unsurprising given that members of the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO) ranked that issue at the top of their own set of operational priorities late last year.[ Related: State CIOs will focus on security and cloud in 2016 ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hyatt hackers hit payment processing systems, scooped cards used at 250 locations

Hackers managed to compromise payment cards used at 250 Hyatt Hotels locations in around 50 countries after infecting the company's payment processing systems with malware.Hyatt announced the data breach back in December and launched an investigation. On Thursday, it published the full list of affected locations and the time interval during which the payment cards were exposed: Aug 13. to Dec. 8.Most of the potentially compromised cards were used at restaurants in the affected locations, but a small percentage were used at spas, golf shops, parking systems, front desks and sales offices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco launches tool to uncover shadow IT in the enterprise

"You can't manage what you can't see" is a popular saying in the network industry. Historically, it's been used for traditional network management, with the thought being that one can't fix a problem on the network without having visibility into the applications, traffic flows, and infrastructure. Recently, though, the meaning of that phrase has changed as "shadow IT" has become increasingly popular. Shadow IT is when lines of business or individual users purchase their own cloud services without any involvement in IT. The problem today is very real. An interesting data point to support this comes from a ZK Research report that showed that 96% of organizations claim to be running cloud applications that are not sanctioned by IT (disclosure: I am an employee of ZK Research).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenSSH patches information leak that could expose private SSH keys

If you're connecting to servers over the secure shell (SSH) protocol using an OpenSSH client, you should update it immediately. The latest version patches a flaw that could allow rogue or compromised servers to read users' private authentication keys.The vulnerability stems from an experimental feature known as roaming that allows SSH connections to be resumed. This feature has been enabled by default in OpenSSH clients since version 5.4, released in March 2010, but is not present in the OpenSSH server implementation. As a result only clients are affected.The vulnerability allows a server to read information from a connecting client's memory, including its private keys. It has been fixed in OpenSSH 7.1p2, released Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Automating VMware NSX Security Rules Creation using Splunk and Some Code

The VMware NSX network virtualization platform allows us to build sophisticated networking and security constructs in software. NSX has a rich RESTful API which allows one to build highly flexible and automated environments. In this blog, we’re going to focus on operations and automation; we’ll demonstrate one example of automation around security policies/rules that can be done with NSX.

VMware NSX allows for micro-segmentation with a distributed firewall service (DFW). The DFW is a kernel-level module and allows for enhanced segmentation and security across a virtualized environment. One of the common questions we get asked is, “how do I decide what rules to build?” NSX allows for multiple options to create rules such as the use of NSX flow-monitoring or analyzing traffic patterns via logging to create the rules.

We’ll demonstrate how the VMware NSX DFW can be monitored with the popular Splunk platform. Further, we’ll demonstrate, along with using Splunk for monitoring traffic passing through the DFW, how the NSX REST API can be leveraged to automate workflows and creation of DFW rules. Continue reading

Researcher finds fault in Apple’s Gatekeeper patch

Apple hasn't completely fixed a weakness in Gatekeeper, its security technology that blocks harmful applications from being installed. Patrick Wardle, director of research with the company Synack, said in an interview he reverse-engineered a patch Apple released in October and found it wasn't quite the fix he expected. Wardle found he could still bypass Gatekeeper and install malware. He's going public with his latest findings on Sunday at the Shmoocon security conference, which starts Friday in Washington, D.C. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Go upgrade fixes bug that could leak RSA private key

Google has released an upgrade to Go 1.5.3 to fix a security issue with the math/big package for implementing multiprecision arithmetic. Go programs must be recompiled with this version to receive the fix."This issue can affect RSA computations in crypto/rsa, which is used by crypto/tls," a golang-dev post in Google Groups says. "TLS servers on 32-bit systems could plausibly leak their RSA private key due to this issue. Other protocol implementations that create many RSA signatures could also be impacted in the same way." Incorrect results in one part of the RSA Chinese Remainder computation can lead to the wrong outcome down the line such that it leaks a prime number.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM to tackle fraud with Iris Analytics

IBM is going to apply machine learning to fraud busting with Iris Analytics.While that makes it sound as though it will be using Watson AI systems to identify fraudsters by gazing deep into their eyes, this is really about its acquisition of a German software firm called Iris Analytics.Iris monitors banking transactions and uses machine learning to spot previously unknown patterns of fraudulent transactions in real time. The system can work alone or in conjunction with human analysts, according to IBM.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 6 simple tricks for protecting your passwords With only one bank in six equipped with real-time fraud detection systems, and even those taking a month or more to learn to stop new attacks once they are identified, IBM sees a big market for integrating systems like that of Iris with its existing antifraud products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here