Is packet-sniffing illegal? (OmniCISA update)

In the news recently, Janet Napolitano (formerly head of DHS, now head of California's university system) had packet-sniffing software installed at the UC Berkeley campus to monitor all its traffic. This brings up the age old question: is such packet-sniffing legal, or a violation of wiretap laws.

Setting aside the legality question for the moment, I should first point out that's its perfectly normal. Almost all organizations use "packet-sniffers" to help manage their network. Almost all organizations have "intrusion detection systems" (IDS) that monitor network traffic looking for hacker attacks. Learning how to use packet-sniffers like "Wireshark" is part of every network engineer's training.

Indeed, while the news articles describes this as some special and nefarious plot by Napolitano, the reality is that it's probably just an upgrade of packet-sniffer systems that already exist.

Ironical, much packet-sniffing practice comes from UC Berkele. It's famous for having created "BPF", the eponymously named "Berkeley Packet Filter", a standard for packet-sniffing included in most computers. Whatever packet-sniffing system Berkeley purchased to eavesdrop on its networks is almost certainly including Berkeley's own BPF software.


Now for the legal question. Even if everyone is doing it, it doesn't necessarily mean it's legal. But the wiretap Continue reading

Worth Reading: Disaggregation at LinkedIn

Disaggregation has been on the top of my mind a good bit recently, partially because of our work at LinkedIn around this topic. Zaid has just posted a piece on the LinkedIn Engineering Blog about Project Falco, which is our internal disaggregation project for our data centers. Just a little taste to convince you to jump over there and read this one, because I think this sort of thing will have a major impact in the networking industry over the next three to five years.

Pigeon is a 3.2Tbps switching platform that can be used as a leaf or spine switch. Pigeon is our first foray into active switch software development. We are not venturing into developing our own switch because we aspire to become experts in the switching and routing space, but because we want control of our destiny. We continue to be supportive of our commercial vendors and work with them in a decoupling model.

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Comcast targets first markets it will offer gigabit over copper cable service

Comcast announced today that Atlanta and Nashville would be its first two markets to offer DOCSIS 3.1 technology, in “early 2016,” and that Chicago, Detroit and Miami would join them in the second half of the year.DOCSIS 3.1 is a new wired cable Internet standard, which gives Comcast the ability to offer gigabit speeds over existing copper cable. The latest version of the standard uses smaller subcarrier channels that use considerably less bandwidth than those of DOCSIS 3.0, bonding those subchannels together for greater efficiency. The company said that it tested the technology last month in its home market of Philadelphia.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: 'Big bets' cost Google parent Alphabet $3.6 billion in losses last year + Microsoft starts recommended update roll-out for Windows 10To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Who's Hiring?

  • Manager - Site Reliability Engineering: Lead and grow the the front door SRE team in charge of keeping Netflix up and running. You are an expert of operational best practices and can work with stakeholders to positively move the needle on availability. Find details on the position here: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/398

  • Macmillan Learning, a premier e-learning institute, is looking for VP of DevOps to manage the DevOps teams based in New York and Austin. This is a very exciting team as the company is committed to fully transitioning to the Cloud, using a DevOps approach, with focus on CI/CD, and using technologies like Chef/Puppet/Docker, etc. Please apply here.

  • DevOps Engineer at Robinhood. We are looking for an Operations Engineer to take responsibility for our development and production environments deployed across multiple AWS regions. Top candidates will have several years experience as a Systems Administrator, Ops Engineer, or SRE at a massive scale. Please apply here.

  • Senior Service Reliability Engineer (SRE): Drive improvements to help reduce both time-to-detect and time-to-resolve while concurrently improving availability through service team engagement.  Ability to analyze and triage production issues on a web-scale system a plus. Find details on the position here: https://jobs. Continue reading

SDN shifts from configuration to analytics

Two SDN vendors have enhanced their offerings to improve visibility into virtual networks.Midokura this week unveiled an upgrade of its Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) network virtualization software to provide visibility into encapsulated traffic in OpenStack clouds. And Pluribus Networks rolled out software designed to provide an operational view of the data center network for insight into application performance and troubleshooting, and enhancing forensic analysis and security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security flaws found in Fisher-Price smart teddy bear and kid’s GPS tracker watch

The Internet of Things increasingly includes “smart toys,” but no parent knowingly purchases a toy for their child that potentially risks the safety and privacy of their family. Those risks are caused by security flaws found in the Internet-connected toys. Unlike “dumb” toys, hackers could exploit “smart” toy vulnerabilities and potentially harvest a child’s name, birthdate, location and more.This time, Rapid7 revealed security flaws in Fisher-Price’s Smart Toy, an Internet-connected stuffed bear, and in the hereO GPS watch, a wearable location-tracking device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA’s big rocket will carry 13 cool tiny satellites

NASA today said the first voyage of its heavy-lift rocket will include 13 tiny satellites or cubesats that will conduct a variety of experiments from taking a closer look at the moon to evaluating space weather.NASA’s rocket – the Space Launch System (SLS) – along with an unmanned Orion spacecraft are expected to launch in 2018. The heart of the mission is to test the rockets but also to evaluate the Orion spacecraft which is the first spacecraft built for astronauts destined for deep space since NASA’s Apollo missions and ultimately is destined for deep space travel.More on Network World: Quick look: NASA Orion’s critical test missionTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

We Are Number Two!

Checklist

In my old IT life I once took a meeting with a networking company. They were trying to sell me on their hardware and get me to partner with them as a reseller. They were telling me how they were the number two switching vendor in the world by port count. I thought that was a pretty bold claim, especially when I didn’t remember seeing their switches at any of my deployments. When I challenged this assertion, I was told, “Well, we’re really big in Europe.” Before I could stop my mouth from working, I sarcastically replied, “So is David Hasselhoff.” Needless to say, we didn’t take this vendor on as a partner.

I tell this story often when I go to conferences and it gets laughs. As I think more and more about it the thought dawns on me that I have never really met the third best networking vendor in the market. We all know who number one is right now. Cisco has a huge market share and even though it has eroded somewhat in the past few years they still have a comfortable lead on their competitors. The step down into the next tier of Continue reading

The Big List of Alternatives to Parse

Parse is not going away. It’s going to get better.
Ilya Sukhar — April 25th, 2013 on the Future of Parse

 

Parse is dead. The great diaspora has begun. The gold rush is on. There’s a huge opportunity for some to feed and grow on Parse’s 600,000 fleeing customers.

Where should you go? What should you do? By now you’ve transitioned through all five stages of grief and ready for stage six: doing something about it. Fortunately there are a lot of options and I’ve gathered as many resources as I can here in one place.

There is a Lot Pain Out There

Parse closing is a bigger deal than most shutterings. There’s even a petition: Don't Shut down Parse.com. That doesn’t happen unless you’ve managed to touch people. What could account for such an outpouring of emotion.

Parse and the massive switch to mobile computing grew up at the same time. Mobile is by definition personal. Many programmers capable of handling UI programming challenge were not as experienced with backend programming and Parse filled that void. When a childhood friend you grew to depend on dies, it hurts. That hurt is deep. It goes into the very Continue reading

Worth Reading: What They’re Not Telling You About Global Deduplication

When it comes to endpoint backup, is global deduplication a valuable differentiator? Not if data security and recovery are your primary objectives. Backup vendors that promote global deduplication say it minimizes the amount of data that must be stored and provides faster upload speeds. What they don’t say is how data security and recovery are sacrificed to achieve these “benefits.” -via csa

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Fitness trackers are leaking lots of your data, study finds

Some of the more popular sports wearables don't just let you track your fitness, they let other people track you.That's what Canadian researchers found when they studied fitness-tracking devices from eight manufacturers, along with their companion mobile apps.All the devices studied except for the Apple Watch transmitted a persistent, unique Bluetooth identifier, allowing them to be tracked by the beacons increasingly being used by retail stores and shopping malls to recognize and profile their customers.The revealing devices, the Basis Peak, Fitbit Charge HR, Garmin Vivosmart, Jawbone Up 2, Mio Fuse, Withings Pulse O2 and Xiaomi Mi Band, all make it possible for their wearers to be tracked using Bluetooth even when the device is not paired with or connected to a smartphone, the researchers said. Only the Apple device used a feature of the Bluetooth LE standard to generate changing MAC addresses to prevent tracking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Technology ‘net 0x1339ECA: 2015 Measured and Plumbed

technology-netOne of the great things about APNIC is the amount of information about the state of the Internet Geoff Huston puts out each year. He’s recently posted two studies on the state of BGP and the state of IPv4 addresses as of 2015; they’re both well worth reading in full, but here are several key takeaways of particular interest.

BGP in 2015
Addressing in 2015

First, the size of the global (DFZ) table has crossed 512,000 routes. While the actual table size varies by your view of the network (BGP is a path vector protocol, which has many of the same attributes as a distance-vector protocol, including multiple views of the network), this is the first time the route view servers have actually crossed that number. Why is 512,000 a magic number? If there are 512,000 routes, there are likely 512,000 FIB entries (unless there’s some sort of FIB compression involved), and there are a number of older boxes that cannot support 512,000 routes in their FIB.

Second, the DFZ has been growing at a rate of about 7%-8% per year for a number of years. Given the number of new devices being added to the Internet, how can this Continue reading

Google fixes critical Wi-Fi and media-processing flaws in Android

Google has patched thirteen new vulnerabilities in Android, two of which could allow attackers to take control of Android devices located on the same Wi-Fi network, if they have Broadcom chips.The two critical vulnerabilities are located in the Broadcom Wi-Fi driver and can be exploited by sending specially crafted wireless control packets to the affected devices. These messages could corrupt the kernel's memory and allow for the execution of arbitrary code in the kernel -- the highest privileged area of the operating system.These flaws are critical because the attack doesn't require any user interaction, can be exploited remotely and can lead to a complete device compromise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Skyport Systems: Fortress Infrastructure

The attitude of breach presumption is one that has fostered a family of seek-and-destroy security products. Find the infected system and fix it. Fair enough. Breach presumption is perhaps a wise posture to take, but it doesn’t mean we have to give up the perimeter. While some security consultants I’ve talked to tell me they […]

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Skyport Systems: Fortress Infrastructure

The attitude of breach presumption is one that has fostered a family of seek-and-destroy security products. Find the infected system and fix it. Fair enough. Breach presumption is perhaps a wise posture to take, but it doesn’t mean we have to give up the perimeter. While some security consultants I’ve talked to tell me they […]

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Decrypt SSL traffic to detect hidden threats

The percentage of encrypted Internet traffic continues to grow creating a space where not only private information but also criminals can travel about undetected. In the last five years, the advent of SSL traffic from major companies like Google, YouTube, and Twitter has spawned an expansive movement toward encrypting Internet traffic for enterprises as well. The risk in taking this security measure, though, is that while the exchange of information via the Internet is secured, bad guys can also linger unnoticed. Criminals, of course, know this and use it to their advantage, cloaking their attacks within Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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