What security research shows for 2015

The year in security researchImage by CSOSecurity researchers were busy in 2015 — almost as busy as the criminals whose work they studied.Among the notable numbers this year: Low tech 'visual hacking' proves to be successful nine times out of ten, most websites had at least one serious vulnerability for 150 or more days, click fraud costs businesses $6.3 billion a year in wasted ad money, and oh so much more!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Small Massachusetts town will offer blazing 2Gbps fiber Internet for $40 a month

Leverett, Mass., will improve its existing fiber-optic network by the start of the new year, boosting peak speeds from one gigabit to two gigabits, and dropping the price from $45 per month to $40, according to a report in the local Recorder newspaper.A small town in central Massachusetts, just north of Amherst, Leverett has fewer than 2,000 residents, making it among the smallest in the country with its own municipal gigabit fiber network.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Dell maneuvers toward EMC takeover with no rivals in sight + F5 Networks brings back retired CEO after successor resigns over "personal conduct"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Response: Adobe Profits Show Cloud is Expensive For Consumers

Adobe reports massive increase in revenue and profits on the back of moving to the cloud. First, let’s have a look at the numbers. Adobe reported a record $1.31 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 22 percent year over year increase. It disclosed record annual revenue of $4.8 billion. Mind you these are significant, but the big number to […]

The post Response: Adobe Profits Show Cloud is Expensive For Consumers appeared first on EtherealMind.

Attacks using TeslaCrypt ransomware intensify

Over the past two weeks security researchers have seen a surge in attacks using a file-encrypting ransomware program called TeslaCrypt, known for targeting gamers in the past.TeslaCrypt first appeared in March and stood out because over 50 of the 185 file types it targeted were associated with computer games and related software, including game saves, custom maps, profiles, replays and mods -- content that users might have a hard time replacing.In April researchers from Cisco found a weakness in TeslaCrypt's encryption routine and created a tool that could decrypt files affected by some versions of the program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Few Cybersecurity Predictions for 2016

I’m a bit reluctant to blog about 2016 cybersecurity predictions as it seems like everyone is getting into this act.  Alas, this end-of-year tradition used to be the exclusive domain of the analyst community and a few industry beacons but now it seems like every security tools vendor in the world is reaching out to me to tell me what they see in their crystal ball. So with some hesitancy, here are a few of the things I expect to see after the proverbial ball drops (in no particular order):1.       Greater focus on cyber supply chain security.  Enterprise CISOs realize that strong cybersecurity extends beyond the corporate LAN and that cyber-attacks and data breaches could easily start with third parties with access to the network.  The OPM and Target breaches are two examples where cyber-adversaries simply compromised trusted business partners and used them as a beachhead to penetrate their targets.  At the same time, we’ve seen in increase in malware hiding in firmware, system BIOS, device drivers, etc., so servers, routers, storage devices, and network appliances could all introduce malicious code into an otherwise pristine environment.  I expect CISOs to extend Continue reading

Pentagon wants $12 billion to ‘kick the crap out of’ iWorld geeks from foreign regimes

What do you do if you are worried about killer robots? If you are the Pentagon and those killer robots belong to the Chinese and Russians, then you propose a $12 to $15 billion budget to fund your own AI army and next-gen weapon technology.The Pentagon’s plan for new tech, according to Reuters, will include “wearable electronics, exoskeletons, greater use of drones and manned aircraft working together, and mother ships that would send out mini-drones to execute military missions.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IncludeOS is now free and open source!

IncludeOS

Alfred Bratterud is Assistant Professor and PhD scholar at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science where he is currently working full time leading the development of IncludeOS at the NetSys research group.

We’ve finally lifted the lid on IncludeOS, just in time for the IEEE CloudCom paper presentation recently. A preprint of the paper is available from our repo. However, we’ve done quite a lot of work since the paper was written, so here’s an update on what IncludeOS is now, and what you can expect in the near future.

It’s a bit like a JVM, but for x86 C++

A Java Virtual Machine is a portable language runtime environment. Java is portable across hardware architectures and operating systems because it uses a common instruction set. Once you’ve started a Java program, you can’t log into it (unless your program itself provides the facilities), and you can’t boot up any other programs inside it.

IncludeOS is like a safe language runtime for C++ programs, compiled into the x86 instruction set. This has the obvious advantage of removing one layer of abstraction, compared to Java: with hardware virtualization the code will execute directly on the CPU. Like with Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Device administration with Cisco WLC

I recently had to dive very deeply into doing device administration AAA with Cisco Wireless LAN controllers and the SourceFire/Cisco FirePower Manager software. Given the interest that others have shown, I decided to write this Blog entry to share my experience.How Device Admin AAA works on the Cisco WLC Device Administration with a Cisco Catalyst switch is capable of command-level authorizations. With the WLC, however, it is based on the sections of the menu system. It does not prevent access to those sections of the GUI, but instead prevents changes from being saved when inside a menu section that is not authorized. Figure 1 shows the different menus in the orange box, with three of the individual menus highlighted with a yellow box.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security ‘net

The ‘web has been abuzz with security stuff the last couple of weeks; forthwith a small collection for your edification.

The man in the middle attack is about as overused as the trite slippery slope fallacy in logic and modern political “discourse” (loosely termed — political discourse is the latest term to enter the encyclopedia of oxymorons as it’s mostly been reduced to calling people names and cyberbullying, — but of course, putting the social media mob in charge of stopping bullying will fix all of that). But there are, really, such things as man in the middle attacks, and they are used to gather information that would otherwise be unavailable because of normal security provided by on the wire encryption. An example? There is no way to tell if your cell phone is connecting to a real cell phone tower or a man-in-the-middle device that sucks all your information out and ships it to an unintended recipient before forwarding your information along to its correct destination.

The list of aliases used by the devices that masquerade as a cell phone tower, trick your phone into connecting with them, and suck up your data, seems to grow every day. But Continue reading

Avoiding an ISSUe on the Nexus 5000

The idea for this post came from someone I was working with recently. Thanks Fan (and Carson, and Shree) :-)

In Service Software Upgrade (ISSU) is a method of upgrading software on a switch without interrupting the flow of traffic through the switch. The conditions for successfully completing an ISSU are usually pretty strict and if you don’t comply, the hitless upgrade can all of a sudden become impacting.

The conditions for ISSU on the Nexus 5000 are pretty well documented (cisco.com link) however, there are a couple bits of knowledge that are not.  This post is a reminder of the ISSU conditions you need to comply with and a call out to the bits of information that aren’t so well documented.

The two major ISSU conditions on the n5k are:

  1. You must unconfigure all Layer 3 features
  2. The n5k must not have any Spanning Tree (STP) ports in Designated state unless the port is an Edge port.

The first one is easy: the switch cannot be doing any routing. Even if the switch is Layer 2 only, this condition will still fail if any of the following are true:

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