We Are Number Two!

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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 […]

The post Skyport Systems: Fortress Infrastructure appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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

Survey: Average successful hack nets less than $15,000

The majority of cyber attackers are motivated by money, but make less than $15,000 per successful attack, according to a survey of hackers in the U.S., U.K. and Germany released yesterday by the Ponemon Institute.The hackers, who were promised anonymity, netted, on average, less than $29,000 a year."In the more established countries, that is not a lot of money," said Scott Simkin, senior threat intelligence manager at Palo Alto Networks, which sponsored the study. "They're making a quarter of what a cybersecurity professional makes."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Debug Generator – Fortigate Flow Trace

I’ve found that when working with Fortigate firewalls and needing to be able to use the debug flow command set, it takes a bit too long to manually type out the commands. If you’re in a pressurised environment saving a few seconds here and there can be valuable. First we need to grab the script […]

The post Debug Generator – Fortigate Flow Trace appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Debug Generator – Fortigate Flow Trace

I’ve found that when working with Fortigate firewalls and needing to be able to use the debug flow command set, it takes a bit too long to manually type out the commands. If you’re in a pressurised environment saving a few seconds here and there can be valuable. First we need to grab the script […]

The post Debug Generator – Fortigate Flow Trace appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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