In wake of Paris attacks, legislation aims to extend NSA program

A U.S. senator plans to introduce legislation that would delay the end of the bulk collection of phone metadata by the National Security Agency to Jan. 31, 2017, in the wake of security concerns after the terror attacks last Friday in Paris.Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, believes that the termination of the program, scheduled for month-end under the USA Freedom Act,  "takes us from a constitutional, legal, and proven NSA collection architecture to an untested, hypothetical one that will be less effective."The transition will happen in less than two weeks, at a time when the threat level for the U.S. is "incredibly high," he said Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Cisco is trying to keep NSA spies out of its gear

Cisco is working to build the confidence of prospective customers in its products, two years after disclosures of spying by the U.S. National Security Agency seeded doubt, particularly in China. It is increasingly putting more stringent security requirements on its suppliers and has launched a beta program that allows customers to analyze its products in a highly secure environment before buying. The efforts are intended to introduce more transparency to allay growing concerns over how supply chains could be opportunistically used by spies and cybercriminals. "I worry about manipulation, espionage and disruption," said Edna Conway, chief security officer of Cisco's global value chain, in a recent interview. "We worry about tainted solutions, counterfeit solutions and the misuse of intellectual property."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Blackhole exploit kit makes a surprising encore appearance

The Blackhole exploit kit has made a surprising reappearance two years after cybercriminals stopped using it, according to security vendor Malwarebytes.Exploit kits are frameworks planted on Web pages that try to find software flaws on the computers in order to silently install malware.Blackhole was one of most popular exploit kits, but it faded from prominence after its alleged creator, who went by the nickname Paunch, was arrested in Russia. The kit was sold or rented to other cybercriminals in the underground economy for hacking tools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Music cyberlocker downloads 36 months of jailtime

In the first criminal copyright infringement sentence imposed for a cyberlocker operator in the United States, the owner of the RockDizMusic.com got 36 months in prison and ordered to forfeit $50,851.05 and pay $48,288.62 in restitution.The US Department of Justice said Rocky Ouprasith, 23, of Charlotte, North Carolina operated RockDizMusic.com, a website originally hosted on servers in France and later in Canada, from which Internet users could find and download infringing digital copies of popular, copyrighted songs and albums.+More on Network World: 17 Real Big Sci/Tech projects+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network security primer: What is access control?

During its testimony on security weaknesses among federal agencies this week, the Government Accountability Office detailed a number of critical elements that make up effective protection systems.Among the systems the watchdog agency detailed was the key components in access control which is typically the technology an enterprise uses to regulate who has access to what resources.+ More on Network World: Watchdogs detail Federal security tribulations +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network security primer: What is access control?

During its testimony on security weaknesses among federal agencies this week, the Government Accountability Office detailed a number of critical elements that make up effective protection systems.Among the systems the watchdog agency detailed was the key components in access control which is typically the technology an enterprise uses to regulate who has access to what resources.+ More on Network World: Watchdogs detail Federal security tribulations +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Plexxi Unveils A New Cloud Builder Software Suite and New Switch 3 (100GbE) Hardware Platform: Simply a Better Solution for Cloud Builders

We said that the next era of IT would shake things up, and it is. And so is Plexxi.

Today, Plexxi announced two new products that combine to deliver cloud builders unprecedented capabilities to bring public cloud flexibility and efficiency to the private cloud through a focus on agility, ease-of-use, security, scale and cost-effectiveness. The first product, Plexxi 2.2 Software Suite for cloud builders, is available immediately and includes the Plexxi Network OS, the Plexxi Control application-defined fabric controller, and Plexxi Connect workflow orchestration and automation tool set. The second product, the Plexxi Switch 3 (available in January) is a powerful next-generation switch capable of delivering 10/25/40/50/100 GbE connectivity. Together, these new products expand Plexxi’s go-to-market opportunities in content distribution, high frequency trading, enterprise and government market segments.

The cloud enables rapid scaling; both up and down, of compute and storage capacity and facilitates speedy introduction of new services and applications. Early adopters have leveraged public cloud to achieve increased agility and scalability. In times when internal IT teams are challenged to respond quickly to requests, business department heads often turn to public cloud providers to implement new services quickly. This offers competitive advantage from a time-to-market perspective. It Continue reading

Hard-coded credentials make it simple to steal millions of sensitive records from apps

During a Black Hat Europe talk about (In)Security of Backend-as-a-Service, researchers warned that thousands of popular mobile apps have hard-coded backend credentials which could allow anyone to access millions of sensitive records. “Attacks are free, effortless, and simple,” they warned.Siegfried Rasthofer and Steven Arzt, PhD students at TU Darmstadt in Germany, focused on apps that use Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) frameworks from the providers Amazon Web Services, CloudMine and Parse.com, which is owned by Facebook. This is the “first comprehensive security evaluation of several popular BaaS providers and APIs as well as their use in real-world Android and iOS applications.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Organizations sloppy about securing privileged accounts

Companies' haphazard processes for managing administrative or other privileged accounts are putting them at risk of security breaches, according to a new global security survey.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 6 simple tricks for protecting your passwords The survey, conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Dell, found that 83 percent of respondents face numerous challenges with managed privileged accounts and administrative passwords. That's not to say they lack procedure for securing them — nearly 80 percent say they have a defined process for managing them — but they're not diligent about it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Docker tool removes a big barrier for enterprises

Making containers enterprise-ready has been a theme at this week's DockerCon EU conference in Barcelona, and on Tuesday Docker itself launched a new tool with that goal in mind.Aiming to give companies operational control while maintaining developers' productivity, Docker Universal Control Plane runs on-premises and is designed to help deploy and manage Dockerized distributed applications in production on any infrastructure."Portability has always been one of the premier attractions of modern application containers such as Docker, so it's no surprise to see the company and community focused on enhancing and extending that portability," said Jay Lyman, a research manager with 451 Research.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 ways bimodal IT accelerates innovation

Innovation is the cornerstone for sustained business success, and given how much innovation relies on technology these days, IT has to play a vital role in making it happen. Even so, Brocade's 2015 Global CIO Study found that more than half of CIO respondents spent around 1,000 hours a year reacting to unexpected problems such as data loss, network downtime and application access. With that much time spent fighting fires, how is the average CIO supposed to find the time to innovate?

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Microsoft touts new, holistic approach to enterprise security

Microsoft is putting a lot of effort and money into building a holistic security platform that combines the attack protection, detection and response features built into Windows 10, Office 365, Azure and the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite to help companies safeguard their data regardless of where it resides.Talking at the Microsoft Government Cloud Forum in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the company is spending more than  $1 billion a year in research and development to build security into its products, because "security has to be core to the operational systems used by enterprises."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Microsoft Azure cloud security tools will work on prem, in Amazon’s cloud too

Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled tools that protect not only cloud-based workloads in the company's Azure IaaS public cloud, but those on customers’ premises and even in competing clouds, such as those from Amazon Web Services.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave a keynote address at a Government Cloud Forum in Washington, D.C. this morning in which he talked about his company’s broad security efforts. Microsoft spends $1 billion annually in research and development to improve security across the company’s three major products: Windows 10, Office 365 and Azure. “We don’t think of security as being a separate piece of technology,” Nadella said. “It has to be core to the operational systems that you use, where your data resides, where your most critical application usage is.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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