The disaster-recovery lessons we learned after Katrina

A decade ago New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of the United States were devastated by the sixth strongest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claims Hurricane Katrina was the most destructive storm to ever strike the United States.The destruction from the hurricane itself, and the subsequent flooding that put most of New Orleans underwater knocked many businesses out of commission—and more than a few completely out of existence. Thankfully, we have learned a lot of hard lessons in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that businesses can use to be better-prepared for the next major disaster.An article from USA Today in 2007—two years after Hurricane Katrina—estimates that 7,900 businesses in New Orleans and southeast Louisiana went out of existence as a result of Katrina. Some of those businesses failed as a result of lost revenue resulting from nearly half a million people displaced from the region, but many of those businesses failed as a direct result of the destruction and impact the storm had on their ability to continue operating.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon dumps Flash, and the Web is better off

Amazon will stop accepting Flash ads on its advertising network on Tuesday, and it will help make the entire Web more secure, security experts say. According to Amazon, the move was prompted by a recent update from Google Chrome that limited how Flash was displayed on Web pages. Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari already had similar limitations in place. "his change ensures customers continue to have a positive, consistent experience on Amazon, and that ads displayed across the site function properly for optimal performance," the company said in its announcement. Bad, bad FlashTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

As energy push accelerates, battery costs set to plunge 60%

An energy storage study claims that prices for certain battery technologies will plunge by as much as 60% over the next five years. The report was prepared by Australian consultancy AECOM and published by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). The 130-page study, originally published last month, expects all battery technologies  to drop in price. However, the largest reductions are forecast for Li-ion and flow-battery technologies, which are expected to plummet by 60% and 40%, respectively by 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 processor gets technology to secure Android phones

Qualcomm is promising to improve security and privacy on high-end smartphones with Snapdragon Smart Protect, which uses on-device machine learning to help detect zero-day malware.The popularity of smartphones has started to catch the imagination of hackers, resulting in the need for better protection. Qualcomm’s latest contribution is Snapdragon Smart Protect, which the company announced on Monday.Smart Protect looks at what’s going on in the smartphone and warns about what it thinks are abnormal behaviors to protect users. At its most basic, that could be an application that takes a photo even though the display is off or an application sending an SMS without any user interaction. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware NSX 6.2: Enterprise Automation, Security and Application Continuity

VMworld 2015 in San Francisco marks the two-year anniversary of the launch of VMware VMware NSX LogoNSX. Since we originally launched, we have taken the promise of NSX and turned it into a platform that customers around the world are using to transform the operations of their data center networks and security infrastructure – in fact, more than 700 customers have chosen NSX. We also have more than 100 production deployments, and more than 65 customers have invested more than $1M of their IT budgets in NSX. We’ve trained more than 3,500 people on NSX, and we have more than 20 interoperable partner solutions generally available and shipping today.

Perhaps what’s most exciting is that at this year’s show, we will have more than two dozen NSX customers represented in various forums throughout the event. Organizations such as Baystate Health, City of Avondale, ClearDATA, Columbia Sportswear, DirecTV, FireHost, George Washington University, Heartland Payment Systems, IBM, IlliniCloud, NovaMedia, Rent-A-Center, Telstra, Tribune Media, United Health Group, University of New Mexico…the list goes on.

And as the capstone, we get to debut VMware NSX 6.2 at the show. So let’s take a deeper look at what we’ve learned from our customers and what’s new Continue reading

Defending the White Elephant

Click here to download the full report that includes attack details, TTPs and indicators of compromise.   Myanmar is a country currently engaged in an important political process. A pro-democracy reform took place in 2011 which has helped the government create an atmopshere conducive to investor interest. The country is resource rich, with a variety of […]

Defending the White Elephant

Click here to download the full report that includes attack details, TTPs and indicators of compromise.  

white elephant

Myanmar is a country currently engaged in an important political process. A pro-democracy reform took place in 2011 which has helped the government create an atmopshere conducive to investor interest. The country is resource rich, with a variety of natural resources and a steady labor supply. Despite recent progress, the country is subject to ongoing conflict with ethnic rebels and an ongoing civil war. Analysts suggest that both China and the United States are vying for greater influence in Myanmar, with China in particular having geopolitical interest due to sea passages, port deals, and fuel pipelines that are important to its goals. Geopolitical analysts have suggested that the United States may have its own interests that involve thwarting Chinese ambitions in the region.

APT groups from multiple countries – including China – have been known to target organizations of strategic interest with aggressive malware-based espionage campaigns. One of the malware families used in such a scenario is the well-known Remote Access Trojan PlugX, also known as Korplug, that enables full access to the victim’s machine and network.

Multiple instances of PlugX and related downloader Continue reading

New products of the week 08.31.2015

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.AppFolio Property Manager, Common Area Maintenance (CAM) featureKey features: Cloud-based business software provider AppFolio expanded the feature set within AppFolio Property Manager. CAM allows property managers to easily track and allocate common area expenses within commercial leases. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: How to protect top-secret data

The small, camera-equipped drone hovers unobtrusively outside your office window, quietly photographing the confidential documents on your desk and on your computer screen. A dumpster diver retrieves your shredded printouts, scans them into a computer and uses jigsaw-puzzle-solving software to reform the shreds into legible documents. An innocent-looking but virus-infected computer uses nothing more than heat signatures to glean data from your air-gapped (non-networked), “off-the-grid” machines that you thought were perfectly safe from prying eyes. And an industrial spy has tapped into your network links to make copies of private documents as they flow around your company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

How to Bring SDN/NFV into Reality


Unless you've been living inside a cave, or on top of a mountain without any Internet connection, you must have heard or read the news about Software-Defined Networking (SDN). In fact, SDN news pops up too often these days it makes some skeptics start thinking whether it is really real or just another hype in networking industry.

The challenge is it seems like everybody comes with their own definition of SDN. Each networking vendor displays its solution based on each own interpretation of SDN implementation. IETF group called the Interface to the Routing System (I2RS) is still trying to standardize southbound programming protocols and network-wide, multilayer topologies that include both virtual and real elements, network overlays and underlays. Open Networking Foundation (ONF), as a user-driven organization dedicated to the promotion and adoption of SDN, until today is mainly focusing on standardization of OpenFlow protocol. And the rise of new SDN startups, no doubt have created lots of excitement with many innovations within SDN spaces, contributes to the confusion at the same time.


The questions from today's business leaders in companies that consume networking technologies: if we want to embrace SDN, are we on the right track? Which way to go? Continue reading

Looking at IS-IS Security

Engineers hardly ever think of the control plane as an attack surface — from the new/old wave of centralized controllers (Rule 11!) to the middle term wave of distributed routing protocols, the control plane just hums along in the background without many people thinking about it from a security perspective. That is, until a big […]

The post Looking at IS-IS Security appeared first on Packet Pushers.

‘KeyRaider’ iOS malware targets jailbroken devices

Credentials for more than 225,000 Apple accounts have been stolen by sophisticated malware that targets modified iOS devices, according to Palo Alto Networks.The malware, which is nicknamed KeyRaider, enables attackers to download applications from Apple's App Store without paying or to lock devices in lieu of a ransom.“We believe this to be the largest known Apple account theft caused by malware,” wrote Claud Xiao of Palo Alto Networks in a blog post.Palo Alto Networks notified Apple of KeyRaider on Aug. 26 and provided the stolen account information, Xiao wrote. Apple officials in Sydney couldn't be immediately reached on Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Russian-speaking hackers breach 97 websites, many of them dating ones

Russian-speaking hackers have breached 97 websites, mostly dating-related, and stolen login credentials, putting hundreds of thousands of users at risk.Many of the websites are niche dating ones similar to Ashley Madison, according to a list compiled by Hold Security, a Wisconsin-based company that specializes in analyzing data breaches. A few are job-related sites.Batches of stolen information were found on a server by the company’s analysts, said Alex Holden, Hold Security’s founder and CTO. The server, for some reason, was not password protected, allowing analysis of its contents, he said.None of the dating sites are nearly as prominent as Ashley Madison, which saw sensitive company information, emails, internal documents and details of 30 million registered users released in a devastating data breach. Holden said this Russian-speaking group is not related to Impact Team, which claimed credit for the intrusion into Ashley Madison.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

About the systemd controversy…

As a troll, one of my favorite targets is "systemd", because it generates so much hate on both sides. For bystanders, I thought I'd explain what that is. To begin with, I'll give a little background.

An operating-system like Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux comes in two parts: a kernel and userspace. The kernel is the essential bit, though on the whole, most of the functionality is in userspace.

The word "Linux" technically only refers to the kernel itself. There are many optional userspaces that go with it. The most common is called BusyBox, a small bit of userspace functionality for the "Internet of Things" (home routers, TVs, fridges, and so on). The second most common is Android (the mobile phone system), with a Java-centric userspace on top of the Linux kernel. Finally, there are the many Linux distros for desktops/servers like RedHat Fedora and Ubuntu -- the ones that power most of the servers on the Internet. Most people think of Linux in terms of the distros, but in practice, they are a small percentage of the billions of BusyBox and Android devices out there.

The first major controversy in Linux was the use of Continue reading
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