US defense secretary mulls rapid grants for tech companies

The U.S. Department of Defense is considering offering rapid seed funding to private companies as a way to encourage more work on technology projects with the commercial sector, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said Wednesday. The push for greater cooperation with tech companies has been a big theme for the DOD in the last year as it faces a growing and unprecedented threat from private and state actors on the Internet and beyond. That was demonstrated late last year when Sony Pictures suffered a devastating hack of its corporate email system that the U.S. government attributed to North Korea. Hackers based overseas have also been blamed for high-profile attacks on the Department of State and the Office of Personnel Management, the latter of which resulted in personal data on millions of government employees being lost.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Video: Virtual networking’s killer use case

A key theme at this year's VMworld conference was the virtualization of the data center, and specifically the network.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Containers key to Cisco's "open" data center OS +VMware entered into the networking market two years ago when it purchased Nicira for more than $1 billion. Since then VMware has rolled out NSX, it’s virtual networking product. Officials say there are already 700 NSX deployments, including 65 customers that have $1 million+ NSX deployments.In the video below, check out what VMware’s Chris King says have been some of the driving factors behind virtual networking, and learn how virtual networking is being used as a security tool, and not just network agility software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Video: Virtual networking’s killer use case

A key theme at this year's VMworld conference was the virtualization of the data center, and specifically the network.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Containers key to Cisco's "open" data center OS +VMware entered into the networking market two years ago when it purchased Nicira for more than $1 billion. Since then VMware has rolled out NSX, it’s virtual networking product. Officials say there are already 700 NSX deployments, including 65 customers that have $1 million+ NSX deployments.In the video below, check out what VMware’s Chris King says have been some of the driving factors behind virtual networking, and learn how virtual networking is being used as a security tool, and not just network agility software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Turla cyberespionage group exploits satellite Internet links for anonymity

A cyberespionage group of Russian origin that targets governmental, diplomatic, military, educational and research organizations is hijacking satellite-based Internet connections in order to hide their servers from security researchers and law enforcement agencies.The group is known as Epic Turla, Snake or Uroburos and even though some of its operations were first uncovered in February 2014, it has been active for at least eight years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Apple TV: Siri and the App Store are the stars of Apple’s new set-top box

Apple is re-entering the living room with the 2015 Apple TV, a new set-top box that streams video, plays games, and uses Siri to answer your every entertainment whim.+ Find out what Apple did to the new iPad +The last time Apple upgraded its living room hardware was more than two years ago, and even that was a minor refresh of the 2012 Apple TV. The new version is a significant upgrade, packing more powerful hardware and a full-blown app store.Similar look, new apps At first glance, the new Apple TV sports a similar interface to that of its predecessor. A strip of recommendations sit on top, followed by a list of apps underneath. The big difference now is that there’s an entire App Store, rather than a preset list of Apple-curated selections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Some notes on satellite C&C

Wired and Ars Technica have some articles on malware using satellites for command-and-control. The malware doesn't hook directly to the satellites, of course. Instead, it sends packets to an IP address of a known satellite user, like a random goat herder in the middle of the wilds of Iraq. Since the satellites beam down to earth using an unencrypted signal, anybody can eavesdrop on it. Thus, while malware sends packets to that satellite downlink in Iraq, it's actually a hacker in Germany who receives them.

This is actually fairly old hat. If you look hard enough, somewhere (I think Google Code), you'll find some code I wrote back around 2011 for extracting IP packets from MPEG-TS streams, for roughly this purpose.

My idea was to use something like masscan, where I do a scan of the Internet from a fast data center, but spoof that goat herder's IP address. Thus, everyone seeing the scan would complain about that IP address instead of mine. I would see all the responses by eavesdropping on that satellite connection.

This doesn't work in Europe and the United States. These markets use more expensive satellites which not only support encryption, but also narrow "spot Continue reading

Trade Stimulators and the Very Old Idea of Increasing User Engagement

Very early in my web career I was introduced to the almost mystical holy grail of web (and now app) properties: increasing user engagement.

The reason is simple. The more time people spend with your property the more stuff you can sell them. The more stuff you can sell the more value you have. Your time is money. So we design for addiction.

Famously Facebook, through the ties that bind, is the engagement leader with U.S. adults spending a stunning average of 42.1 minutes per day on Facebook. Cha-ching.

Immense resources are spent trying to make websites and apps sticky. Psychological tricks and gamification strategies are deployed with abandon to get you not to leave a website or to keep playing an app.

It turns out this is a very old idea. Casinos are designed to keep you gambling, for example. And though I’d never really thought about it before, I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn retail stores of yore used devices called trade stimulators to keep customers hanging around and spending money.

Never heard of trade stimulators? I hadn’t either until, while watching American Pickers, one of my favorite shows, they talked about this whole Continue reading

Microsoft patches yet another Hacking Team zero-day exploit

Over two months after Italian surveillance software maker Hacking Team had its internal data leaked by hackers, vendors are apparently still fixing zero-day exploits from the company's arsenal.On Tuesday, Microsoft published 12 security bulletins covering 56 vulnerabilities in the new Edge browser, Internet Explorer, Windows, Office, Skype for Business, .NET Framework and some of its other software products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

17 Real Big Sci/Tech projects

17 Real Big Sci/Tech projectsImage by NASASome science/technology is big news like the discovery of a new gene – but sometimes its just big, like the Saturn V rocket of the Apollo era. Here we take a look at pictures of some recent BIG science and technology topics like a cool new wind turbine, a black hole discovery and more. Have fun:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ASA v9.4 Elliptic Curve Cryptography with TLS1.2

cryptoWith ASA version 9.4 Cisco has added support for Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), which is one of the most powerful types of encryption in use today. While ECC has been in use since 2004, only it’s recently use has skyrocketed. Part of this reason is power consumption… In my limited understanding, experts have concluded that a shorter ECC keys are just as strong as a much larger RSA key. This increases performance significantly, which reduces the power required for each calculation. If you want to learn more about ECC, check out this fantastic article from arstechnica.

That brings me to the issue. Last night I failed over some 5585x’s running > 9.4 that happened to be doing Anyconnect SSL VPN. This morning, my client was seeing issues. Luckily the solution was simple and a college pointed me to the solution fairly quickly. From the Cisco support community page I found later on….

For version 9.4.(x) we have the following information:

Elliptic curve cryptography for SSL/TLS—When an elliptic curve-capable SSL VPN client connects to the ASA, the elliptic curve cipher suite will be negotiated, and the ASA will present the SSL VPN client with an elliptic curve Continue reading

Rebuilding Reader

For the time being, we are discontinuing Reader.PacketPushers.net. We didn't advertise it heavily in the past. Reader saw some traffic, but not a lot. And...we were never entirely happy with the result we got out of it. Our plan is to reboot Reader at some point in the future with new software. We still think it's a good idea, but we want to get a more polished look and feel out of it first.

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