LinkedIn-based intelligence gathering campaign targets the security industry

For the past several weeks an intelligence-gathering campaign has been using fake LinkedIn recruiter profiles to map out the professional networks of IT security experts, researchers from F-Secure have discovered.LinkedIn can be a great tool to establish new professional relationships and discover job opportunities. However, accepting connection requests from unknown people is a double-edged sword that can put both employees and the companies they work for at risk.There are multiple cases where attackers have used fake LinkedIn profiles to gather sensitive information about organizations and their employees. Knowing who is the manager of a particular department in a company or who is a member of the organization's IT staff can be very useful in planning targeted attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: For wearables, scientists suggest running a wireless network through your body

Magnetic signals can be used to communicate within the human body, a team of scientists recently said.The newly developed technique sends magnetic fields through biological tissue and could be used for a human-hosted wireless sensor network. Full-body health monitoring might be an application.The proof-of-concept idea, demonstrated recently by electrical engineers from the University of California, San Diego, could one day replace power-hungry Bluetooth for wearable networking, the researchers say.It would also be more secure than existing communications between wearables, they reckon.Signals move easier Magnetic field-generating coils, wrapped around three parts of the body—head, arm, and leg—allowed signals to move easily from one side of the body to the other in the scientists' experiments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Globally Distributed Applicaitons

Putting the right architecture and processes in place will enable your systems and company to withstand the common hiccups distributed, high traffic applications face. This enables you to stay ahead of scaling constraints, manage inevitable network and system failures, stay calm and debug production issues in real-time, and grow your company and product successfully. via high scalability

The post Worth Reading: Globally Distributed Applicaitons appeared first on 'net work.

Three key challenges in vulnerability risk management

1 asses risk

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Vulnerability risk management has re-introduced itself as a top challenge – and priority – for even the most savvy IT organizations. Despite the best detection technologies, organizations continue to get compromised on a daily basis. Vulnerability scanning provides visibility into potential land mines across the network, but often just results in data tracked in spreadsheets and independent remediation teams scrambling in different directions.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PlexxiPulse—Happy Labor Day!

Wishing you a safe and happy Labor Day from the entire team here at Plexxi. Enjoy the celebrations this weekend!

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Enjoy!

Enterprise Networking Planet: With SDN, Programmability is the Point
By Arthur Cole
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is the moniker that the enterprise has accepted for the new breed of virtual network architectures abstracted from underlying hardware. But since software involves code, what we are really talking about is programmable networking. That raises a number of questions regarding the ultimate goal of this investment: programmed how? And programmed to do what, exactly? For specialty chip developers like Xilinx, a key function will be workload acceleration. As the enterprise tries to satisfy the twin masters of increased data volumes and demand for real-time data services, the need to quickly navigate through an ever-shifting set of network resources will become paramount.

Data Center Knowledge: Latency, Bandwidth, Disaster Recovery: Selecting the Right Data Center
By Bill Kleyman
In selecting the right type of data center colocation, administrators must thoroughly plan out their deployment and strategies. This means involving more than just facilities teams in the planning Continue reading

Microsoft will release its hackathon help tool to the world

Microsoft is planning to bring its internal tool for running hackathons to the public next year, starting by allowing a few select colleges to test drive it at their own events. It's part of a plan by the company's Garage division to help other organizations get better at handling the administrative side of organizing marathon hack sessions like the three-day-long bonanza Microsoft held in July as part of its Oneweek employee team-building session. Known inside Microsoft as the "Hackathon interactive project site," it was built to help 13,000 employees and interns work on 1,700 projects during the Oneweek hackathon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ashley Madison still a top lure for scammers and crooks

The Ashley Madison breach has been a Christmas-in-August present for spammers and scammers of all kinds, and your company could be the next target. Here are some scams to watch out for. Phishing There is a significant amount of spam related to the Ashley Madison attack. According to Trend Micro, the most recent Ashley Madison-related phishing campaign offers a link to the "Ashley Madison Client List" but instead infects the user's computer with banking malware, or locks up files until the user pays one Bitcoin, or approximately $235. "Companies should block all Ashley Madison related emails at the email gateway and use URL filtering for all inbound emails for those bulletproof hosts which are disseminating this crimewave," said Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer at Irving, Tex.-based Trend Micro Inc.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Jobs movie: A quieter, more authentic portrait

This October, Michael Fassbender will join Ashton Kutcher among the actors to have played Steve Jobs. Aaron Sorkin's movie adaptation of Walter Isaacson's biography is one of many dramatizations of the life of Apple's co-founder, who died in 2011.This week sees a quieter yet more authentic release in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, available Sept. 4 in theaters and on iTunes from Magnolia Pictures. Rather than offering a straight biography, Academy Award-winning documentarian Alex Gibney sets out to answer a question: Why were so many people so moved by the death of someone who he describes as "ruthless, deceitful, and cruel"? If we loved products that came from someone also described as incapable of love, what does that say about the man?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Use nProbe and ELK Stack to Build a Netflow Solution on Software Gone Wild

How do you capture all the flows entering or exiting a data center if your core Nexus 7000 switch cannot do it in hardware? You take an x86 server, load nProbe on it, and connect the nProbe to an analysis system built with ELK stack… at least that’s what Clay Curtis did (and documented in a blog post).

Obviously I wanted to know more about his solution and invited him to the Software Gone Wild podcast. In Episode 39 we discussed:

Read more ...

Even encrypted medical record databases leak information

A new study from Microsoft researchers warns that many types of databases used for electronic medical records are vulnerable to leaking information despite the use of encryption.The paper, due to be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security next month, shows how sensitive medical information on patients could be pilfered using four different attacks.Researchers discovered the sex, race, age and admission information, among other data, using real patient records from 200 U.S. hospitals.In the light of increasing cyberattacks against the health care industry, the researchers recommended that the systems they studied "should not be used in the context of" electronic medical records.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Networking Field Day 10 – Intel

Let me start this out by saying that I was thrilled to see Intel present at a NFD event!  While Intel is well known in the network space for their NICs, they are most well known for their powerful line of processors, boards, and controllers.  Most would argue that this doesn’t make them a ‘traditional’ network vendor but, as we all know, things are rapidly changing in the network space.  As more and more network processing moves from hardware to software the Intel’s of the world will have an increasingly large role to play in the network market.

Check out the following presentations they gave at the recent NFD10 event…

Intel Intro and Strategy

Intel Open Network Platform Solutions for NFV

Intel Software Defined Infrastructure: Tips, Tricks and Tools for Network Design and Optimization

Here are some of my thoughts on the presentations that I thought were worth highlighting…

The impact of software and NFV
Intel made some interesting observations comparing telco companies using big hardware to Google using SDN and NFV.  Most telco companies are still heavily reliant on big, high performance, hardware driven switches that can cost into the 10s of millions of dollars. Continue reading

Review: Rick and Morty

The best sci-fi on television right now is an animated series called Rick and Morty on the Cartoon Network.

You might dismiss it, as on the surface it appears to be yet another edgy, poorly-drawn cartoon like The Simpsons or South Park. And in many ways, it is. But at the same time, hard sci-fi concepts infuse each episode. Sometimes, it's a parody of well-known sci-fi, such as shrinking a ship to voyage through a body. In other cases, it's wholly original sci-fi, such as creating a parallel "micro" universe whose inhabitants power your car battery. At least I think it's original. It might be based on some obscure sci-fi story I haven't read. Also, the car battery episode is vaguely similar to William Gibson's latest cyberpunk book "The Peripheral".

My point is this. It's got that offensive South Park quality that I love, but mostly, what I really like about the series is its hard sci-fi stories, and the way it either parodies or laughs at them. I know that in next year's "Mad Kitties" slate, I'm definitely going to write in Rick and Morty for a Hugo Award.

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