China retains supercomputing crown in latest Top 500 ranking

A supercomputer developed by China’s National Defense University remains the fastest publically known computer in the world while the U.S. is close to an historic low in the latest edition of the closely followed Top 500 supercomputer ranking, which was published on Monday.The Tianhe-2 computer, based at the National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou, has been on the top of the list for more than two years and its maximum achieved performance of 33,863 teraflops per second is almost double that of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Cray Titan supercomputer, which is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.The IBM Sequoia computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the third fastest machine, and fourth on the list is the Fujitsu K computer at Japan’s Advanced Institute for Computational Science. The only new machine to enter the top 10 is the Shaheen II computer of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, which is ranked seventh.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Interviewing for the “Ideal Candidate”: Looking for “Nerdvana”

I was going through a stock photo website the other day and came across a “formula” that was supposed to equal the “perfect job candidate”.  I chuckled a little out loud.  The person sitting next to me looked over at what was on my laptop screen. Paused. Then asked me what I look for when […]

Author information

Denise "Fish" Fishburne

Denise "Fish" Fishburne
CPOC Engineer at Cisco Systems

Denise "Fish" Fishburne, (CCIE #2639, CCDE #2009:0014) is a team lead with Cisco's Customer Proof of Concept Lab in RTP, N.C. Fish loves playing in the lab, troubleshooting, learning, and passing it on. CLI girl living in a GUI world.

The post Interviewing for the “Ideal Candidate”: Looking for “Nerdvana” appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Denise "Fish" Fishburne.

It’s 2015: “Supports IPv6″ should mean full support

It’s 2015. ARIN is finally out of IPv4 addresses, more than 20% of Google users in the US are using IPv6…and vendors are still doing a half-assed job with IPv6 support. I purchased a new TP-Link Wi-Fi router/modem recently, and it doesn’t fully support IPv6. It’s not good enough, and I will be returning it.

I purchased the Archer D5 “AC1200 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit ADSL2+ Modem Router.” The website blurb includes this:

IPv6 Supported. The next generation of Internet protocol, helping you to future-proof your network.

And the specifications page says: “IPv6 and IPv4 dual stack.”

I checked the documentation for how to configure IPv6. This FAQ walks through configuring IPv6 on several TP-Link devices. Note that it includes this line “…choose Connection type (Here we just set up PPPoE as an example, if you are not sure, please contact your IPv6 provider)”

In New Zealand, most ADSL services are delivered as PPPoA. The specifications page says this device supports PPPoA. My ISP provides native IPv6 via DHCPv6 PD. So everything should be good to go, right?

Not so much. The Archer D5 does indeed support PPPoA. It also supports IPv6 with DHCPv6 PD. But it Continue reading

Leaked emails show Florida police interested in buying Hacking Team surveillance tech

“Developing the U.S. market. Well done,” reads an email from Hacking Team CEO David Vincenzetti dated on May 22. That comment was in regards to the Hacking Team meeting with the Florida Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation (MBI) in Orlando after the police agency expressed an interest in purchasing surveillance malware. MBI is a “a multi-agency task force that covers Orange and Osceola counties” and includes members from DEA, FBI, ICE, Secret Service and other agencies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Hacking Team Helped Italian Special Operations Group with BGP Routing Hijack

As part of the Hacking Team fall out and all the details published on wikileaks, it became public knowledge that Hacking Team helped one of their customers Special Operations Group (ROS), regain access to Remote Access Tool (RAT) clients. ROS recommended using BGP hijacking and Hacking Team helped with the setup of new RAT CnC servers.
In this post we’ll take a closer look at the exact details of this incident and support the wikileaks findings with BGP data.

Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale and Hacking Team
The Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale or ROS is the Special Operations Group of the Italian National Military police. The group focuses on investigating organized crime and terrorism. Hacking Team sells its RAT software known as Remote Control System (RCS) to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, ROS included.

ROS infected and installed the RCS client on the machines of persons of interest (referred to in the emails as targets). These Remote Access Tools can provide ROS with all kinds of information and typically provide the tool’s operator with full access over a victim’s machine. The RCS clients normally need to check in with a server —for example a machine the clients can get their commands (orders) from— Continue reading

MikroTik and Ubiquity routers being Hijacked by Dyre Malware?

 

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Came across several interesting articles that claim there is a change in the way Dyre aka Upatre malware is spreading. Dyre seems to be getting a lot of press as it is used in browser hijacks to compromise online banking credentials and other sensitive private data. However, most recently – instead of infecting hosts, it appears to be compromising routers as well.  Blogger krebsonsecurity.com writes:

Recently, researchers at the Fujitsu Security Operations Center in Warrington, UK began tracking Upatre being served from hundreds of compromised home routers — particularly routers powered by MikroTik and Ubiquiti’s AirOS.

As I first started researching this, I was wondering how they determined the router itself is compromised and not a host that sits on a NAT behind the router. Certainly different devices leave telltale signs visible in an IP packet capture that help point towards the true origin of a packet, so it’s possible that something was discovered in that way. It’s also possible the router isn’t being compromised via the Internet, but rather on the LAN side as it would be much easier for malware to scan the private subnet it sits on and attempt to use well known Continue reading

MikroTik and Ubiquity routers being Hijacked by Dyre Malware?

 

[adrotate banner=”4″]

 

Came across several interesting articles that claim there is a change in the way Dyre aka Upatre malware is spreading. Dyre seems to be getting a lot of press as it is used in browser hijacks to compromise online banking credentials and other sensitive private data. However, most recently – instead of infecting hosts, it appears to be compromising routers as well.  Blogger krebsonsecurity.com writes:

Recently, researchers at the Fujitsu Security Operations Center in Warrington, UK began tracking Upatre being served from hundreds of compromised home routers — particularly routers powered by MikroTik and Ubiquiti’s AirOS.

As I first started researching this, I was wondering how they determined the router itself is compromised and not a host that sits on a NAT behind the router. Certainly different devices leave telltale signs visible in an IP packet capture that help point towards the true origin of a packet, so it’s possible that something was discovered in that way. It’s also possible the router isn’t being compromised via the Internet, but rather on the LAN side as it would be much easier for malware to scan the private subnet it sits on and attempt to use well known Continue reading

Second Flash Player zero-day exploit found in Hacking Team’s data

The huge cache of files recently leaked from Italian surveillance software maker Hacking Team is the gift that keeps on giving for attackers. Researchers sifting through the data found a new exploit for a previously unknown vulnerability in Adobe’s Flash Player.This is the second Flash Player zero-day exploit discovered among the files and the third overall—researchers also found a zero-day exploit for a vulnerability in Windows.A zero-day exploit is a previously unknown vulnerability for which a patch does not exist.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware NSX 101 – Components

Today I want to explain the basic components and the set-up of VMware NSX. In this case I’m referring to NSX for vSphere or NSX-V for short. I want to explain what components are involved, how you set them up for an initial deployment and what the requirements are.

Versioning

At time of this writing the latest release is NSX 6.1.4. This version added support for vSphere 6, although you cannot use any vSphere 6 feature in this release, there is support for the platform itself only.

vSphere

The first step is of course deploy your ESXi vSphere cluster with ESXi 5.5 or 6.0 with vCenter 5.5 or 6.0. I recommend using the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) instead of the Windows version. You will also need a Windows VM where the vSphere Update Manager is installed, this is not available as virtual appliance, only as Windows application. I also highly recommend installing an Active Directory server to manage all of your passwords. You will be installing a large amount of machines with all different usernames and possibly passwords. I recommend picking a very long and difficult one, as all VMware appliances seem to require Continue reading

Static routes

OpenContrail allows the user to specify a static route with a next-hop of an instance interface. The route is advertised within the virtual-network that the interface is associated with. This script can be used to manipulate the static routes configured on an interface.

I wrote it in order to setup a cluster in which overlay networks are used hierarchically. The bare-metal nodes are running OpenStack using OpenContrail as the neutron plugin; a set of OpenStack VMs are running a second overlay network using OpenContrail which kubernetes as the compute scheduler.

In order to provide external access for the kubernetes cluster, one of the kubernetes node VMs was configured as an OpenContrail software gateway.

This is easily achievable by editing /etc/contrail/contrail-vrouter-agent.conf to include the following snippet:

# Name of the routing_instance for which the gateway is being configured
routing_instance=default-domain:default-project:Public:Public

# Gateway interface name
interface=vgw

# Virtual network ip blocks for which gateway service is required. Each IP
# block is represented as ip/prefix. Multiple IP blocks are represented by
# separating each with a space
ip_blocks=10.1.4.0/24

The vow interface can then be created via the following sequence of shell commands:

ip link add vgw type vhost
ip  Continue reading

Citizens of Tech 010 – Vinyl Glacier Robot Earthquakes

On today’s show recorded July 8th, 2015, we cover news from Amazon, review a cheap IP surveillance camera, dive deep on retina displays and how your eyeballs work, and do not discover extraterrestrial life. Also, robots duel, and glaciers cause earthquakes. Among other things!

Author information

Ethan Banks

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 3M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks

The post Citizens of Tech 010 – Vinyl Glacier Robot Earthquakes appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

The grim reaper approaches for Windows Server 2003

Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 has its Windows XP moment coming very soon, and that’s bad news for IT leaders who have been dragging their feet.The company will end extended support for the 12-year-old operating system on July 14. That will leave users without security patches and other updates for any applications still running on the OS, which went out to manufacturers just weeks after the start of the second Iraq war. Microsoft says there were almost 24 million instances of Windows Server 2003 running in July 2014, though it hasn’t released more recent numbers as the end-of-support date has loomed.According to Mike Schutz, Microsoft’s general manager of cloud platform marketing, the good news is that most of the customers Microsoft has spoken with have moved “the vast percentage” of their server workloads off Windows Server 2003. But that still means that there are holdouts who will be left to protect their own servers as Microsoft cuts off security improvements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reddit chief Ellen Pao resigns amid vitriol, protests

Ellen Pao is resigning as Reddit’s interim chief executive after a week of tumult on the online message board with many users calling for her ouster.Pao is resigning under a mutual agreement with Reddit’s board, the company announced. She will be succeeded by Steve Huffman , Reddit’s co-founder and original chief executive, who will work alongside Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.Pao leaves the company after a storm of furor from users after Reddit’s termination of Victoria Taylor, a key employee who helped facilitate Reddit’s popular Ask Me Anything sessions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Plexxi Pulse – Bimodal IT: The future of network disruption?

Gartner refers to bimodal IT as “having two modes of IT, each designed to develop and deliver information- and technology-intensive services in its own way.”

If this week’s top articles are any indication, it’s certainly a topic that is at forefront everyone’s minds. We’ve especially been enjoying Kurt Marko’s series for Forbes. For some, bimodal is just another buzzword, but for others, it presents an entirely new way of approaching IT. It disrupts legacy IT, offering groundbreaking tactics for testing and rolling-out new technologies. No other area of IT needs this more than the network. As we’ve frequently discussed, storage and compute have evolved rapidly over the last decade, but networking has remained unchanged – despite huge shifts in the way we manage and move information. The articles below are certainly a good start to a lengthy discussion. Enjoy!

 

Forbes: Bimodal IT Doesn’t Mean Bipolar Organizations: The Path to IT Transformation

By Kurt Marko

Never underestimate a buzzword’s power to frame the discussion. As I recently discussed, the term bimodal IT has captured the imagination and polemical energy of technology commentators and like many IT discussions in the age of 140-character commentary, it often degenerates into polarized, all-or-nothing Continue reading

OPM director resigns after unprecedented data breach

The director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management resigned on Friday, a day after her agency announced hackers had stolen information on 21.5 million current, former and prospective government employees and their families.Katherine Archuleta said she had informed President Barack Obama of her plans to step down, and he had accepted her resignation.“I conveyed to the President that I believe it is best for me to step aside and allow new leadership to step in, enabling the agency to move beyond the current challenges and allowing the employees at OPM to continue their important work,” she said in an email to employees.Archuleta had been at the agency for less than two years, joining in November 2013 at about the time the agency began an upgrade of its cyberdefenses. It was as part of that upgrade that it discovered two separate ongoing breaches that, investigators concluded, were unprecedented in their size and seriousness.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here