Patch halt looms for half of all IE users

With just over four months left before Microsoft stops serving security updates to most versions of Internet Explorer (IE) other than IE11, nearly half of all IE users are still running a soon-to-be-retired edition, new data released Saturday showed.In August 2014, Microsoft abruptly told virtually all IE users that they needed to be running IE11 by Jan. 12, 2016, or face a shut-off of security updates. After that date, Microsoft will support IE9 only on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008; IE10 only on Windows Server 2012; and only IE11 on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hello Windows 10. Hello Criminals.

It’s not really surprising that scammers are taking advantage of Microsoft’s consumer release of Windows 10. According to security firm KnowBe4:  Major Operating System upgrades are usually causing confusion among end-users and the current Windows 10 upgrade is no exception. The bad guys exploit these confusions in several ways, mostly through massive phishing campaigns and with criminal call-center operations which claim to be Microsoft tech support. Some campaigns will try to worry the user that their PC has changed somehow, causing access issues. Other phishing emails will try to lure the user with links where they can get their new no-charge version of Windows 10, or have it "attached" in a zipped file, which makes it our Scam Of The Week, because the attachment is the CBT-Locker ransomware!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

It’s About Time

I guess I’m semi-famous. Or maybe I’m a moderately sized fish in a rather small bowl. Whatever the reason, a lot of people reach out to me for career advice. Which is okay, of course — I make it a personal policy to answer every email that’s addressed to me, individually, that I receive. It only takes a minute or two, after all, and it drives me nuts when I send an email to someone that seems to go into a black hole. I try not to be the person that drives me nuts. :-)

So a couple of times a week, I open my inbox to find either an email or a message through some social network (the only social networks I actively use, by the way, are Twitter and LinkedIn, so if you friend me on Facebook, or send me an invite to something else, I’m not likely to accept) asking some variation of a couple of questions. The one I want to address in this post is probably the hardest to answer.

How can I become an architect/really good engineer/really good writer/really successful/etc.?

The snark inside me just wants to answer, “just change your title on LinkedIn, that’s Continue reading

iPexpert’s Newest “CCIE Wall of Fame” Additions 8/1/2015

Please join us in congratulating the following iPexpert students who have passed their CCIE lab!

This Week’s CCIE Success Stories

  • Victor Yin, CCIE #49618 (Collaboration)
  • Christopher Bacon, CCIE #49617 (Route/Switch)
  • Majed Al-Logman, CCIE #49639 (Wireless)

We Want to Hear From You!

Have you passed your CCIE lab exam and used any of iPexpert’s self-study products, or attended a CCIE Bootcamp? If so, we’d like to add you to our CCIE Wall of Fame!

Worth Reading: Access Control with Segmentation

When you couple software-defined segmentation with an intelligent planning and implementation methodology, you get active segmentation. This approach to segmentation allows network operators to effectively cordon off critical network assets and limit access appropriately with minimal disruption to normal business functions. via the Cloud Security Alliance

The post Worth Reading: Access Control with Segmentation appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Outsourcing

And my second point is even more important: know the allegiance of your outsourcer. The key issue with outsourcing IT is this — who does your IT staff work FOR? via Cringley


This is a point that many people don’t get — if all businesses are data businesses (and they are, despite the constant refrain I’ve heard throughout my career that “we don’t make technology, here, so…”), then all the data, and all the analysis you do on that data, is just like the famous Coke recipe.

Know data, know your business. No data, no business.

It’s really that simple. When will we learn — and take this idea seriously? And when will we realize this rule applies to the network as well as the data in many cases?

The post Worth Reading: Outsourcing appeared first on 'net work.

Quick and dirty annotations for Go stack traces

CloudFlare’s DNS server, RRDNS, is entirely written in Go and typically runs tens of thousands goroutines. Since goroutines are cheap and Go I/O is blocking we run one goroutine per file descriptor we listen on and queue new packets for processing.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by wiredforlego

When there are thousands of goroutines running, debug output quickly becomes difficult to interpret. For example, last week I was tracking down a problem with a file descriptor and wanted to know what its listening goroutine was doing. With 40k stack traces, good luck figuring out which one is having trouble.

Go stack traces include parameter values, but most Go types are (or are implemented as) pointers, so what you will see passed to the goroutine function is just a meaningless memory address.

We have a couple options to make sense of the addresses: get a heap dump at the same time as the stack trace and cross-reference the pointers, or have a debug endpoint that prints a goroutine/pointer -> IP map. Neither are seamless.

Underscore to the rescue

However, we know that integers are shown in traces, so what we did is first convert IPv4 addresses to their uint32 Continue reading

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, Aug. 3

Attacked then abandoned in Philadelphia, Hitchbot’s attempt to thumb a lift across the U.S. ends in disasterA robot that counted on the kindness of strangers to help it travel around the world has met a cruel fate in Philadelphia, barely three weeks into an attempt to hitch-hike across the U.S. Hitchbot, developed by robotics researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, had already hitch-hiked successfully across Canada and Germany, but U.S. residents turned out to be less welcoming, AP reports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, Aug. 3

Attacked then abandoned in Philadelphia, Hitchbot’s attempt to thumb a lift across the U.S. ends in disasterA robot that counted on the kindness of strangers to help it travel around the world has met a cruel fate in Philadelphia, barely three weeks into an attempt to hitch-hike across the U.S. Hitchbot, developed by robotics researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, had already hitch-hiked successfully across Canada and Germany, but U.S. residents turned out to be less welcoming, AP reports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A secure employee departure checklist

Employee exitImage by ThinkstockA certain amount of employee turnover is a natural part of any organization’s life cycle. With each departure, whether the employee was entry-level or an executive, every organization should have a comprehensive process in place to facilitate the employee’s exit, while protecting the company’s information and securing the network and computer system accounts. Laura Iwan, Senior Vice President of Programs at the Center for Internet Security, has compiled these tips to help avoid any issues when an employee leaves the company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

T-Mobile caught in crossfire of injected ad war with Flash Networks

LAS VEGAS - An ongoing conflict between website owners and ad injectors who place unwanted ads on those websites has just flared up into full-blown war, with advertisers and carriers caught in the crossfire.Take, for example, T-Mobile, which is proudly named as a customer by Flash Networks, a company that brags about creating "new monetization opportunities" for mobile operators when it "inserts the most relevant engagement display into the selected webpages."This seems to have been a surprise to T-Mobile. Cynthia Lee, the company's senior digital media manager, adamantly denied that T-Mobile was using Flash Networks to inject ads into webpages it was serving up to mobile customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Automating Intelligence: Discovering Recent PlugX Campaigns Programmatically

One of the hardest things to do when you are receiving malware that have “anonymized” (e.g. name-is-hash) names or general samples that lack any indication of the infection vector is to determine the origin of the file and its intended target. Even harder is when you do not receive telemetry data from products that contains information about infected machines. To that end, I have been working on automating ways to help ASERT better understand the context around samples so we can answer question about what may have been targeted, why it was targeted and when it was targeted. This post will use the PlugX malware as an example (PlugX is well known and has had its various iterations analyzed many times), due in part to its ongoing activity and will focus on  leveraging metadata from VirusTotal due to it being publicly accessible.

The How

Automation is king when processing malware and getting the configuration out of samples without analyst intervention is always ideal and we prefer to treat our various sandbox platforms as black boxes and extract what we can from them before doing our own normalization and post-processing tasks to collate all the information into our internal malware analysis system and Continue reading

China clamps down on exports of drones and supercomputers

China plans to limit exports of advanced drones and supercomputers for national security reasons.The new export controls on certain drone and high-performance computing technologies will come into effect Aug. 15, Chinese government regulators said Friday. Affected vendors will have to apply for a government permit to ship their technology outside China.The regulations target more advanced drones that can be flown for at least an hour, “beyond the natural sight of the operator” and function more as an unmanned aerial vehicles.Shenzhen-based DJI, a major Chinese builder of drones, seems confident the new export controls won’t disrupt its business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sorriest technology companies of 2015

Sorry situationImage by ThinkstockDespite all the technology advances that have rolled out this year, it’s also been a sorry state of affairs among leading network and computing vendors, along with businesses that rely heavily on technology. Apple, Google, airlines and more have issued tech-related mea culpas in 2015…To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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