Packets of Interest (2015-07-24)

I've been doing a lot of reading and video watching on securing industrial control and automation systems (ICAS) (sometimes referred to as SCADA systems) so this POI has a few links related to that and ends with a link to an editorial piece about privacy and why privacy matters to us all.

Amazon posts a profit as AWS sales nearly double

Cloud services continue to grow by leaps and bounds for Amazon.com.The company reported that Amazon Web Services generated $1.8 billion in sales in the second quarter, up about 80 percent from the $1 billion it brought in a year earlier.That helped Amazon achieve a profit of $92 million, a turnaround from its loss of $126 million in last year’s second quarter.Overall revenue grew by 20 percent, reaching $23.18 billion.Amazon offers an increasingly broad range of products and services, including an e-commerce site, video streaming, cloud computing, ebook readers, tablets and phones.The company continues to briskly roll out new online services. During this last quarter, it launched Amazon Business, an e-commerce portal for businesses, as well as Amazon Mexico, a version of its e-commerce site specifically for that country. It also introduced the Amazon Echo, a voice-controlled device for ordering Amazon products or playing music and audio news.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HTIRW: NOG World

NOGs and other NOGs, they sit on logs… Looking at the Internet from the outside, it might almost seem like it runs just on standards bodies, vendors, and providers. But these three groups, as important as they are, really only scratch the surface of the sinews that keep the Internet operating. At the core of […]

Author information

Russ White

Principal Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White has scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, nibbled and noodled at a lot of networks, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about — or don't really care about. You can find Russ at 'net Work, the Internet Protocol Journal, LinkedIn, and his author page on Amazon.
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The post HTIRW: NOG World appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.

HP study finds smartwatches could do more to keep user data safe

Smartwatches are failing people at keeping their data safe and protecting them from hackers.Those are the findings of a study from Hewlett-Packard, whose Fortify on Demand security division tested 10 popular smartwatches. The company is in the process of alerting vendors about the flaws and can’t disclose the watches it tested, said Daniel Miessler, practice principal at HP.HP also examined the security around the Web interfaces and mobile apps that accompany smartwatches and allow a person to access the device as well as how data gathered by watch apps is protected and used.The study found vulnerabilities with each of the watches and raised concerns over user authentication methods, data encryption and data privacy, among other issues.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Datanauts 004 – The Silo Series – Provisioning Perspectives

Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks bust IT silos by walking through a service request at a fictional corporation. They outline the steps required from network and server domains, providing context to help each group understand what the other is trying to accomplish. The result? A more effective team.

The post Datanauts 004 – The Silo Series – Provisioning Perspectives appeared first on Packet Pushers.

YouTube cofounder endorses paid version

As Google prepares to launch a subscription version of YouTube, the move has been endorsed by at least one interested party: YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley.YouTube has grown massively since its launch in 2005 and its acquisition a year later by Google. But to support its continued growth, the site needs to provide the right tools for people to create and post videos, even if that might result in a cost to users, Hurley said.“You have different forms of [video on demand],” he said, suggesting that some might be worth paying for. YouTube needs tools to help people create better content, determine how to make money from their video, and charge subscribers, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Blackberry delves deeper into security with AtHoc purchase

BlackBerry continues to shift its focus from selling mobile phones to securing them—as well as other portable devices, and increasingly connected items that are part of the Internet of things.“All of our investments and acquisitions go to one thing, to make the most secure mobile platform that the industry has to offer,” said John Chen, BlackBerry executive chairman and CEO, kicking off a morning of presentations at the company-sponsored BlackBerry Security Summit, held Thursday in New York.BlackBerry still sells handsets, but, to judge from the day’s presentations, it clearly sees a brighter future now in enterprise mobile security, where it can best leverage its remaining strengths in the market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Datanauts 004 – The Silo Series – Provisioning Perspectives

Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks bust IT silos by walking through a service request at a fictional corporation. They outline the steps required from network and server domains, providing context to help each group understand what the other is trying to accomplish. The result? A more effective team.

Author information

Drew Conry-Murray

I'm a tech journalist, editor, and content director with 17 years' experience covering the IT industry. I'm author of the book "The Symantec Guide To Home Internet Security" and co-author of the post-apocalyptic novel "Wasteland Blues," available at Amazon.
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The post Datanauts 004 – The Silo Series – Provisioning Perspectives appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Drew Conry-Murray.

Threat or menace?: Gaging electromagnetic risks to the electric grid

The United States is sorely unprepared for electromagnetic threats – which could originate in space from the Sun or a terrorist nuclear device exploded in the atmosphere -- to the nation’s electric grid.That was the main conclusion from a number of experts testifying before a Senate committee hearing entitled “Protecting the Electric Grid from the Potential Threats of Solar Storms and Electromagnetic Pulse” this week.+More on Network World: NASA’s cool, radical and visionary concepts+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Introducing Partner Analytics

CloudFlare has over 5,000 partner hosting providers. Every day, thousands of our partners' customers take advantage of CloudFlare to help them be faster and more secure. The benefits to our partners aren't just happier customers, they also translate into real savings. In the last month, for instance, we saved our partners more than 25 Petabytes in aggregate bandwidth. In addition to bandwidth savings, in that same period, we stopped more than 65 billion malicious requests that would have otherwise impacted our partners' infrastructure. Now we've broken out the bandwidth and performance data by partners so they can see the savings and protection we're delivering.

Back when we launched the CloudFlare Partner Program four years ago, we periodically distributed these figures as high level summaries of bandwidth saved, threats blocked, and number of domains protected and accelerated via each partnership. Our partners knew anecdotally from their own logs and operating expenditures that CloudFlare was reducing their costs and greatly improving their customers’ experiences, but we did not yet have the tools to help demonstrate these benefits on a repeatable and granular basis.

It wasn’t that we didn’t want to provide this data, it was that our tremendous growth rate had stretched Continue reading

Researchers disclose four unpatched vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer

Security researchers published limited details about four unpatched vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer because Microsoft has not moved quickly enough to fix them.The flaws could potentially be exploited to execute malicious code on computers when users visit compromised websites or open specially crafted documents. They were reported through Hewlett-Packard’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) program.HP’s TippingPoint division, which sells network security products, pays researchers for information on unpatched high-risk vulnerabilities in popular software. The company uses the information to create detection signatures, giving it a competitive advantage, but also reports the flaws to the affected vendors so they can be fixed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google lures businesses to Nearline with 100 PB of free cloud storage

Google had its sights fixed firmly on Amazon Thursday as it launched its new, low-cost Nearline cloud storage service out of beta and into general availability.Originally introduced to much fanfare in March, Cloud Storage Nearline now promises 99 percent uptime, on-demand I/O, lifecycle management and a broadly expanded partner ecosystem. Aiming to further sweeten the deal for companies currently using other providers, Google is now offering the service with 100 free petabytes of storage—equivalent to 100 million gigabytes—for new users for up to six months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google: Users still aren’t getting message about online security

Google researchers say that experts and non-experts go about protecting their digital privacy in very different ways, according to survey results they plan to present at the upcoming Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.The importance of regular software updates is apparently lost on a large proportion of Internet users who aren’t security experts, the survey found. Just 2% of non-experts said that routinely patching software was high on their list of security priorities, compared to 35% of experts.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Hacker: 'Hundreds of thousands' of vehicles are at risk of attack | How to check if you've been attacked by Hacking Team intrusion malware +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Simplify the process and cut the cost of data migration and data acceleration

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  From time to time, companies must undertake a data migration project for one reason or another. Perhaps it's to consolidate data onto a single platform after a merger or acquisition, or to accommodate an application upgrade or consolidation. Migrating away from legacy systems is another popular reason to move data around. Whatever the motivation, a data migration project is no fun.In the years 2000, 2007 and 2011, Bloor Research undertook research studies on the costs and challenges of data migrations. Their 2011 study showed that the average budget for a data migration project is $875,000. Despite spending that kind of money, only 62% of such projects were brought in "on time and on budget." The average cost of budget overruns is $268,000. One of Bloor's recommendations for achieving the greatest chance of success with a project is to have a dedicated internal competency center or team specializing in data migration. Even with that, success is not guaranteed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WordPress gets patch for critical XSS flaw

Developers of the popular WordPress blogging platform have released a critical security update to fix a vulnerability that can be exploited to take over websites.WordPress 4.2.3, released Thursday, resolves a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could allow users with the Contributor or Author roles to compromise a website, said Gary Pendergast, a member of the WordPress team, in a blog post.While this is not as critical as a flaw that can be exploited without authentication, it still poses a high risk for many websites because the compromise of a single non-administrator user account can turn into a complete website takeover.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC ruling could finally make telecoms eradicate ‘robocalls’

I don't want to seem cranky or brash, but I really wish "Rachel" would stop calling me. Remember Rachel? That feminine voice on the other end of those "robocalls," telling you she's from cardholder services, a non-existent outfit that tries to scam the unsuspecting? Despite millions of complaints from consumers on the receiving end of unwanted telemarketing calls, the big phone companies are unwilling to use readily available technology to block them. This week, the attorneys general (AGs) of 44 states and Washington D.C. wrote a letter to the CEOs of five major telecommunications companies (AT&T, CenturyLink, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon) to tell them to cut off Rachel and her obnoxious cohorts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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