Simple Helix chooses CloudFlare to ignite white-hot Magento performance

Today’s guest blogger is George Cagle. George is a system administrator at Simple Helix, a CloudFlare partner.

Some months ago, we made a big bet on partnering with CloudFlare for performance improvements and website security for our Magento hosting customers. Customer experience is core to our business and relying on another company is a major deal. CloudFlare is now included in Default–On mode for select Simple Helix hosting plans and can be added to any existing plan. The results have been great and we wanted to share a couple successes with the rest of the CloudFlare community.

Testing the waters

The first thing one notices after melding their site with the worldwide CloudFlare CDN network is just how fast a website becomes. In Simple Helix’s testing, we found that proper CloudFlare implementation can yield 100% speed increases, and an even faster 143% speed increase when paired with the Railgun™ web optimizer for dynamic content.

Adding CloudFlare will certainly improve performance, but it can also significantly improve security through the Web Application Firewall feature. The security benefits of having the CloudFlare service can be seen after just the first few days of adoption as outlined below:

 Total number of threats mitigated Continue reading

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Popular Belkin Wi-Fi routers plagued by unpatched security flaws

If your Wi-Fi network is using the popular Belkin N600 DB router, be warned: it may have several vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to take it over.Remote unauthenticated attackers could exploit the vulnerabilities to spoof DNS (Domain Name System) responses and direct users to rogue websites or trick users' browsers to change the device configuration, the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) at Carnegie Mellon University said Monday in an advisory.Furthermore, attackers with access to the local area network could bypass an affected router's authentication and take complete control over it, CERT/CC said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybercrooks quickly bypass Adobe Flash Player’s improved security protections

As of today, Google's Chrome browser will automatically pause ads that use Flash by default. Most Flash ads were converted to HTML5 and those HTML5 ads will still work. Flash can quickly suck the power from a laptop battery, but even worse is the never-ending supply of Flash vulnerabilities.Supposedly, the version of Flash Player released in July had "additional protections to make entire classes of security flaws much harder to exploit in the future." The future is now then, because cybercriminals have wasted no time circumventing those extra security protections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ericsson’s next-gen LTE targets faster mobile networks and IoT

Ericsson is working on LTE with faster upload speeds, as well as using unlicensed spectrum to speed up downloads and customizing the technology for Internet of Things applications.The Swedish telecom equipment vendor is showing off some of the developments at the CTIA Super Mobility conference next week in Las Vegas.5G will likely be one of the hottest topics at CTIA, but LTE still has lots mileage left -- after all, the first two letters stand for Long Term. And it’s a lot easier to upgrade an existing network than roll out a new one.One of the more contentious upgrades is using unlicensed spectrum for LTE. Detractors fear it will affect Wi-Fi performance, which uses the same frequencies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Employees are Human Beings

Employees are human beings. They devote their lives to creating value for customers, shareholders, and colleagues. And, in return, at least in theory, they share in the rewards of the value created by their team. via linkedin


This is one of those places where I agree with the point the author is making, but I don’t really agree with the path they chose to get there… The bottom line problem is this—government, companies, and even individuals (yes, that means you and I) tend to slip into a mode of treating people as objects which either cost something, or produce something. From many perspectives, it’s easy to treat people as units of information, work, cost, etc.—but when you cross the line from using this as a useful abstraction to actually seeing people as an abstraction, then you’ve cross a line you shouldn’t be crossing.

The post Worth Reading: Employees are Human Beings appeared first on 'net work.

Intel says GPU malware is no reason to panic, yet

Malware that runs inside GPUs (graphics processing units) can be harder to detect, but is not completely invisible to security products.Researchers from Intel division McAfee Labs teamed up with members of Intel's Visual and Parallel Computing Group to analyze a proof-of-concept GPU malware program dubbed JellyFish that was released in March.Their conclusion, which was included in McAfee's latest quarterly threat report, is that running malicious code inside GPUs still has significant drawbacks and is not nearly as stealthy as its developers suggested.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Blame Pipeline

wc_pipeline sketch

Talk to any modern IT person about shifting the landscape of how teams work and I can guarantee you that you’ll hear a bit about DevOps as well as “siloed” organizational structures. Fingers get pointed in all directions as to the real culprit behind dysfunctional architecture. Perhaps changing the silo term to something more appropriate will help organizations sort out where the real issues lie.

You Dropped A Bomb On Me

Silos, or stovepipes, are an artifact of reporting structures of days gone by. Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) has a great piece on the evils of ITIL. In it, he talks about how the silo structure creates blame passing issues and lack of responsibility for problem determination and solving.

I think Greg is spot on here. But I also think that the love of blame extends in the other direction too. It is one thing to have the storage team telling everyone that the arrays are working so it’s not their problem. It’s another issue entirely when the CxO-level folks come down from the High Holy Boardroom to hunt for heads when something goes wrong. They aren’t looking to root out the cause of the issue. They want someone Continue reading

DARPA looking to sling and recover drones from aircraft motherships

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is moving forward with a program that will launch and recover volleys of small unmanned aircraft from one or more existing large airplanes such as B-52s, B-1s or C-130s.The Gremlins program has as a goal to launch groups of drones or gremlins from large aircraft such as bombers or transport aircraft, as well as from fighters and other small, fixed-wing platforms while those planes are out of range of adversary defenses. When the gremlins complete their mission, a C-130 transport aircraft would retrieve them in the air and carry them home, where ground crews would prepare them for their next use within 24 hours, DARPA said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel: Criminals getting better at data exfiltration

Enterprises tend to be highly focused on keeping attackers out of their systems, but most of the actual damage happens not when the bad guys first break in, but when they're able to successfully steal data -- and the techniques they're using to do this are getting steadily more sophisticated.One of the ways that attackers evade detection is to disguize the data before sending it out, according to a new report from Intel Security."They are compressing the data so that it's smaller in size, or making it look like something else," said Intel Security CTO Steve Grobman. "Or they cut it up into little pieces and send the pieces to different places, so that the attacker can then pick up all the chunks and reassemble them."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Web’s ten most dangerous neighborhoods

Wouldn't it be convenient if all the spam and malware sites were all grouped together under one top-level domain -- .evil, say -- so that they would be easy to avoid? According to a new study from Blue Coat, there are in fact ten such top-level domains, where 95 percent or more of sites pose a potential threat to visitors.The worst offenders were the .zip and the .review top-level domains, with 100 percent of all sites rated as "shady," according to the report.The report is based on an analysis of tens of millions of websites visited by Blue Coat's 75 million global users. In order to protect its customers, Blue Coat has a database where it ranks websites on whether they have legitimate content, or malware, spam, scams, phishing attacks or other suspicious behaviors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Global Village Idiot

I recall from some years back, when we were debating in Australia some national Internet censorship proposal de jour, that if the Internet represented a new Global Village then Australia was trying very hard to position itself as the Global Village Idiot. And the current situation with Australia’s new Data Retention laws may well support a case for reviving that sentiment.

Bought a brand-new phone? It could still have malware

A new phone is supposed to be a clean slate. But alarmingly, that's not always the case.Security company G Data has identified more than 20 mobile phones that have malware installed despite being marketed as new, according to a research report. And it doesn't appear the infection is occurring during manufacturing."Somebody is unlocking the phone and putting the malware on there and relocking the phone," said Andy Hayter, security evangelist for G Data.Many of the suspect phones are sold in Asia and Europe through third parties or middleman and aren't coming directly from the manufacturers, Hayter said.Brands of affected phones include Xiaomi, Huawei, Lenovo, Alps, ConCorde, DJC, Sesonn and Xido.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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