Building Globally Distributed, Mission Critical Applications: Lessons From the Trenches Part 2

This is Part 2 of a guest post by Kris Beevers, founder and CEO, NSONE, a purveyor of a next-gen intelligent DNS and traffic management platform. Here's Part 1.

Integration and functional testing is crucial

Unit testing is hammered home in every modern software development class.  It’s good practice. Whether you’re doing test-driven development or just banging out code, without unit tests you can’t be sure a piece of code will do what it’s supposed to unless you test it carefully, and ensure those tests keep passing as your code evolves.

In a distributed application, your systems will break even if you have the world’s best unit testing coverage. Unit testing is not enough.

You need to test the interactions between your subsystems. What if a particular piece of configuration data changes – how does that impact Subsystem A’s communication with Subsystem B? What if you changed a message format – do all the subsystems generating and handling those messages continue to talk with each other? Does a particular kind of request that depends on results from four different backend subsystems still result in a correct response after your latest code changes?

Unit tests don’t answer these questions, Continue reading

Despite reports of hacking, baby monitors remain woefully insecure

Disturbing reports in recent years of hackers hijacking baby monitors and screaming at children have creeped out parents, but these incidents apparently haven't spooked makers of these devices.A security analysis of nine baby monitors from different manufacturers revealed serious vulnerabilities and design flaws that could allow hackers to hijack their video feeds or take full control of the devices.The tests were performed by researchers from security firm Rapid7 during the first half of this year and the results were released Tuesday in a white paper. On a scale from A to F that rated their security functionality and implementation, eight of the devices received an F and one a D.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The RMS Titanic and cybersecurity

Little known fact: Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of Bob Ballard’s discovery of the RMS Titanic, several hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland Canada. I’ve recently done some research into the ship, its builders, and its ultimate fate and believe that lessons learned from Titanic may be useful for the cybersecurity community at large. The Titanic tragedy teaches us of: The dangers of technology hubris. The Titanic was designed with the latest technology at the time to withstand severe storms in the north Atlantic. Because of this, the shipbuilders at Harland and Wolff decided to market the ship as “unsinkable.” Likewise, our industry has this absolute love affair with technology. I’m constantly briefed on the latest and greatest prevention or detection engine designed to withstand anything hackers can throw at it. Like the “unsinkable” Titanic, this is nothing but hot air. Bad guys will find ways around all of our defenses over time. Strong security demands people, process, and technology so the industry love affair with technology alone is counterproductive and leaves us susceptible to a sea of cybersecurity icebergs. The need for organizational coordination. There were two inquiries into the Titanic disaster, one in the U.S. Continue reading

How to get security right when embracing rapid software development

Accelerated software development brings with it particular advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, it increases the speed to market and allows for fast, frequent code releases, which trump slow, carefully planned ones that unleash a torrent of features at once. Continuous release cycles also allow teams to fine-tune software. With continuous updates, customers don’t have to wait for big releases that could take weeks or months.

Embracing failure without blame is also a key tenet of rapid acceleration. Teams grow faster this way, and management should embrace this culture change. Those who contribute to accidents can give detailed accounts of what happened without fear of repercussion, providing valuable learning opportunities for all involved.

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

Check Point’s SandBlast sandbox spells R.I.P for ROP attacks

Check Point is upgrading its sandboxing technology so it catches attacks earlier in the process and makes it harder for adversaries to evade detection.Called SandBlast, the new software monitors CPU activity looking for anomalies that indicate that attackers are using sophisticated methods that would go unnoticed with traditional sandboxing technology, according to Nathan Shuchami, head of threat prevention sales for Check Point.Traditional sandboxes, including Check Point’s, determine whether files are legitimate by opening them in a virtual environment to see what they do. To get past the sandboxes attackers have devised evasion techniques, such as delaying execution until the sandbox has given up or lying dormant until the machine it’s trying to infect reboots.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Automating New Network Build – Part 2 (BGP)

In this post we’ll have a look at how to automate a typical BGP setup. This is where configuration may get particularly messy especially in presence of backdoor links and complex routing failover policies. However, as I will show, it is still possible to create a standard set of routing manipulation policies and selectively apply them to the required adjacencies to achieve the desired effect.

Continue reading

Micromanaging networks considered harmful: on (k)nerd knobs

Nerd Knobs (or as we used to call them in TAC, knerd knobs) are the bane of the support engineer’s life. Well, that and crashes. And customer who call in with a decoded stack trace. Or don’t know where to put the floppy disc that came with the router into the router. But, anyway…

What is it with nerd knobs? Ivan has a great piece up this week on the topic. I think this is the closest he gets to what I think of as the real root cause for nerd knobs —

Instead of using cookie-cutter designs, we prefer to carefully craft unique snowflakes that magically integrate the legacy stuff that should have been dead years ago with the next-generation technologies… and every unique snowflake needs at least a nerd knob or two to make it work.

Greg has a response to Ivan up; again, I think he gets close to the problem with these thoughts —

Most IT managers have lost the ability to recognise technical debt and its impacts … Nerd Knobs are symptoms of much deeper problems/technical debt in the networking market and treat the cause not the symptom.

A somewhat orthogonal article caught my eye, Continue reading

Intel’s pint-sized Compute Stick PC powered up with Core M processor

Intel announced a Core M-based version of its Compute Stick pocket PC at the IFA show, part of a small coterie of unexpected announcements Intel made at the trade show here.As expected, Intel formally announced Skylake, its sixth-generation Core processor. Kirk Skaugen, a senior vice president at Intel, called the chip its “best processor ever.”Skylake can scale from over 90 watts down to just 4.5 watts, the power consumed by the Core M, now rebranded as the Core m. That makes it ideal for two-in-ones and even tiny devices like Intel’s Compute Stick, which had used an earlier version of Intel’s Atom processor when it debuted. Intel didn’t announce a price or a ship date for the new Compute Stick, however.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How CISOs can beat the information security skills-gap

The information security skills gap may have become a huge issue for Chief Security Offices (CSOs) and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), but there are a number of ways InfoSec teams can work around the shortage so to protect their networks and stay ahead of the attackers. Outsourcing staff When people think of outsourcing, they often think of outsourcing services. A company may, for example, choose to outsource its accounting, customer management, or recruitment. However, it’s worth noting that you can also outsource talent and this is a poignant note for an understaffed and under-skilled security industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Study: 81% of large health care organizations breached

In the past two years, 81 percent of hospitals and health insurance companies have had a data breach, according to a report released by KPMG."These are all incidents where they have determined they lost data," said Greg Bell, Cyber US Leader at KPMG. "This wasn't just a malware or a virus infection -- it actually went to exfiltration."The study surveyed 223 senior technology and security executives at health care organizations with over $500 million in annual revenues.However, only 66 percent of the insurance executives and 53 percent of hospital executives said they said that they were prepared for an attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Employees put business data at risk by installing gambling apps on their phones

If you work for a large, global company, chances are some of your peers have installed gambling apps on the mobile devices they use for work, and that's bad news for IT security.A study has found that the average company has more than one such gambling application in some employee devices, putting corporate data stored on those devices at risk.The analysis was performed by security firm Veracode, which scanned hundreds of thousands of mobile apps installed in corporate mobile environments. The study found that some companies had as many as 35 mobile gambling apps on their network environment.The company tested some of the most popular gambling apps it detected in corporate environments for potential security risks and found critical vulnerabilities that could enable hackers to gain access to a phone's contacts, emails, call history and location data, as well as to record conversations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How VMware aims to distinguish itself in the cloud

VMware VP of Cloud Services Mathew Lodge acknowledges that the virtualization vendor “got started later than other folks” in the IaaS public cloud market, but he flatly denies that the company is slowing investment in this area. VMware’s position is that while it has catching up to do with cloud market leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, it also has strengths that can make it stand out.VMware used its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco this week to show off some of those differentiators, and teased more advances to come. HYBRID ALL THE WAY The company’s cloud strategy centers around VMware’s Unified Hybrid Cloud platform, as CEO Pat Gelsinger stressed in a pre-VMworld interview with Network World.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP beefs up enterprise security suite with tools to root out malware, app vulnerabilites

Hewlett-Packard has devised two new ways of securing enterprise systems in the endless war on malicious network attackers.One service inspects the Internet addresses being requested by employees for malicious links and the other service learns how an organization's coders write their programs.The two new releases aim to "protect the interactions among your most valuable assets: your users, your applications and your data," said Frank Mong, HP vice president of solutions. The company announced the new software at the HP Protect security conference, held this week near Washington.HP DNS Malware Analytics (DMA) monitors outbound DNS (Domain Name System) requests to ensure employee browsers aren't contacting rogue or malware Web sites. A DNS server provides specific numeric Internet addresses to end-user computers requesting Web sites by their domain names.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Test all the things: IPv6, HTTP/2, SHA-2

CloudFlare constantly tries to stay on the leading edge of Internet technologies so that our customers' web sites use the latest, fastest, most secure protocols. For example, in the past we've enabled IPv6 and SPDY/3.1.

Today we've switched on a test server that is open for people to test compatibility of web clients. It's a mirror of this blog and is served from https://http2.cloudflare.com/. The server uses three technologies that it may be helpful to test with: IPv4/IPv6, HTTP/2 and an SSL certificate that uses SHA-2 for its signature.

The server has both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

$ dig +short http2.cloudflare.com A
45.55.83.207  
$ dig +short http2.cloudflare.com AAAA
2604:a880:800:10:5ca1:ab1e:f4:e001

The certificate is based on SHA-2 (in this case SHA-256). This is important because SHA-1 is being deprecated by some browsers very soon. On a recent browser the connection will also be secured using ECDHE (for forward secrecy).

And, finally, the server uses HTTP/2 if the browser is capable. For example, in Google Chrome, with the HTTP/2 and SPDY indicator extension the blue lightning bolt indicates that the page was served using HTTP/2:

This server isn't on the normal CloudFlare Continue reading

Private and Public Clouds, and the Mistakes You Can Make

A few days ago I had a nice chat with Christoph Jaggi about private and public clouds, and the mistakes you can make when building a private cloud – the topics we’ll be discussing in the Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds workshop @ Data Center Day in Berne in mid-September.

The German version of our talk has been published on Inside-IT; those of you not fluent in German will find the English version below.

Read more ...

Verizon to introduce SDN security feature later this month

Verizon will introduce a virtualized firewall service across its global network later this month, part of its move into software-defined networking.The aim is to help businesses such as manufacturers or retailers, who may be running networks in far-flung places, to have better security when connecting their applications to the corporate network, said Shawn Hakl, head of network platforms and managed services for Verizon Enterprise Solutions.The type of organizations Verizon is aiming to attract are those running a Layer 3 private network who may want a better and more reliable connection for people using mobile apps.Mobile users will connect to whatever network is available and then onto Verizon's private network, Hakl said. Applications can securely connect, and the traffic can be put through the usual security inspections before it goes into the corporate network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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