NetDevOps: Delivering Network Levers

As a recent transition from the VAR side of the room to that of the vendor, it’s been eye opening and a great reset experience to view the world from a previously unexperienced angle. Truly.

Just for clarity, this post contains my own views. Period.

What is so apparent and this falls perfectly inline with Matt Oswalt’s floweringly hilarious post, is we’re moving to a period where sexy has to be real and functional. It could be an easy button (something that makes your life easier as an operator of network infrastructure) or an insight shared with your customer that results in infrastructure being used or consumed slightly differently to solve a real business problem. After all, the infrastructure wouldn’t exist without the business requirement to consume it. The days of huge world changing massive behemoth solutions has died a death. Why would an enterprise change their entire operational procedures and practices just because “MEGA SOLUTION-TRON” can make an omelette? The NOC team doesn’t even eat omelettes!

Take the story of Software Defined Networking. Starting out as a centralised control-plane for distributed data paths and being churned up by the stampeding vendor crusades, it’s now a $variable that covers Continue reading

Two US telecom companies to pay $3.5 million for data breach

Two sister mobile and telecom service providers will pay a combined US$3.5 million after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission found that they were storing customers’ personal data on unprotected servers accessible over the Internet.TerraCom and YourTel America failed to adequately protect the personal information of more than 300,000 customers, the FCC said. The settlement stems from a 2013 incident when an investigative reporter found customer records from the companies’ low-income Lifeline programs online, the agency said in an October 2014 proposal to fine the companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Two US telecom companies to pay $3.5 million for data breach

Two sister mobile and telecom service providers will pay a combined US$3.5 million after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission found that they were storing customers’ personal data on unprotected servers accessible over the Internet.TerraCom and YourTel America failed to adequately protect the personal information of more than 300,000 customers, the FCC said. The settlement stems from a 2013 incident when an investigative reporter found customer records from the companies’ low-income Lifeline programs online, the agency said in an October 2014 proposal to fine the companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OPM hackers stole data on 21.5m people, including 1.1m fingerprints

Investigators have tallied up the number of records stolen in an attack on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and it’s bigger than anyone thought.The agency has concluded “with high confidence” that hackers got away with sensitive information including Social Security numbers on 21.5 million people—almost everyone who underwent a background security investigation for a government job through OPM since 2000.The majority of records, some 19.7 million, were for background investigation applicants while an additional 1.8 million were from nonapplicants—friends and family of applicants who would also be investigated as part of the process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why incumbent ISPs should be worried about the broadband market

The broadband market has been rocked by a handful of major unexpected developments over the past few years, from Google suddenly stepping into the market with significantly faster broadband at much lower prices to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) removing nearly all legal barriers to municipal broadband projects.The fallout from the FCC's ruling is beginning to gain some steam, with a 101-city coalition called Next Century Cities aiming to smooth the path for municipalities to bring affordable, gigabit-speed broadband to their cities.See also: Inside the bold plan to bring gigabit fiber to Detroit While the success stories are much more well-known, such as Chattanooga, Tennessee's long-running municipal gigabit fiber network, others have failed in spectacular fashion, like the city of Provo, Utah, whose municipal broadband project struggled before the city ultimately sold its existing fiber to Google for $1. This nationwide group could help provide access to information and expertise on broadband deployment to ensure the taxpayer money devoted to such a project doesn't go to waste.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GAO: Early look at fed’s “Einstein 3” security weapon finds challenges

When it comes to the government protecting all manner of state and personal information, the feds can use all the help it can get. One of the most effective tools the government has is the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS), known as “EINSTEIN.” In a nutshell EINSTEIN is a suite of technologies intended to detect and prevent malicious network traffic from entering and exiting federal civilian government networks. +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

Bitglass boosts security for data in public-cloud apps

Bitglass has boosted the protection it offers cloud-based applications, now supporting fully searchable AES 256 encryption without degrading the speed of searches.The company has received a U.S. patent on the technology it is using to deliver the searchable encryption and that is now available through its security-brokering service.The service is designed for corporate customers who want to use cloud software as a service (SaaS) but who don’t want their data stored unsecured in the cloud.A gateway on customers’ sites encrypts data that is headed to the cloud, then uploads only an encryption prefix or handle to the cloud itself. When an authorized person wants to use the cloud app, the app sends down the handle to the gateway. The gateway uses the handle as an index to find the full version of the encrypted data and decrypts it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The curious case of Google Street View’s missing streets

With the arrival of El Capitan on Google Street View last month, you can now haul yourself virtually up one of the most famous rock faces in the world. Navigating certain streets in urban areas, however, can still be a challenge.As Google expands Street View into ever more exotic places, it appears to have a problem in many of the towns and cities where the service has been available for years. Look closely at any major city, especially the residential areas, and Street View is littered with hundreds, even thousands, of little gaps. And although it’s hard to be sure, the problem may be getting worse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

T-Mobile touts first continental phone plan for North America

T-Mobile on Thursday announced that there would be no added charges for its U.S.-based Simple Choice customers when they call, text or use data to Mexico and Canada or when traveling there.The move, which takes effect Wednesday, makes T-Mobile the first carrier to offer continental phone service under a single plan anywhere in the world, company officials said.The new Mobile without Borders plan means that customers can call from the U.S. to both countries for no added cost as well as when they travel in both countries.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch Both consumers and business customers will be eligible, although business customers will pay $1 more per phone line for accounts with more than 10 phone lines, with no added cost for the first 10 lines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Software update caused NYSE suspension

An incompatibility with a software update and subsequent attempt to fix it were the root cause of glitch that forced a nearly four hour long suspension of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.The exchange traced the problems back to an update applied to a single system on Tuesday evening. The new software was related to an upcoming industry-wide test of a new timestamp procedure for communications.On Wednesday morning as customers began connecting to the system, communications issues arose because of an incompatibility between the new software and configurations in customer systems. The software in the customer systems was updated prior to the market open at 9:30 a.m. EDT, but that update caused additional issues, the NYSE said in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Startup Radar: Fiber Mountain Blends Optics & SDN For Data Center Efficiency

The startup Fiber Mountain aims to make data center networks more flexible and efficient using a combination of fiber optics and SDN.

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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 Startup Radar: Fiber Mountain Blends Optics & SDN For Data Center Efficiency appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Drew Conry-Murray.

OpenSSL fixes serious flaw that could enable man-in-the-middle attacks

A flaw in the widely used OpenSSL library could allow man-in-the-middle attackers to impersonate HTTPS servers and snoop on encrypted traffic. Most browsers are not affected, but other applications and embedded devices could be.The OpenSSL 1.0.1p and 1.0.2d versions released Thursday fix an issue that could be used to bypass certain checks and trick OpenSSL to treat any valid certificates as belonging to certificate authorities. Attackers could exploit this to generate rogue certificates for any website that would be accepted by OpenSSL.“This vulnerability is really only useful to an active attacker, who is already capable of performing a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, either locally or upstream from the victim,” said Tod Beardsley, security engineering manager at Rapid7, via email. “This limits the feasibility of attacks to actors who are already in a privileged position on one of the hops between the client and the server, or is on the same LAN and can impersonate DNS or gateways.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

United fiasco prompts networking confessions

Yesterday’s grounding of the United Airlines fleet, which the company has blamed on a routing mishap of some kind, has prompted readers of Reddit’s section devoted to networking to share their worst workplace screw-ups and the consequences of same.  There are almost 200 tales and comments, but there is one that stands out from the rest: We were removing old trading workstations in the Chicago pits during a Globex/Dealing upgrade. We were told to just use snips to cut the towers free. I cut the wrong damn line. An entire wall of stations and displays went down including the big index board. Commodities quotes from NY went dead. Trading was halted at CME/CBOE for 3 f***ing hours. I single handedly caused the most expensive technical market glitch in Chicago exchange history up to that point. I halted an estimated $3b in trades.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verifying TDD Scenarios

Now that Ansible has done all the information gathering for us it’s time to finally make use of it. In this post I will show how to use Ansible to run traceroutes from and to the hosts defined in a test scenario and perform verification of the results of those tests. Should any of those tests fail, Ansible will provide a meaningful description of what exactly failed and why. While doing all this I’ll introduce a couple of new Ansible features like conditional looping and interactive prompts.

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