The NSA reportedly tried — but failed — to use a Stuxnet variant against North Korea

Right around the time that the Stuxnet attack so famously sabotaged Iran’s nuclear program in 2009 and 2010, the U.S. National Security Agency reportedly was trying something similar against North Korea.The NSA-led U.S. effort used a version of the Stuxnet virus designed to be activated by Korean-language computer settings, but it ultimately failed to sabotage North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, according to a Friday Reuters report, which attributed the information to people familiar with the campaign.The NSA did not respond to a request for comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Show 239 – Design & Build #2 – A New Network From Scratch

Eric Dennington @edennington, Steve Occhiogrosso @StephenO86, and Jason Lavoie join the Packet Pushers to chat about building a new network from scratch. We compiled our notes, and decided on a three phase approach.

Author information

Ethan Banks

Co-host at Packet Pushers

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 3M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks
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The post Show 239 – Design & Build #2 – A New Network From Scratch appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Silk Road mastermind Ulbricht sentenced

The creator and chief operator of the Silk Road has been sentenced to two life sentences in jail for running the online drug marketplace, which federal prosecutors estimated facilitated the sales of more than US$213 million worth of drugs and other unlawful goods between 2011 and 2013.The life sentences are to be served concurrently, along with a five-year sentence for hacking and twenty years for money laundering. The government is also seeking $183 million from Ulbricht based on the profits he made.In February, Ross Ulbricht was found guilty of multiple charges related to the operation of Silk Road, including narcotics conspiracy, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to commit computer hacking and money laundering. The narcotics and criminal enterprise charges carry maximum penalties of life in prison. Under current federal sentencing laws, Ulbricht faced at least 20 years behind bars.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google levels up security at I/O with secure comms tool, better authentication

Google targeted people’s growing digital insecurity at its I/O developer conference this week with a number of new products that aim to protect communications and improve authentication.Project Vault is a new hardware device created by Google’s Advanced Technology and Products (ATAP) lab for people who need the absolute highest security for their communications. The device, which is packed in the form factor of a MicroSD card, is designed to provide encryption for sensitive data at rest, and allow end-to-end protection of streaming data (including streaming video) as well. The Vault card contains its own antenna, processor and operating system, which means that the device can authenticate directly with the Project Vault servers without requiring the use of other potentially insecure hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New NSA phone dragnet proposals blasted as flawed

Two U.S. senators are pushing proposals to extend the National Security Agency’s domestic telephone records dragnet, but a diverse coalition of civil liberties and advocacy groups have called on lawmakers to vote against those plans.Proposals by Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, and Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, to extend expiring parts of the counterterrorism Patriot Act, “contain flaws and omissions that are incompatible with the goal of stopping domestic bulk collection,” the coalition said in a letter to Senate leaders sent Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New NSA phone dragnet proposals blasted as flawed

Two U.S. senators are pushing proposals to extend the National Security Agency’s domestic telephone records dragnet, but a diverse coalition of civil liberties and advocacy groups have called on lawmakers to vote against those plans.Proposals by Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, and Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, to extend expiring parts of the counterterrorism Patriot Act, “contain flaws and omissions that are incompatible with the goal of stopping domestic bulk collection,” the coalition said in a letter to Senate leaders sent Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Enterprise tech a no-show at Google I/O

A parade of top Google executives cycled on and off the stage for more than two hours yesterday at the company's annual I/O developer conference in San Francisco, but because Google is involved in so many projects and markets, the company barely scratched the surface of what it is up to. For example, driverless cars, easily Google's most popular moonshot project, weren't even mentioned until the closing minutes of I/O keynote address. Cloud computing and Google+ weren't mentioned at all. Neither were Google’s plans for the enterprise.+ ALSO AT GOOGLE I/O: Google hypes Android M, Android Pay, Google Photos at I/O 2015 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Google took a page from Apple to secure Android Pay

In case you missed it, Google launched a new mobile payment service at its annual I/O developers conference Thursday. It’s called Android Pay. But didn’t Google already have a mobile payment service? Yes, yes, Google Wallet. That’s not going away—in fact, it’s getting a reboot as a peer-to-peer payment service—but Android Pay works a lot more like Apple Pay than Google’s last attempt.That’s a good thing. Google Wallet required you to wake your phone, open the Wallet app, and enter a pin number if you decided to protect the app with a passcode, all before waving your phone near the payment terminal. That’s a lot of work.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How internet growth is changing business processes

Mary Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, has for years released an annual report on where she sees the internet going. Things have changed since she started it. In 1995, the first year of the report, mobile phone penetration was 1% of the population. Today, it's 73%.Latest report The latest report has just come out and within it she's collected pages of fascinating snippets of data and factoids related to changes in our internet-driven lives. She talks of new forms of e-commerce, smartphones, and how Millennials see things differently than older folks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google and Levi’s team up on smart clothes

Google executives have a vision that one day soon your jacket, shirt, pants -- even your socks -- might control your phone, tablet or even the lights in your house.Ivan Poupyrev, Google's technical program lead, received wild applause at a morning session at Google I/O today when he talked about Project Jacquard.The project isn't about a new smartphone or tablet or even a giant humanoid robot. It's about smart textiles that could change the way we connect and communicate with our environment and devices. They can also track health and physical activity. (Yes, your pants will know if you're sitting on the couch instead of doing power squats.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN Appears in Cisco Career Certs: The New CCNA (and CCNP) Cloud

Most of us probably don’t sit around meticulously reading the exam topics of vendor certification exams. But if you did, you might have noticed the announcement of a few new career certifications from Cisco this week. And if you look closely at one of the exam blueprints, for the first of two exams related to the CCNA Cloud certification, you’d see a bit of a milestone:

  • The first Cisco career cert exam blueprints that mention ACI
  • The first Cisco career cert exam blueprints that mention SDN

In today’s post, I’ll outline the key facts about the new certs, and look more closely at the exam blueprint for one of the exams. And the most interesting exam topic, given that it’s the first Cisco career cert exam with SDN in it?

“Describe how ACI solves the problem not addressed by SDN”.

Read on!

Quick Overview

Cisco refers to their CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE certifications as career certifications. The CCNA Cloud and CCNA Industrial certifications push the total number of current Cisco CCNA certifications up to 11.

As for an SDN angle – this blog is called SDNSkills, after all - the cloud certs happen to be Cisco’s first career certifications (best Continue reading

Tor connections to hidden services could be easy to de-anonymize

Identifying users who access Tor hidden services—websites that are only accessible inside the Tor anonymity network—is easier than de-anonymizing users who use Tor to access regular Internet websites.Security researchers Filipo Valsorda and George Tankersley showed Friday at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam why Tor connections to hidden services are more vulnerable to traffic correlation attacks.One of Tor’s primary goals is to provide anonymity for Internet users. This is achieved by routing their Web traffic through a series of randomly chosen nodes or relays before passing it back onto the public Internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel reportedly close to purchasing Altera for $15 billion

Intel and Altera are apparently once again on speaking terms and said to be nearing a deal in which Intel would buy the smaller chip maker for US$15 billion.News of a possible deal first surfaced in media reports in late March, but those negotiations broke down after Altera supposedly rejected a bid of $54 per share from Intel in early April.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper Networks Announces New Network Design Training Curriculum and Certification Program

Juniper took a big step forward in rounding out their certification programs by announcing a new Design Training and Certification curriculum, focusing on best practices and techniques that can be used across the spectrum of network architecture and design. Slated to be included in this program are also technologies around software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV).

This is a huge step forward for Juniper's training and certification program and will round out their education portfolio with something similar to Cisco's design certification. Furthermore with the advent of network automation, and SDN and NFV technologies becoming more commonplace, the benefits from such a training and certification curriculum can't be overstated.

The design curriculum will eventually include a portfolio of training offerings, starting with the first course which is available now, the Juniper Networks Design Fundamentals course. These courses and their corresponding design certifications will focus on the latest techniques, resources and various tools that companies can use to fully design, secure, and automate their networks. Trainings will range all the way from design fundamentals on through to more advanced courses covering the design specific requirements of Data Center and WAN networks. The first certification, Juniper Networks Certified Design Associate (JNCDA) is available for registration now, Continue reading

PlexxiPulse—The Open Networking Summit

In two weeks, we’ll be heading to Santa Clara, CA for the Open Networking Summit hosted in partnership with the Open Networking Foundation. Plexxi co-founder and EVP of products and technology Dave Husak is participating in the “Hot Startups & Investing: Building Business with Open Source–VC perspective” panel on June 16 at 2:00 p.m. PT at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The Open Networking Summit draws networking’s best and brightest, and we’re excited to learn from this year’s impressive lineup of speakers. Heading to the event? Let us know on Twitter or send us a note at [email protected]. See you there!

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week.

TechTarget: Converged vs. hyper-converged landscape: What does it mean?
By Dave Raffo
Confused by all the talk about converged vs. hyper-converged infrastructure in the data center and what it means to storage? If so, you are not alone. Consultant Scott Lowe laid out pros and cons of approaches to convergence and how they differ this week during the Modern Infrastructure Summit in Chicago. Lowe, founder and managing consultant of The 1610 Group, told conference attendees that the rise of convergence Continue reading

Cisco sees Internet half full

Cisco’s most recent Visual Networking Index (VNI), the ongoing report of Internet and IP trends and statistics, finds that more than half of the world’s population will be Internet users by 2019. Also, the number of machine-to-machine (M2M) interconnections – the underpinning of the Internet of Things/Everything – will triple by then.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HTIRW: Internet Exchange Points

Most providers — transit, edge, and content — are pretty obvious to the various users of the Internet. Users interact with edge and content providers every day, and transit providers have such large names in the industry that they’re often the subject of news and other articles. But who actually connects all these different providers […]

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: Internet Exchange Points appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.

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