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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The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Thursday, July 9

NYSE halts trading as IT systems go down... but it’s no cyberattackTrading on the New York Stock Exchange halted for over three hours Wednesday due to unspecified computer problems. The exchange quickly ruled out a cyberattack, which means there are likely to be red faces in the NYSE IT department when the cause is uncovered.Microsoft lays off 7,800 staff as it dials down its smartphone ambitionsA little over a year after buying Nokia’s smartphone division, Microsoft is laying off all but one-sixth of the division’s staff, and writing off $7.6 billion, almost all of its purchase price. CEO Satya Nadella reportedly never liked the acquisition, set in motion by his predecessor Steve Ballmer, and now plans to slim down the bewildering array of Lumia phones the company makes, more tightly integrating them with Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Thursday, July 9

NYSE halts trading as IT systems go down... but it’s no cyberattackTrading on the New York Stock Exchange halted for over three hours Wednesday due to unspecified computer problems. The exchange quickly ruled out a cyberattack, which means there are likely to be red faces in the NYSE IT department when the cause is uncovered.Microsoft lays off 7,800 staff as it dials down its smartphone ambitionsA little over a year after buying Nokia’s smartphone division, Microsoft is laying off all but one-sixth of the division’s staff, and writing off $7.6 billion, almost all of its purchase price. CEO Satya Nadella reportedly never liked the acquisition, set in motion by his predecessor Steve Ballmer, and now plans to slim down the bewildering array of Lumia phones the company makes, more tightly integrating them with Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple drops Recovery Key in new two-factor authentication for El Capitan and iOS 9

In early June, Apple said two-factor authentication would be tightly integrated into OS X 10.11 El Capitan and iOS 9, but provided little detail as to what that means. The current setup is scattered across sites and methods in order to deliver a second one-time use, time-limited code or other method of verification when a user logs in to an Apple site or on an Apple device with an Apple ID set up for it.Apple today posted a detailed explanation about how two-factor authentication works starting with the public betas of iOS 9 and El Capitan.6 simple tricks for protecting your passwords Among other changes, the Recovery Key option that has tripped up users in the past, and led in some cases to users having to abandon an Apple ID as permanently unavailable, has been removed, an Apple spokesperson confirmed. With the new system, Apple customer support will work through a detailed recovery process with users who lose access to all their trusted devices and phone numbers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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