Device Naming Conventions – What’s in a Name

Choosing a device hostname seems trivial to say the least. However, from multiple design meetings, this is a topic that tends to drag on. Everyone has a preference, and opinion or just set in the...

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Equation cyberspies use unrivaled, NSA-style techniques to hit Iran, Russia

A cyberespionage group with a toolset similar to ones used by U.S. intelligence agencies has infiltrated key institutions in countries including Iran and Russia.Kaspersky Lab released a report Monday that said the tools were created by the “Equation” group, which it stopped short of linking to the U.S. National Security Agency.The tools, exploits and malware used by the group—named after its penchant for encryption—have strong similarities with NSA techniques described in top-secret documents leaked in 2013.Countries hit the most by Equation include Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and China. Targets in those countries included the military, telecommunications, embassies, government, research institutions and Islamic scholars, Kaspersky said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BGP routing incidents in 2014, malicious or not?

Over the last year we have seen and written about numerous BGP routing incidents that looked out of the ordinary, straight-up suspicious or were just configuration mistakes. In this blog post we will highlight a few of them and look at the impact and cause of each of the observed incidents and try to determine if there was any malicious intent.

I presented the same data last week at NANOG 63, in San Antonio, a recording of this presentation can be found below:

BGP hijacking for monetary gain.

We have all heard of Bitcoin, it’s been in the news quite a bit and chances are that some of you are mining Bitcoins right now. There are now computing devices optimized for Bitcoin mining and even dedicated Bitcoin mining data centers. In addition to the dedicated data centers, many Bitcoin miners use cloud compute instances from Amazon, OVH, Digital Ocean, etc. So it’s obvious that there is a lot of money spent on Bitcoin mining & trading; and as such there is also an opportunity to make a quick buck.
This summer we blogged about a series of BGP hijacks where an attacker cleverly misused the Bitcoin stratum protocol. By Continue reading

Overlay Networking as a Method to Scale Flow Networking and Handling

Overlay Networking and Coarse Flow Table are two ways to scale up the flow networking for SDN.

The post Overlay Networking as a Method to Scale Flow Networking and Handling appeared first on EtherealMind.

Campaigners offer simpler way to find out if British government spied on you

There’s now an easier way to discover whether the U.K. intelligence services illegally obtained your information from their U.S. colleagues—but you’ll have to tell a U.K. campaign group as well as the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters your details to find out.Civil rights group Privacy International has launched a website to allow anyone in the world to ask whether GCHQ has illegally spied on them. If you’re curious to find out you can sign up by giving the group your name, email address and, optionally, your phone number, and granting its legal team permission to share the data with GCHQ and the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Secrets to Drawing Effective Network Diagrams

by Kevin Dooley, originally published on the Auvik blog Good network diagrams aren’t hard to make, but I find them distressingly

A Neutral ‘Net?

This week I’m going to step off the beaten path for a moment and talk about ‘net neutrality. It appears we are about to enter a new phase in the life of the Internet — at least in the United States — as the FCC is out and about implying we should expect a ruling on Title II regulation of the ‘net within the United States in the near future. What the FCC’s chairman has said is —

The Internet would be reclassified as a Title II communication service, which means the portions within the United States would fall under the same regulations as telephone and television service.
“comma, but…” The ‘net infrastructure in the United States won’t be subject to all the rules of Title II regulation.
Specifically mentioned is the last mile, “there will be no rate regulation, no tariffs, no last-mile unbundling.”

A lot of digital ink has been spilled over how the proposed regulations will impact investment — for instance, AT&T has made a somewhat veiled threat that if the regulations don’t go the way they’d like to see them go, there will be no further investment in last mile broadband throughout the US (as Continue reading

Interview with Ansible CEO

tools

Ansible CEO Saïd Ziouani recently sat down for an interview with Adrian Bridgwater of ToolsAdvisor.net to talk about the past, present and future of Ansible.

Tools Advisor: Ansible Tower is an opportunity for less technical users to get involved with IT automation by virtue of its role-based access control and dashboard functionality being core extras over and above the command line version of the open source product. Just exactly how 'non-technical' a user do you think should be involved here?

Saïd Ziouani: We strongly believe that IT Automation should be a dull task; your IP competency should be your priority and the main focus for your software developers. Managing your infrastructure must be simple to a point that it's almost boring. Tower takes the simplicity model of Ansible to a new level, allowing easy push button automation at scale, and team role delegation.

Read the full interview here.

Software Defined Reality – NFD9 Redux

NFD Logo

I’ve just got back from Networking Field Day 9 (NFD9) and my head is buzzing after a busy week of presentations. I posted a preview of NFD9 so it seems only fair to give a quick wrap up of the week’s themes and presentations as I saw it.

My NFD9

After some time spent thinking on the flights back home, I came to the conclusion that there were two themes that were recurring this week.

The dominating theme for me was, at last, seeing the magic rainbow-expelling problem-solving unicorn that is Software Defined Networking – SDN – and all its inherent paradigm-shifting magic, turned into products that actually seem real, and are starting to deal with some of the issues that were flagged up when SDN was first being described. It’s relatively easy to SDN-wash a product, but making it something from which a user can actually benefit, well, that’s something else.

The second theme was that many of the products looked to the concept of detecting or fixing problems before the users were aware of them, whether as an alert from a monitoring system, or a network that automatically self-heals or otherwise avoids problem areas.

SDN == Programming

Don’t Continue reading

Proposal for altered data retention law is still unlawful, Dutch DPA says

The Dutch government’s proposed revision of the country’s data retention law is not enough to bring it into compliance with a recent European Union court ruling, the Dutch privacy watchdog said Monday.An effort by the Dutch government to adjust a law requiring telecommunications and Internet companies to retain their customers’ location and traffic metadata for investigatory purposes should be dropped, as the infringement of the private life of virtually all Dutch citizens is too great, the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) said on Monday.The Dutch government is looking to change data retention obligations for telephone and Internet communications operators following a decision last year by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The court invalidated the European data retention directive, on which the Dutch law is based, because it violates fundamental privacy rights.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Materials breakthrough promises smaller chips

If you haven't heard of graphene, or its new brother silicene, you will.For the uninitiated, graphene is a super cost-effective, ultra-hard and light-weight conductor. It's better than copper at conducting and is in fact the world's most conductive substance. Silicene is similar in that it's also ultra-thin, but it has properties that may be more suited for use in chips.We've been hearing about graphene for a while. However, this miracle substance has a slight, somewhat awkward problem for a superstar. Despite its second-coming-like trumpet blowing, it's not very good in transistors. The reason: it doesn't have the necessary logic operation capability.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Materials breakthrough promises smaller chips

Huawei looks to give indoor mobile speeds a boost with LTE-Advanced

Huawei Technologies has conducted a real-world trial of LTE-Advanced that shows that much faster indoor cellular speeds may be around the corner.The telecommunications equipment vendor conducted the trial with Singaporean network operator StarHub, using products capable of download speeds of up to 300Mbps. Early test results were promising, with users getting much faster downloads and better video quality than before, Huawei said without offering any details of the data rates achieved.The speed increase is fueled by a technique called carrier aggregation, an LTE-Advanced technology that allows mobile operators to treat up to three radio channels in different frequency bands as if they were one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Talented startup aims to deliver software defined cloud

One of the ways you can tell that software defined networking (SDN) has the power to change the vendor landscape is by the number of startups that have emerged. Over the past few years, we've seen startups pop up to address the evolution of the data center and the WAN. For this reason, I always tend to keep my eyes open for companies generating buzz in the marketplace in this area. In my recent travels, I was made aware of another "stealth-mode" startup that's building a solution to address a new use case for SDNs. According to its website, Avni Networks addresses the "transformation of the Data Center to Virtual Clouds for the Applications Economy." From what I can tell, there seems to be some buzz around what this company is up to, which made me curious about learning more.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Products of the week 02.16.2015

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Actifio OneKey features: Actifio One is a flexible cloud-based service for midmarket companies to extend their datacenter. Built on the copy data virtualization technology, applications are available when and where users need them. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, February 16

Kaspersky exposes huge, ongoing bank-robbery-by-hackRussian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab is releasing a report Monday with some details on a wide-ranging series of hacks into at least 100 banks in 30 counties—some of which are apparently still ongoing. Kaspersky gave the New York Times an advance look at the material, and says that losses total at least $300 million, mostly suffered by banks in Russia but also affecting institutions in Japan, Europe and the U.S.Xiaomi still tops Apple in China, says IDCTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, February 16

5 cool ways to give an iOS device a physical keyboard

This week, a startup named Tactus Technology got a lot of attention for its Phorm iPad Mini case, which includes a transparent screen cover that creates bubbles over each letter in the iOS keyboard. It's basically a tactile keyboard that appears on a touchscreen only when the user needs it. Tactus has been working on its on-demand keyboard technology for more than five years, according to Wired. The screen cover is based on microfluidic technology, which has its roots in ink jet printers, and it has small grooves carved into the spot where each letter appears on the iPad screen. When the user slides a switch on the back of the case – which appears to be almost a third of the size of the rear of the case, so it won't require you to flip your iPad around and hunt for a button – the case applies a small amount of pressure that forces a tiny amount fluid to rush across the screen. That fluid gets caught fills up each of the grooves, creating bubbles that act as tactile buttons on the touchscreen keyboard. Here's a video showing the technology in use.To read this article in full or Continue reading

Tech Notes: Audio Ping Response From The Terminal / CLI

The following command line will use the Text to Speech converter in *nix to say the word "pingtastic" every time a successful icmp response message is received using the ping command.

The post Tech Notes: Audio Ping Response From The Terminal / CLI appeared first on EtherealMind.

Information disclosure flaw exposes Netgear wireless routers to attacks

Several wireless routers made by Netgear contain a vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to extract sensitive information from the devices, including their administrator passwords and wireless network keys.The vulnerability can be exploited over local area networks, as well as over the Internet if the devices are configured for remote administration and expose their Web interface externally.Details about the vulnerability were published on the Full Disclosure mailing list last week, along with a proof-of-concept exploit. Peter Adkins, the researcher who found the flaw, claims that he contacted Netgear but that his attempts to explain the nature of the issue to the company’s technical support department failed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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