What is a virtual network

A computer network as we usually visualize it involves various cables (Ethernet, fiber optic, coaxial) connecting to appliances like routers and switches, which direct data packets where they need to go.The rise of Wi-Fi and cellular data networks have replaced some of those wires with wireless signals, but even radio waves are in the realm of the physical, and they connect back to cell towers or Wi-Fi access points.In the seven-layer OSI network reference model, all of that network equipment, processing, and communication occupies the lowest three layers: Level 3 (the network), Level 2 (the data link), and Level 1 (the physical layer).To read this article in full, please click here

Enterprises turn to single-vendor SASE for ease of manageability

Before the start of the Covid epidemic, a traditional WAN architecture with centralized security worked well for Village Roadshow. "Advanced security inspection services can be applied, firewalls can provide separation, and a demilitarized zone can be implemented," said Michael Fagan, chief transformation officer at Village Roadshow, the largest theme park owner in Australia.But it required backhauling traffic from remote sites to a data center or hub for security inspection, which can hurt application performance, create a poor user experience, and cost the company in productivity, he said.When the pandemic led the company to transition to a hybrid workforce, with most people working from home or from a remote site, it prompted Village Roadshow to rethink its network and security approach.To read this article in full, please click here

Uptick in healthcare organizations experiencing targeted DDoS attacks

Uptick in healthcare organizations experiencing targeted DDoS attacks

Healthcare in the crosshairs

Uptick in healthcare organizations experiencing targeted DDoS attacks

Over the past few days, Cloudflare, as well as other sources, have observed healthcare organizations targeted by a pro-Russian hacktivist group claiming to be Killnet. There has been an increase in the amount of healthcare organizations coming to us to help get out from under these types of attacks. Multiple healthcare organizations behind Cloudflare have also been targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks and Cloudflare has helped them successfully mitigate these attacks. The United States Department of Health and Human Services issued an Analyst Note detailing the threat of Killnet-related cyberattacks to the healthcare industry.

A rise in political tensions and escalation of the conflict in Ukraine are all factors that play into the current cybersecurity threat landscape. Unlike traditional warfare, the Internet has enabled and empowered groups of individuals to carry out targeted attacks regardless of their location or involvement. Distributed-denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks have the unfortunate advantage of not requiring an intrusion or a foothold to be launched and have, unfortunately, become more accessible than ever before.

The attacks observed by the Cloudflare global network do not show a clear indication that they are originating from a single botnet and the attack methods and sources Continue reading

AMD issues firmware fixes for Epyc, Ryzen processors

Earlier this month AMD quietly disclosed 31 new CPU vulnerabilities affecting both its Ryzen desktop chips and EPYC data center processors. AMD disclosed the flaws in coordination  with several researchers, including teams from Google, Apple, and Oracle.AMD typically releases vulnerability findings twice a year, in May and November, but decided to release the fixes early due to the relatively large number of new vulnerabilities and the timing of the mitigations.Despite the severity and number of flaws, AMD posted the lists to its security page. The flaws include BIOS/UEFI revisions that AMD has distributed to its OEMs. Since every OEM has a different BIOS/UEFI, it’s best to check with your motherboard maker or system vendor to see if you need the updates.To read this article in full, please click here

AMD issues firmware fixes for Epyc, Ryzen processors

Earlier this month AMD quietly disclosed 31 new CPU vulnerabilities affecting both its Ryzen desktop chips and EPYC data center processors. AMD disclosed the flaws in coordination  with several researchers, including teams from Google, Apple, and Oracle.AMD typically releases vulnerability findings twice a year, in May and November, but decided to release the fixes early due to the relatively large number of new vulnerabilities and the timing of the mitigations.Despite the severity and number of flaws, AMD posted the lists to its security page. The flaws include BIOS/UEFI revisions that AMD has distributed to its OEMs. Since every OEM has a different BIOS/UEFI, it’s best to check with your motherboard maker or system vendor to see if you need the updates.To read this article in full, please click here

A Journey To The AWS Advanced Networking Certification

There’s a trend to cloudify every aspect of IT. You might think that there’s no need to understand classical networking because “the cloud” solves problems related to routers and switches. The truth is that clouds have massive networks under the hood. Someone needs to connect cloud services and bring users to these clouds in a […]

The post A Journey To The AWS Advanced Networking Certification appeared first on Packet Pushers.

C can be memory-safe

The idea of memory-safe languages is in the news lately. C/C++ is famous for being the world's system language (that runs most things) but also infamous for being unsafe. Many want to solve this by hard-forking the world's system code, either by changing C/C++ into something that's memory-safe, or rewriting everything in Rust.

Forking is a foolish idea. The core principle of computer-science is that we need to live with legacy, not abandon it.

And there's no need. Modern C compilers already have the ability to be memory-safe, we just need to make minor -- and compatible -- changes to turn it on. Instead of a hard-fork that abandons legacy system, this would be a soft-fork that enables memory-safety for new systems.

Consider the most recent memory-safety flaw in OpenSSL. They fixed it by first adding a memory-bounds, then putting every access to the memory behind a macro PUSHC() that checks the memory-bounds:

A better (but currently hypothetical) fix would be something like the following:

size_t maxsize CHK_SIZE(outptr) = out ? *outlen : 0;

This would link the memory-bounds maxsize with the memory outptr. The compiler can then be relied upon to do all the bounds checking to prevent buffer Continue reading
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