For networking pros, every month is Cybersecurity Awareness Month

When National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM) was launched in October 2004, it was a modest affair, offering anodyne advice to individual Americans and US businesses along the lines of making sure to update your antivirus software twice a year.Since then NCSAM has grown into an event-packed month with star-studded guest panels, annual launches in various cities (looking at you, Ypsilanti, Michigan!), the participation of federal cybersecurity officials, and weekly themes. This year, for example, the themes in each successive week are: Be Cyber Smart Phight the Phish! Experience. Share. (Cybersecurity Career Awareness Week) Cybersecurity First Linux security: Cmd provides visibility, control over user activity Not sure why the organizers didn’t make “Cybersecurity First” the theme of the month’s first week, but it is not for me to second-guess the federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the public/private National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), organizers of the annual awareness month.To read this article in full, please click here

For networking pros, every month is Cybersecurity Awareness Month

When National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM) was launched in October 2004, it was a modest affair, offering anodyne advice to individual Americans and US businesses along the lines of making sure to update your antivirus software twice a year.Since then NCSAM has grown into an event-packed month with star-studded guest panels, annual launches in various cities (looking at you, Ypsilanti, Michigan!), the participation of federal cybersecurity officials, and weekly themes. This year, for example, the themes in each successive week are: Be Cyber Smart Phight the Phish! Experience. Share. (Cybersecurity Career Awareness Week) Cybersecurity First Linux security: Cmd provides visibility, control over user activity Not sure why the organizers didn’t make “Cybersecurity First” the theme of the month’s first week, but it is not for me to second-guess the federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the public/private National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), organizers of the annual awareness month.To read this article in full, please click here

Announcing The Cloudflare Distributed Web Gateways Private Beta: Unlocking the Web3 Metaverse and Decentralized Finance for Everyone

Announcing The Cloudflare Distributed Web Gateways Private Beta: Unlocking the Web3 Metaverse and Decentralized Finance for Everyone
Announcing The Cloudflare Distributed Web Gateways Private Beta: Unlocking the Web3 Metaverse and Decentralized Finance for Everyone

It’s cliché to say that the Internet has undergone massive changes in the last five years. New technologies like distributed ledgers, NFTs, and cross-platform metaverses have become all the rage. Unless you happen to hang out with the Web3 community in Hong Kong, San Francisco, and London, these technologies have a high barrier to entry for the average developer. You have to understand how to run distributed nodes, set up esoteric developer environments, and keep up with the latest chains just to get your app to run. That stops today. Today you can sign up for the private beta of our Web3 product suite starting with our Ethereum and IPFS gateway.

Announcing The Cloudflare Distributed Web Gateways Private Beta: Unlocking the Web3 Metaverse and Decentralized Finance for Everyone

Before we go any further, a brief introduction to blockchain (Ethereum in our example) and the InterPlanetary FileSystem (IPFS). In a Web3 setting, you can think of Ethereum as the compute layer, and IPFS as the storage layer. By leveraging decentralised ledger technology, Ethereum provides verifiable decentralised computation. Publicly available binaries, called "smart contracts", can be instantiated by users to perform operations on an immutable set of records. This set of records is the state of the blockchain. It has to be maintained by every node on the Continue reading

Get started Building Web3 Apps with Cloudflare

Get started Building Web3 Apps with Cloudflare
Get started Building Web3 Apps with Cloudflare

For many developers, the term Web3 feels like a buzzword — it's the sort of thing you see on a popular "Things you need to learn in 2021" tweet. As a software developer, I've spent years feeling the same way. In the last few months, I’ve taken a closer look at the Web3 ecosystem, to better understand how it works, and why it matters.

Web3 can generally be described as a decentralized evolution of the Internet. Instead of a few providers acting as the mediators of how your interactions and daily life on the web should work, a Web3-based future would liberate your data from proprietary databases and operate without centralization via the incentive structure inherent in blockchains.

The Web3 space in 2021 looks and feels much different from what it did a few years ago. Blockchains like Ethereum are handling incredible amounts of traffic with relative ease — although some improvements are needed — and newer blockchains like Solana have entered the space as genuine alternatives that could alleviate some of the scaling issues we've seen in the past few years.

Cloudflare is incredibly well-suited to empower developers to build the future with Web3. The announcement of Continue reading

Web3 — A vision for a decentralized web

Web3 — A vision for a decentralized web
Web3 — A vision for a decentralized web

By reading this, you are a participant of the web. It's amazing that we can write this blog and have it appear to you without operating a server or writing a line of code. In general, the web of today empowers us to participate more than we could at any point in the past.

Last year, we mentioned the next phase of the Internet would be always on, always secure, always private. Today, we dig into a similar trend for the web, referred to as Web3. In this blog we'll start to explain Web3 in the context of the web's evolution, and how Cloudflare might help to support it.

Going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote his seminal 1989 document “Information Management: A Proposal”, he outlined a vision of the “web” as a network of information systems interconnected via hypertext links. It is often assimilated to the Internet, which is the computer network it operates on. Key practical requirements for this web included being able to access the network in a decentralized manner through remote machines and allowing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination.

Web3 — A vision for a decentralized web
The Continue reading

Video: Public Cloud Networking Is Different

Even though you need plenty of traditional networking constructs to deploy a complex application stack in a public cloud (packet filters, firewalls, load balancers, VPN, BGP…), once you start digging deep into the bowels of public cloud virtual networking, you’ll find out it’s significantly different from the traditional Ethernet+IP implementations common in enterprise data centers.

For an overview of the differences watch the Public Cloud Networking Is Different video (part of Introduction to Cloud Computing webinar), for more details start with AWS Networking 101 and Azure Networking 101 blog posts, and continue with corresponding cloud networking webinars.

You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video

Video: Public Cloud Networking Is Different

Even though you need plenty of traditional networking constructs to deploy a complex application stack in a public cloud (packet filters, firewalls, load balancers, VPN, BGP…), once you start digging deep into the bowels of public cloud virtual networking, you’ll find out it’s significantly different from the traditional Ethernet+IP implementations common in enterprise data centers.

For an overview of the differences watch the Public Cloud Networking Is Different video (part of Introduction to Cloud Computing webinar), for more details start with AWS Networking 101 and Azure Networking 101 blog posts, and continue with corresponding cloud networking webinars.

You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video

May I ask who’s calling, please? A recent rise in VoIP DDoS attacks

May I ask who’s calling, please? A recent rise in VoIP DDoS attacks
May I ask who’s calling, please? A recent rise in VoIP DDoS attacks

Over the past month, multiple Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers have been targeted by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks from entities claiming to be REvil. The multi-vector attacks combined both L7 attacks targeting critical HTTP websites and API endpoints, as well as L3/4 attacks targeting VoIP server infrastructure. In some cases, these attacks resulted in significant impact to the targets’ VoIP services and website/API availability.

Cloudflare’s network is able to effectively protect and accelerate voice and video infrastructure because of our global reach, sophisticated traffic filtering suite, and unique perspective on attack patterns and threat intelligence.

If you or your organization have been targeted by DDoS attacks, ransom attacks and/or extortion attempts, seek immediate help to protect your Internet properties. We recommend not paying the ransom, and to report it to your local law enforcement agencies.

Voice (and video, emojis, conferences, cat memes and remote classrooms) over IP

Voice over IP (VoIP) is a term that's used to describe a group of technologies that allow for communication of multimedia over the Internet. This technology enables your FaceTime call with your friends, your virtual classroom lessons over Zoom and even some “normal” calls you make from your cell phone.

May I ask who’s calling, please? A recent rise in VoIP DDoS attacks

Continue reading

Fedora Linux declared a ‘digital public good’

Fedora Linux has been recognized as a "digital public good" by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), a strategy group set up by UNICEF to promote sustainable development through open-source solutions that contribute to an equitable world.The reasons Fedora was recognized include that Fedora: promotes best practices and adheres to standards creates an innovative platform for hardware, clouds, and containers that enables software developers and community members to build tailored solutions for their users is free of charge and comes with permissions to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sell copies of the software without restrictions other than that the same permissions must be granted to anyone using resulting products adheres to privacy and other applicable international and domestic laws shares personal information in limited and acknowledged ways causes no harm follows privacy policy guidelines and makes privacy policy available to partners Finding installed packages on Fedora Linux systems DPGA also notes that Fedora is actively used in 483 countries.To read this article in full, please click here

Fedora Linux declared a ‘digital public good’

Fedora Linux has been recognized as a "digital public good" by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), a strategy group set up by UNICEF to promote sustainable development through open-source solutions that contribute to an equitable world.The reasons Fedora was recognized include that Fedora: promotes best practices and adheres to standards creates an innovative platform for hardware, clouds, and containers that enables software developers and community members to build tailored solutions for their users is free of charge and comes with permissions to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sell copies of the software without restrictions other than that the same permissions must be granted to anyone using resulting products adheres to privacy and other applicable international and domestic laws shares personal information in limited and acknowledged ways causes no harm follows privacy policy guidelines and makes privacy policy available to partners Finding installed packages on Fedora Linux systems DPGA also notes that Fedora is actively used in 483 countries.To read this article in full, please click here

Symbexcel: Bringing the Power of Symbolic Execution to the Fight Against Malicious Excel 4 Macros

Office macros are a popular attack vector to compromise a user’s environment and deploy additional components. That’s because macros can hide within documents, often under several layers of obfuscation. In recent years, there has been an increase in attacks that leverage Excel 4.0 macros as threat actors have realized the power that this legacy functionality provides to an attacker.

Analyzing Excel 4.0 macros can be a daunting task, because the analysis often requires manual, step-by-step execution of the code to extract behaviors and IoCs such as the URLs from which additional malware components will be downloaded.

In this blog, we present Symbexcel, a novel solution based on symbolic execution for the automated de-obfuscation and analysis of Excel 4.0 macros. Our approach was recently presented at BlackHat 2021 [1].

What Are Excel 4.0 Macros?

Excel 4.0 macros, or XLM macros, are a 30-year-old feature of Microsoft Excel that allows one to encode a series of operations into the contents of spreadsheet cells. Distinct from the traditional functions provided by an Excel spreadsheet (such as SUM), Excel 4.0 macro functions have access to the Windows API and can be used to interact with the underlying operating Continue reading

Briefings In Brief 102: ZPE Systems Melds Universal CPE With Out-Of-Band Management

ZPE Systems presented at a recent Network Field Day. Founded in 2013, ZPE Systems focuses on two markets: providing out-of-band management for infrastructure, and providing universal CPE for remote and edge locations. The uCPE gear can run third-party VNFs, including firewalling and SD-WAN functions from your favorite vendors.

The post Briefings In Brief 102: ZPE Systems Melds Universal CPE With Out-Of-Band Management appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Real-Time Communications at Scale

Real-Time Communications at Scale
Real-Time Communications at Scale

For every successful technology, there is a moment where its time comes. Something happens, usually external, to catalyze it — shifting it from being a good idea with promise, to a reality that we can’t imagine living without. Perhaps the best recent example was what happened to the cloud as a result of the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. Smartphones created a huge addressable market for small developers; and even big developers found their customer base could explode in a way that they couldn’t handle without access to public cloud infrastructure. Both wanted to be able to focus on building amazing applications, without having to worry about what lay underneath.

Last year, during the outbreak of COVID-19, a similar moment happened to real time communication. Being able to communicate is the lifeblood of any organization. Before 2020, much of it happened in meeting rooms in offices all around the world. But in March last year — that changed dramatically. Those meeting rooms suddenly were emptied. Fast-forward 18 months, and that massive shift in how we work has persisted.

While, undoubtedly, many organizations would not have been able to get by without the likes of Slack, Zoom and Teams as Continue reading

Serverless Live Streaming with Cloudflare Stream

Serverless Live Streaming with Cloudflare Stream
Serverless Live Streaming with Cloudflare Stream

We’re excited to introduce the open beta of Stream Live, an end-to-end scalable live-streaming platform that allows you to focus on growing your live video apps, not your codebase.

With Stream Live, you can painlessly grow your streaming app to scale to millions of concurrent broadcasters and millions of concurrent users. Start sending live video from mobile or desktop using the industry standard RTMPS protocol to millions of viewers instantly. Stream Live works with the most popular live video broadcasting software you already use, including ffmpeg, OBS or Zoom. Your broadcasts are automatically recorded, optimized and delivered using the Stream player.

When you are building your live infrastructure from scratch, you have to answer a few critical questions:

  1. Which codec(s) are we going to use to encode the videos?”
  2. “Which protocols are we going to use to ingest and deliver videos?”
  3. “How are the different components going to impact latency?”

We built Stream Live, so you don’t have to think about these questions and spend considerable engineering effort answering them. Stream Live abstracts these pesky yet important implementation details by automatically choosing the most compatible codec and streaming protocol for the client device. There is no Continue reading