How to Build a Better Security Posture Post-Pandemic

What a whirlwind of a year it has been! Covid has accelerated digital transformation — but also made painfully obvious the data center’s continuing security vulnerabilities. We’ll explore VMware’s data center security insights and solutions at RSA Conference 2021.

Ah, 2020, a year we won’t soon forget. Initially, I know a lot of us had planned to work from home more frequently, given our ability to be physically anywhere with internet access, but who would have thought we would be forced to? I’m thankful we are in an industry that supports and encourages us to be mindful of our health and safety. And so, while conferences like Black Hat and DEFCON (“hacker summer camp”) are moving towards a hybrid model allowing a limited number of attendees to be physically present, I am choosing to stay home and participate remotely.

Why We’re Here

I am confident the underlying theme of the ’cons this year will be how the global pandemic, by requiring us to socially isolate, has forced innovation in the way we work. This has had a profound impact on the industry — accelerating us into a digital transformation that relies on cloud and other technologies. A transformation a lot Continue reading

Upgrading my desktop PC

I built my current desktop PC in 2014. A second SSD was added in 2015. The motherboard and the power supply were replaced after a fault1 in 2016. The memory was upgraded in 2018. A discrete AMD GPU was installed in 2019 to drive two 4K screens. An NVMe disk was added earlier this year to further increase storage performance. This is a testament to the durability of a desktop PC compared to a laptop: it’s evolutive and you can keep it a long time.

While fine for most usage, the CPU started to become a bottleneck during video conferences.2 So, it was set for an upgrade. The table below summarizes the change. This update cost me about 800 €.

Before After
CPU Intel i5-4670K @ 3.4 GHz AMD Ryzen 5 5600X @ 3.7 GHz
CPU fan Zalman CNPS9900 Noctua NH-U12S
Motherboard Asus Z97-PRO Gamer Asus TUF Gaming B550-PLUS
RAM 2×8 GB + 2×4 GB DDR3 @ 1.6 GHz 2×16 GB DDR4 @ 3.6 GHz
GPU Asus Radeon PH RX 550 4G M7 ←
Disks 500 GB Crucial P2 NVMe
256 GB Samsung SSD 850
256 GB Samsung SSD 840		 ←
PSU be quiet! Pure Power CM L8 @ 530 W ←
Case Antec P100 ←
Desktop PC upgrade Desktop PC upgrade Desktop PC upgrade

According to some Continue reading

Cracking WPA/WPA2 Pre-shared Key Using GPU

The WPA/WPA2 4-way authentication handshake between AP (authenticator) and client (supplicant) is used to generate encryption keys. These keys are then used to encrypt data sent over wireless medium. In the previous tutorial, we installed the aircrack-ng suite to capture and crack the 4-way authentication handshake to obtain passphrase needed to access a wireless network. […]
Continue reading...

10 competitors Cisco just can’t kill off

In compiling this iteration of our list of competitors Cisco can’t kill off, one thing is clear: The competition is fierce amongst the bigger players.Nearly all the networking giant’s competitors have refreshed their product lines or bought into technology to compete more closely with Cisco. But that’s not to say Cisco has been sitting still by any means.The 10 most powerful companies in enterprise networking 2021 The company has expanded and refreshed its core Catalyst, Nexus and Silicon One networking gear and made major strides in security and software. Going forward, it wants to lead the industry in network-as-a-service.To read this article in full, please click here

10 competitors Cisco just can’t kill off

In compiling this iteration of our list of competitors Cisco can’t kill off, one thing is clear: The competition is fierce amongst the bigger players.Nearly all the networking giant’s competitors have refreshed their product lines or bought into technology to compete more closely with Cisco. But that’s not to say Cisco has been sitting still by any means.The 10 most powerful companies in enterprise networking 2021 The company has expanded and refreshed its core Catalyst, Nexus and Silicon One networking gear and made major strides in security and software. Going forward, it wants to lead the industry in network-as-a-service.To read this article in full, please click here

IPv6 Buzz 079: IPv6 In The Data Center

In this week's IPv6 Buzz podcast, we explore IPv6 in the data center with guest Jeff Tantsura. Jeff is formerly head of Network Strategy with Juniper/Apstra, and now with Microsoft Azure. We explore IPv6 use cases in the data center, reasons for and challenges of assigning a /64 per host, leveraging IPv6 flow labels to improve data center fabric performance, and more.

IPv6 Buzz 079: IPv6 In The Data Center

In this week's IPv6 Buzz podcast, we explore IPv6 in the data center with guest Jeff Tantsura. Jeff is formerly head of Network Strategy with Juniper/Apstra, and now with Microsoft Azure. We explore IPv6 use cases in the data center, reasons for and challenges of assigning a /64 per host, leveraging IPv6 flow labels to improve data center fabric performance, and more.

The post IPv6 Buzz 079: IPv6 In The Data Center appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Service Mapping with BGP Classful Transport – Kaliraj Vairavakkalai, Principal Engineer @ Juniper Networks

In this episode Kaliraj will explain to us what BGP Classful Transport (BGP-CT) is and how it works. BGP-CT is a mechanism, referred to as “service mapping”, to express association of overlay routes with underlay routes satisfying a certain SLA, using BGP.  It is a framework for classifying underlay routes into transport classes, and mapping service routes to specific transport class.
The “Transport class” construct maps to a desired SLA, and can be used to realize the “Topology Slice” in 5G Network slicing architecture.

BGP-CT is still work in progress in IETF. The draft can be found here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-kaliraj-idr-bgp-classful-transport-planes/
The authors welcome feedback and input for the draft.

It’s Raining Beacons: Automated Generation of Cobalt Strike Traffic

Introduction

Cobalt Strike [1] is a tool to support red teams in attack simulation exercises. To this end, Cobalt Strike provides several techniques that allow a red team to execute targeted attacks to compromise a target network, established a bridge head on a host, and then move laterally to gain additional access to computers, accounts, and, eventually, data.

While the goal of Raphael Mudge, the author of Cobalt Strike, was to provide a framework to test network defenses to support the development of effective detection mechanisms and incident response procedures, the power provided by the tools was not lost on malicious actors (see, for example, [2]).

Soon, Cobalt Strike was copied, modified, and included in the toolset used in attacks against targets of all kinds. For example, recently Cobalt Strike was used as part of both the SolarWinds supply-chain attack [3] and the ransomware attacks against Colonial Pipeline [4]. The tool is so popular that there are Telegram channels and GitHub repositories dedicated to obtaining or producing modified, pirated copies of the Cobalt Strike software [5].

Given its “dual nature” and wide adoption by both sides of the security battlefield, it is not surprising that security teams struggle to develop Continue reading

Buoyant Cloud Beta Brings Simplified Linkerd

Network software provider Linkerd service mesh, has launched the public beta of William Morgan emphasizes that operational simplicity has always been a focus, he says that they expect Buoyant Cloud to take that one step further. “We want to take the operational burden off of the shoulders of whoever is bringing Linkerd into their organization. We want to handle that for you,” he said. “We want to carry the pager for you, we want to make it so that running Linkerd in production is a trivial task. This falls right in line with everything we’ve been doing with Linkerd since the very beginning — our focus has been really heavily on operational simplicity and on making it so that when you operate Linkerd, you’re not in this horrendous situation where you need to hire a team of experts just to maintain your service mesh. With Buoyant Cloud, we have the opportunity to take on a lot of those operational tasks for you, and make it so you get all Continue reading

Day Two Cloud 104: Cloud Is No Escape From Your Data Center Dumpster Fire

IT and business leaders need to be more nuanced in their approach to the cloud. On today's Day Two Cloud podcast, guest Melissa Palmer discusses why cloud hype is a problem for organizations, the need to understand why you'd use cloud, what problems you're trying to solve, and why poor operational processes on prem won't magically vanish by moving to the cloud.

The post Day Two Cloud 104: Cloud Is No Escape From Your Data Center Dumpster Fire appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Cisco completes purchase of security risk-management firm

Cisco continues to bulk-up its security portfolio, this week closing the deal on risk-based management company Kenna Security for an undisclosed amount.Kenna’s Risk-Based Vulnerability Management system collects and analyzes security data to provide security teams with information about threats so they can prioritize remediation and better understand risks. Read about edge networking How edge networking and IoT will reshape data centers Edge computing best practices How edge computing can help secure the IoT The technology will become part of Cisco’s SecureX service that integrates numerous security components. Cisco says the service is an open, cloud-native system to detect and remediate threats across Cisco and third-party products from a single interface. The SecureX dashboard shows operational metrics, triggers alerts to emerging threats, and accelerates threat investigations and incident management by aggregating and correlating global intelligence and local context in one view.  To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco completes purchase of security risk-management firm

Cisco continues to bulk-up its security portfolio, this week closing the deal on risk-based management company Kenna Security for an undisclosed amount.Kenna’s Risk-Based Vulnerability Management system collects and analyzes security data to provide security teams with information about threats so they can prioritize remediation and better understand risks. Read about edge networking How edge networking and IoT will reshape data centers Edge computing best practices How edge computing can help secure the IoT The technology will become part of Cisco’s SecureX service that integrates numerous security components. Cisco says the service is an open, cloud-native system to detect and remediate threats across Cisco and third-party products from a single interface. The SecureX dashboard shows operational metrics, triggers alerts to emerging threats, and accelerates threat investigations and incident management by aggregating and correlating global intelligence and local context in one view.  To read this article in full, please click here

Cloudflare’s Network Doubles CPU Capacity and Expands Into Ten New Cities in Four New Countries

Cloudflare’s Network Doubles CPU Capacity and Expands Into Ten New Cities in Four New Countries
Cloudflare’s Network Doubles CPU Capacity and Expands Into Ten New Cities in Four New Countries

Cloudflare’s global network is always expanding, and 2021 has been no exception. Today, I’m happy to give a mid-year update: we've added ten new Cloudflare cities, with four new countries represented among them. And we've doubled our computational footprint since the start of pandemic-related lockdowns.

No matter what else we do at Cloudflare, constant expansion of our infrastructure to new places is a requirement to help build a better Internet. 2021, like 2020, has been a difficult time to be a global network — from semiconductor shortages to supply-chain disruptions — but regardless, we have continued to expand throughout the entire globe, experimenting with technologies like ARM, ASICs, and Nvidia all the way.

The Cities

Cloudflare’s Network Doubles CPU Capacity and Expands Into Ten New Cities in Four New Countries

Without further ado, here are the new Cloudflare cities: Tbilisi, Georgia; San José, Costa Rica; Tunis, Tunisia; Yangon, Myanmar; Nairobi, Kenya; Jashore, Bangladesh; Canberra, Australia; Palermo, Italy; and Salvador and Campinas, Brazil.

These deployments are spread across every continent except Antarctica.

We’ve solidified our presence in every country of the Caucuses with our first deployment in the country of Georgia in the capital city of Tbilisi. And on the other side of the world, we’ve Continue reading

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