IDC: Moving to the cloud could save 1B+ metric tons of CO2 emissions

IDC has released a new study, the first of its kind, that predicts that cloud computing could help to prevent more than one billion metric ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the next three years.The forecast uses IDC data on server distribution and cloud and on-premises software use along with third-party information on data center power usage, carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt-hour, and emission comparisons of cloud and non-cloud data centers.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] IDC's forecast includes upper and lower bounds for the estimated reduction in emissions. If the percentage of green cloud data centers today stays where it is, just the migration to cloud itself could save 693 million metric tons over the four-year time period.To read this article in full, please click here

A Tale of Two Network Automation Surveys

The 2020 results of the NetDevOps Survey are out! This was the third time the survey was conducted and was targeted to the network automation community. But first, a huge shout out to the team that led this effort again (Damien Garros and Francois Caen). The survey was 100% community-driven, and I thank them for allowing me to be a part of the team, and to provide feedback to existing and new questions.

This survey is a good representation of how network operators and network engineers are utilizing automation to get their jobs done, but largely without management buy-in or a proactive automation strategy. This blog is largely my hot take on the results, as seen through the lens of my history at Red Hat as an Ansible Product Manager helping to get network automation as an official commercial use case off the ground. I’m going to compare and contrast the survey questions and results between the most recent NetDevOps survey and the Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Enterprise Network Automation for 2020 and Beyond results that Red Hat sponsored back in 2019.

Here are the main ideas I gleaned:

  1. Ansible continues to be the de-facto network (and more) automation language.
    Continue reading

In Yucatán, Mexico, IXSY Gets Its Watershed Moment

Despite being the second-most populated country in Latin America, with significant Internet consumption, by the end of 2019 Mexico only had one established Internet exchange point (IXP) – CITI, in three locations (Mexico City, Querétaro, and Tultitlán). In comparison, Argentina and Brazil have more than 30 points each.

In Mexico’s southeastern region – which has the country’s highest poverty rates and lowest connectivity – there were none. This prompted a committed group of people in the State of Yucatán to set out to create an IXP in 2014.

Their efforts intensified in April 2018, with the signing of the founding act for the Internet Exchange Services Yucatán (IXSY), a nonprofit association to administer the node in Yucatán.

In May 2018, the First National IXP Forum was organized. There, IXSY gained the support of Yucatan’s state government. But in July, that government lost the state elections, putting the project on pause.

Still, the new government didn’t take long to see the project’s relevance, says Carmen Denis Polanco, director of the IXSY. “It is beautiful and valuable that it did not become a political issue, but something that was important for the state. A new team of people was formed that could Continue reading

Memory Forensics for Virtualized Hosts

Detecting In-Memory Malware Threats

Memory analysis plays a key role in identifying sophisticated malware in both user space and kernel space, as modern threats are often file-less, operating without creating a file system artifact.

The most effective approach to the detection of these sophisticated malware components is to install on the protected operating system an agent that continuously monitors the OS memory for signs of compromise. However, this approach has a number of drawbacks. First, the agent introduces a constant overhead in the monitored OS — caused by both the resources used by the agent process (e.g., CPU, memory) and the instrumentation used to capture relevant events (e.g., API hooking). Second, a malware sample can detect the presence of an agent and attempt to either disable the agent or evade detection. Third, depending on how it is deployed, the agent not have access to specific portions of the user-space and kernel-space memory, and, as a consequence, may miss important evidence of a compromise. Finally, deploying, maintaining, and updating agents on every endpoint can be challenging, especially in heterogeneous deployments where multiple versions of different operating systems and architectures coexist.

A complementary approach to the detection of Continue reading

Open source, programmability, and as-a-service to play a big role in future networks

Networks of the not-to-distant future could feature many more open-source software components, advanced programmability, and be delivered as-a-service, according to experts speaking at the Future:Net 2021 symposium.Attendees of the virtual event heard predictions from vendors such as Cisco, Google, and Microsoft as well as academics and analyst firms such as Gartner and 451 Research. Who's selling SASE, and what do you get? A key theme from many of the speakers was that networks and networking technology of the future will feature way more software controls and programmability than most enterprise customers see in their environments today. To read this article in full, please click here

Open source, programmability, and as-a-service to play a big role in future networks

Networks of the not-to-distant future could feature many more open-source software components, advanced programmability, and be delivered as-a-service, according to experts speaking at the Future:Net 2021 symposium.Attendees of the virtual event heard predictions from vendors such as Cisco, Google, and Microsoft as well as academics and analyst firms such as Gartner and 451 Research. Who's selling SASE, and what do you get? A key theme from many of the speakers was that networks and networking technology of the future will feature way more software controls and programmability than most enterprise customers see in their environments today. To read this article in full, please click here

Page Shield: Protect User Data In-Browser

Page Shield: Protect User Data In-Browser
Page Shield: Protect User Data In-Browser

Today we're excited to introduce Page Shield, a client-side security product customers can use to detect attacks in end-user browsers.

Starting in 2015, a hacker group named Magecart stole payment credentials from online stores by infecting third-party dependencies with malicious code. The infected code would be requested by end-user browsers, where it would execute and access user information on the web page. After grabbing the information, the infected code would send it to the hackers, where it would be resold or used to launch additional attacks such as credit card fraud and identity theft.

Since then, other targets of such supply chain attacks have included Ticketmaster, Newegg, British Airways, and more. The British Airways attack stemmed from the compromise of one of their self-hosted JavaScript files, exposing nearly 500,000 customers’ data to hackers. The attack resulted in GDPR fines and the largest class-action privacy suit in UK history. In total, millions of users have been affected by these attacks.

Writing secure code within an organization is challenging enough without having to worry about third-party vendors. Many SaaS platforms serve third-party code to millions of sites, meaning a single compromise could have devastating results. Page Shield helps customers monitor these potential Continue reading

Protecting Cloudflare Customers from BGP Insecurity with Route Leak Detection

Protecting Cloudflare Customers from BGP Insecurity with Route Leak Detection
Protecting Cloudflare Customers from BGP Insecurity with Route Leak Detection

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route leaks and hijacks can ruin your day — BGP is insecure by design, and incorrect routing information spreading across the Internet can be incredibly disruptive and dangerous to the normal functioning of customer networks, and the Internet at large. Today, we're excited to announce Route Leak Detection, a new network alerting feature that tells customers when a prefix they own that is onboarded to Cloudflare is being leaked, i.e., advertised by an unauthorized party. Route Leak Detection helps protect your routes on the Internet: it tells you when your traffic is going places it’s not supposed to go, which is an indicator of a possible attack, and reduces time to mitigate leaks by arming you with timely information.

In this blog, we will explain what route leaks are, how Cloudflare Route Leak Detection works, and what we are doing to help protect the Internet from route leaks.

What are route leaks and why should I care?

A route leak occurs when a network on the Internet tells the rest of the world to route traffic through their network, when the traffic isn’t supposed to go there normally. A great example of this Continue reading

Relative Speed of Public Cloud Orchestration Systems

When I was complaining about the speed (or lack thereof) of Azure orchestration system, someone replied “I tried to do $somethingComplicated on AWS and it also took forever”

Following the “opinions are great, data is better” mantra (as opposed to “never let facts get in the way of a good story” supposedly practiced by some podcasters), I decided to do a short experiment: create a very similar environment with Azure and AWS.

I took simple Terraform deployment configuration for AWS and Azure. Both included a virtual network, two subnets, a route table, a packet filter, and a VM with public IP address. Here are the observed times:

Read more …

Relative Speed of Public Cloud Orchestration Systems

When I was complaining about the speed (or lack thereof) of Azure orchestration system, someone replied “I tried to do $somethingComplicated on AWS and it also took forever”

Following the “opinions are great, data is better” mantra (as opposed to “never let facts get in the way of a good story” supposedly practiced by some podcasters), I decided to do a short experiment: create a very similar environment with Azure and AWS.

I took simple Terraform deployment configuration for AWS and Azure. Both included a virtual network, two subnets, a route table, a packet filter, and a VM with public IP address. Here are the observed times:

Read more …

Linux tricks to speed up your workday

One of the really nice things about working on the Linux command line is that you can get a lot of work done very quickly. With a handle on the most useful commands and some command-line savvy, you can take a lot of the tedium out of your daily work. This post will walk you through several handy tricks that can make your work load feel a little lighter and maybe be a little bit more enjoyable.Emptying files with > Any time you have an important file that you need to empty because it's become too large or the data is no longer needed, you can do that by using the command > filename. This is much faster than removing the file and recreating it with the original permissions. The > sign followed by the file name works the same as typing cat /dev/null > filename, but is wonderfully quick. It empties the file, but leaves permissions and ownership intact.To read this article in full, please click here

Linux tricks to speed up your workday

One of the really nice things about working on the Linux command line is that you can get a lot of work done very quickly. With a handle on the most useful commands and some command-line savvy, you can take a lot of the tedium out of your daily work. This post will walk you through several handy tricks that can make your work load feel a little lighter and maybe be a little bit more enjoyable.Emptying files with > Any time you have an important file that you need to empty because it's become too large or the data is no longer needed, you can do that by using the command > filename. This is much faster than removing the file and recreating it with the original permissions. The > sign followed by the file name works the same as typing cat /dev/null > filename, but is wonderfully quick. It empties the file, but leaves permissions and ownership intact.To read this article in full, please click here

Cloudflare’s New Magic WAN Is A Familiar Trick

Cloudflare is building out its network and security services offerings to compete with SASE and CASB providers. The new Magic WAN and Magic Firewall offerings let customers direct traffic from branch offices, remote workers, and data centers to Cloudlfare's infrastructure for WAN transport and security inspection.

The post Cloudflare’s New Magic WAN Is A Familiar Trick appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Scientists are working on a switch to help lower the cost of using quantum computers

As IT professionals know, enterprise server farms are huge energy consumers, and the larger they are, the more voracious their appetite.Quantum computing could help because it is not only supposed to solve complex problems exponentially faster than classical computing, it’s also supposed to do so while consuming less energy. However major barriers—such as creating the extremely low temperatures required to enable superconductivity that is used in quantum-computing components—stand in the way.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Now researchers at MIT are working on a tiny device that could help enable quantum computing and drastically reduce server-farm costs. The roots of this device—made from a superconducting nanowire—stretch back to a similar concept developed in the mid-1950s by an MIT electrical engineer who died tragically young before his vision could become reality.To read this article in full, please click here

Scientists are working on a switch to help lower the cost of using quantum computers

As IT professionals know, enterprise server farms are huge energy consumers, and the larger they are, the more voracious their appetite.Quantum computing could help because it is not only supposed to solve complex problems exponentially faster than classical computing, it’s also supposed to do so while consuming less energy. However major barriers—such as creating the extremely low temperatures required to enable superconductivity that is used in quantum-computing components—stand in the way.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Now researchers at MIT are working on a tiny device that could help enable quantum computing and drastically reduce server-farm costs. The roots of this device—made from a superconducting nanowire—stretch back to a similar concept developed in the mid-1950s by an MIT electrical engineer who died tragically young before his vision could become reality.To read this article in full, please click here

The Hedge 76: Frederico Lucifredi and the Taxonomy of Indecision

Decision making, especially in large organizations, fails in many interesting ways. Understanding these failure modes can help us cope with seemingly difficult situations, and learn how to make decisions better. On this episode of the Hedge, Frederico Lucifredi, Ethan Banks, and Russ White discuss Frederico’s thoughts on developing a taxonomy of indecision. You can find his presentation on this topic here.

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