Quotes To Remember

A great quote is worth remebering. Here are some that I have heard over the years that I like to keep readily available. Compassion Planning Learning Success Sports {{ qt.quoteBlock( attribution="Bruce Lee", text="There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you...continue reading

Quotes To Remember

A great quote is worth remebering. Here are some that I have heard over the years that I like to keep readily available. Compassion Planning Success Sports {{ qt.quoteBlock( attribution="Bruce Lee", text="There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go...

DNS 2XL

This is the second part of a technical report on a detailed exploration of the way the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) interacts with the network when the size of the application transactions exceeds the underlying packet size limitations of hosts and networks. In this part we explore UDP-only and TCP-only behavious and also look at how to maximise the resilience of the DNS when handling larger responses.

AWS improves SD-WAN-to-cloud connectivity with Cisco, Aruba, Arista and others

Amazon Web Services has rolled out a new, more native way to connect SD-WAN infrastructures with AWS resources.Introduced at its re:Invent virtual event, AWS Transit Gateway Connect promises a simpler, faster, and more secure way for customers to tie cloud-based resources back to data centers, remote office workers or other distributed access points as needed.Thirteen networking vendors including Cisco, Aruba, Arista, Alkira, Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Versa announced support for the technology, which offers higher throughput and increased security for distributed cloud workloads.To read this article in full, please click here

AWS improves SD-WAN-to-cloud connectivity with Cisco, Aruba, Arista and others

Amazon Web Services has rolled out a new, more native way to connect SD-WAN infrastructures with AWS resources.Introduced at its re:Invent virtual event, AWS Transit Gateway Connect promises a simpler, faster, and more secure way for customers to tie cloud-based resources back to data centers, remote office workers or other distributed access points as needed.Thirteen networking vendors including Cisco, Aruba, Arista, Alkira, Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Versa announced support for the technology, which offers higher throughput and increased security for distributed cloud workloads.To read this article in full, please click here

Docker Desktop 3.0.0: Smaller, Faster Releases

Today with the release of Docker Desktop 3.0.0, we’re launching several major improvements to the way we distribute Docker Desktop. From now on we will be providing all updates as deltas from the previous version, which will reduce the size of a typical update from hundreds of MB to tens of MB. We will also download the update in the background so that all you need to do to benefit from it is to restart Docker Desktop. Finally, we are removing the Stable and Edge channels, and moving to a single release stream for all users.

Changes Based on Your Feedback

Many of you have given us feedback that our updates are too large, and too time consuming to download and install. Until now, we only provided complete installers, which meant that each update required downloading a file of several hundred MB. But from now on we will be providing all updates as deltas from the previous version, which will typically be only tens of MB per release.

We have also heard that updates are offered at an inconvenient time, when you launch Docker Desktop or when you reboot your machine, which are times that you want Continue reading

The Hedge Episode 63: Anycast with Andree Toonk

Anycast is a bit of a mystery to a lot of network engineers. What is it, and what is it used for? Andree Toonk joins Tom and Russ on this episode of the Hedge to discuss the many uses of anycast, particularly in the realm of the Domain Name Service (DNS). Andree helped build the OpenDNS network and service, so he has deep experience with anycast routing on the DFZ.

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Phorpiex-Powered BitRansomware Targets APAC Universities

By: Jason Zhang, Stefano Ortolani – VMware Threat Analysis Unit

BitRansomware (also known as DCryptSoft or Readme) is a — you guessed it — ransomware program that first surfaced in July 2020. Initially targeting English-speaking users1 this threat actor recently expanded its attack to the APAC region, focusing in particular on universities in Japan and Hong Kong.

The BitRansomware malware encrypts victims’ files and then appends the suffix .ReadMe to each filename. Like the Nemty ransomware attack we reported on earlier this year2, the BitRansomware attack was delivered via a massive email campaign carried out again by the Phorpiex botnet3,4. The malspam campaign distributed a swarm of ZIP archive files containing ransomware downloaders in malicious executables.

In this blog post, we detail some of VMware NSX’s telemetry around the magnitude of the BitRansomware campaign, and we then provide a brief overview of the most distinctive aspects of the attack.

The Spam Campaign

The chart below shows the detection timeline of the campaign as it affected some of our customers in the APAC region. As we can see, the campaign started on November 3, and peaked at over 28,000 email instances on November 4 before Continue reading

Expanding Docker’s Developer Preview Program

Back in April, we did a limited launch of a Desktop Developer Preview Program, an early access program set up to enable Docker power-users to test, experiment with and provide feedback on new unreleased features on Docker Desktop. The aim was to empower the community to work in lock-step with Docker engineers and help shape our product roadmap.

For this first phase of the program, we limited the program to a small cohort of community members to test the waters and gather learnings as we planned to roll-out a full-fledged program later in the year. 

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the official launch of the program, renaming it the Docker Developer Preview Program and broadening its scope to also include Docker Engine on Linux. 

What are the benefits of joining the program?

First and foremost, this is an opportunity for anyone in the community to help shape and improve the experience of millions of Docker users around the world. As a member, you get direct access to the people who are building our products everyday: our engineering team, product managers, community leads etc… Through the program’s private Slack channel, you get to share your feedback, tell us Continue reading

FRR

FRRouting (FRR) is an IP routing protocol suite for Linux and Unix platforms which includes protocol daemons for BGP, IS-IS, LDP, OSPF, PIM, and RIP.

This article uses the Docker DDoS testbed to explore FRRouting's BGP Flowspec capability. Follow the steps in the Docker DDoS testbed article, but instead of running ExaBGP, run the following command to start the pre-built sflow/frr image:
docker run --rm -d --privileged --name frr sflow/frr
Run the following command to show the router configuration:
docker exec frr vtysh -c "show running-config"
The results will be displayed:
Building configuration...

Current configuration:
!
frr version 7.5_git
frr defaults traditional
hostname ed9e435c6f3d
no ipv6 forwarding
log stdout
!
router bgp 65000
bgp router-id 0.0.0.1
neighbor 192.168.65.2 remote-as 65001
neighbor 192.168.65.2 port 1179
neighbor 192.168.65.2 ebgp-multihop 255
neighbor 192.168.65.2 timers connect 10
!
address-family ipv4 unicast
neighbor 192.168.65.2 route-map ALLOW-ALL in
neighbor 192.168.65.2 route-map ALLOW-ALL out
exit-address-family
!
address-family ipv4 flowspec
neighbor 192.168.65.2 activate
neighbor 192.168.65.2 route-map ALLOW-ALL in
neighbor 192.168.65.2 route-map ALLOW-ALL out
exit-address-family
!
address-family ipv6 unicast
neighbor 192.168.65. Continue reading

Connecting Indigenous Communities: An Urgent Call for Inclusivity, Ownership, and Affordability

In October, we held the 2020 edition of Indigenous Connectivity Summit (ICS). Over the last four years, this summit has become a hallmark event for Indigenous network operators, leaders, community members, and others to come together to discuss the unique opportunities and challenges Indigenous communities face when campaigning for quality and affordable Internet access, and to build relationships with like-minded communities across North America.

In addition to the summit itself, for six weeks prior to the event participants in the ICS Policy and Advocacy training program led the development of a set of policy recommendations. These were then elaborated on, reviewed, and endorsed by summit participants, and they will now help both the Internet Society and the Indigenous communities who created them to advocate for policies that will help the United States and Canada move closer to digital equity.

We know that these recommendations really do make a difference. In 2019, our policy recommendations and organized advocacy efforts affected real change. The Federal Communications Commission in the U.S. was about to launch a spectrum auction and include a Tribal Priority Window so Indigenous communities could apply for the rights to the airwaves over their lands. The Tribal Priority Window Continue reading

Taking The Pulse Of The Core HPC Market

Since a big chunk of the IBM HPC team moved over to Lenovo as part of the System x division being acquired by Lenovo back in late 2014, which coincided when we started The Next Platform, we have made a habit of talking to Scott Tease, executive director of high performance computing at Lenovo to take the pulse of the volume segment of the HPC space.

Taking The Pulse Of The Core HPC Market was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPC Does A Cannonball Into HPE’s GreenLake

Peter Ungaro, senior vice president and general manager of HPC and mission critical solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and longtime CEO of supercomputer Cray before HPE bought the company for $1.3 billion in 2019, spoke with The Next Platform earlier this year about the dawning exascale era the world is about to step into.

HPC Does A Cannonball Into HPE’s GreenLake was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Announcing Workplace Records for Cloudflare for Teams

Announcing Workplace Records for Cloudflare for Teams

We wanted to close out Privacy & Compliance Week by talking about something universal and certain: taxes. Businesses worldwide pay employment taxes based on where their employees do work. For most businesses and in normal times, where employees do work has been relatively easy to determine: it's where they come into the office. But 2020 has made everything more complicated, even taxes.

As businesses worldwide have shifted to remote work, employees have been working from "home" — wherever that may be. Some employees have taken this opportunity to venture further from where they usually are, sometimes crossing state and national borders.

Announcing Workplace Records for Cloudflare for Teams

In a lot of ways, it's gone better than expected. We're proud of helping provide technology solutions like Cloudflare for Teams that allow employees to work from anywhere and ensure they still have a fast, secure connection to their corporate resources. But increasingly we've been hearing from the heads of the finance, legal, and HR departments of our customers with a concern: "If I don't know where my employees are, I have no idea where I need to pay taxes."

Today we're announcing the beta of a new feature for Cloudflare for Teams to help solve this problem: Continue reading

IPv6 Buzz 066: Is IPv6 Baked Enough?

Today's IPv6 Buzz podcast tackles the question of IPv6 maturity, how much change we might expect to the protocol going forward, the standards process, and more. Our guest is Russ White, Infrastructure Architect at Juniper Networks. Russ is an author, speaker, and chairs two IETF working groups.