Imposters Among Us

Have you been playing Among Us? If you haven’t, your kids definitely have. I found out about it a few weeks ago because my children suddenly became Batman-level detectives and knew how to ask the kinds of interview questions that would make the FBI proud. In short, the game is all about finding the imposters in your midst based on their behavior and voting them out of the group to win. Sometimes you get it right. Other times you get it wrong and vote out someone who was doing legitimate tasks. It’s all a matter of perception.

Now, let’s look at another situation where we see this kind of behavior in a different light. You probably guessed where this is going already. We’re going to talk about Imposter Syndrome in our non-gaming lives and how it affects us. We may even make reference to pop culture along the way.

Where You Need To Be

I was thinking about this because something I said a few years ago at Security Field Day 1 popped back up in my feed. I was giving a speech at the beginning of the first day to the delegates and I wanted them to know that Continue reading

Introducing Magic Firewall

Introducing Magic Firewall
Introducing Magic Firewall

Today we’re excited to announce Magic Firewall™, a network-level firewall delivered through Cloudflare to secure your enterprise. Magic Firewall covers your remote users, branch offices, data centers and cloud infrastructure. Best of all, it’s deeply integrated with Cloudflare One™, giving you a one-stop overview of everything that’s happening on your network.

Cloudflare Magic Transit™ secures IP subnets with the same DDoS protection technology that we built to keep our own global network secure. That helps ensure your network is safe from attack and available and it replaces physical appliances that have limits with Cloudflare’s network.

That still leaves some hardware onsite, though, for a different function: firewalls. Networks don’t just need protection from DDoS attacks; administrators need a way to set policies for all traffic entering and leaving the network. With Magic Firewall, we want to help your team deprecate those network firewall appliances and move that burden to the Cloudflare global network.

Firewall boxes are miserable to manage

Network firewalls have always been clunky. Not only are they expensive, they are bound by their own hardware constraints. If you need more CPU or memory, you have to buy more boxes. If you lack capacity, the entire network suffers, directly Continue reading

Video: Simplify Device Configurations with Cumulus Linux

The designers of Cumulus Linux CLI were always focused on simplifying network device configurations. One of the first features along these lines was BGP across unnumbered interfaces, then they introduced simplified EVPN configurations, and recently auto-MLAG and auto-BGP.

You can watch a short description of these features by Dinesh Dutt and Pete Lumbis in Simplify Network Configuration with Cumulus Linux and Smart Datacenter Defaults videos (part of Cumulus Linux section of Data Center Fabrics webinar).

You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.

Video: Simplify Device Configurations with Cumulus Linux

The designers of Cumulus Linux CLI were always focused on simplifying network device configurations. One of the first features along these lines was BGP across unnumbered interfaces, then they introduced simplified EVPN configurations, and recently auto-MLAG and auto-BGP.

You can watch a short description of these features by Dinesh Dutt and Pete Lumbis in Simplify Network Configuration with Cumulus Linux and Smart Datacenter Defaults videos (part of Cumulus Linux section of Data Center Fabrics webinar).

You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.

IPv6 Buzz 062: Reviewing DNS Flag Day 2020

DNS Flag Day is a community effort by service providers and DNS software vendors to address DNS issues. In this week's IPv6 Buzz episode, Ed and Scott speak with guest Andrew Wertkin about the DNS flag day for 2020, which took place October 1st. They discuss what this year's DNS Flag Day addressed, plus DNS behavior that listeners should look for that might indicate they aren’t current with their DNS settings and configurations.

IPv6 Buzz 062: Reviewing DNS Flag Day 2020

DNS Flag Day is a community effort by service providers and DNS software vendors to address DNS issues. In this week's IPv6 Buzz episode, Ed and Scott speak with guest Andrew Wertkin about the DNS flag day for 2020, which took place October 1st. They discuss what this year's DNS Flag Day addressed, plus DNS behavior that listeners should look for that might indicate they aren’t current with their DNS settings and configurations.

The post IPv6 Buzz 062: Reviewing DNS Flag Day 2020 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

Earlier this week, we announced Cloudflare One™, our comprehensive, cloud-based network-as-a-service solution. Cloudflare One improves network performance and security while reducing cost and complexity for companies of all sizes.

Cloudflare One is built to handle the scale and complexity of the largest corporate networks. But when it comes to network security and performance, the industry has focused all too often on the largest of customers with significant budgets and technology teams. At Cloudflare, we think it’s our opportunity and responsibility to serve everyone, and help companies of all sizes benefit from a better Internet.

This is Zero Trust Week at Cloudflare, and we’ve already talked about our mantra of Zero Trust for Everyone. As a quick refresher, Zero Trust is a security framework that assumes all networks, devices, and Internet destinations are inherently compromised and therefore should not be trusted. Cloudflare One facilitates Zero Trust security by securing how your users connect to corporate applications and the Internet at large.

As a small business network administrator, there are fundamentally three things you need to protect: devices, applications, and the network itself. Below, I’ll outline how you can secure devices whether they are in your office (DNS Filtering) or remote (WARP+ Continue reading

Getting started with Ansible security automation: Threat Hunting

AnsibleFest has just wrapped up, with a whole track dedicated to security automation, our answer to the lack of integration across the IT security industry. If you’re looking for a use case to start with, our investigation enrichment blog will give you yet another example of where Ansible can facilitate typical operational challenges of security practitioners.

Ansible security automation is about integrating various security technologies with each other. One part of this challenge is the technical complexity: different products, interfaces, workflows, etc. But another equally important part is getting the processes of different teams in the security organization aligned. After all, one sign of successful automation is the deployment across team boundaries.

This is especially true with threat hunting activities: when security analysts suspect a malicious activity or want to prove a hypothesis, they need to work with rules and policies to fine tune the detection and identification. This involves changes and configurations on various target systems managed by different teams.

In this blog post, we will start with a typical day-to-day security operations challenge and walk through some example threat hunting steps - adding more teams and products over the course to finally show how Red Hat Ansible Automation Continue reading

Introducing Cloudflare Browser Isolation beta

Introducing Cloudflare Browser Isolation beta

Reimagining the Browser

Introducing Cloudflare Browser Isolation beta

A web browser, the same application that connects users to the entire Internet, also connects you to all of the potentially harmful parts of the Internet. It’s an open door to nearly every connected system on the planet, which is powerful and terrifying.

We also rely on browsers more than ever. Most applications that we use live in a browser and that will continue to increase. For more and more organizations, a corporate laptop is just a managed web browser machine.

To keep those devices safe, and the data they hold or access, enterprises have started to deploy “browser isolation” services where the browser itself doesn’t run on the machine. Instead, the browser runs on a virtual machine in a cloud provider somewhere. By running away from the device, threats from the browser stay on that virtual machine somewhere in the cloud.

However, most isolation solutions take one of two approaches that both ruin the convenience and flexibility of a web browser:

  • Record the isolated browser and send a live stream of it to the user, which is slow and makes it difficult to do basic things like input text to a form.
  • Unpack the webpage, inspect Continue reading

Backing up databases is critical and complex

Databases, also referred to as structured data, are an essential part of any data center. While databases do not typically hold a high percentage of the terabytes housed in a given data center, they do hold a high percentage of mission-critical data. Understanding their unique structure and operation is key to backing them up.Structured data cannot be backed up like unstructured data due to three very big challenges. First, databases are typically stored in datafiles that are constantly changing as long as something is making updates to the database. This means you cannot just back them up like any other file.To read this article in full, please click here

Backing up databases is critical and complex

Databases, also referred to as structured data, are an essential part of any data center. While databases do not typically hold a high percentage of the terabytes housed in a given data center, they do hold a high percentage of mission-critical data. Understanding their unique structure and operation is key to backing them up.Structured data cannot be backed up like unstructured data due to three very big challenges. First, databases are typically stored in datafiles that are constantly changing as long as something is making updates to the database. This means you cannot just back them up like any other file.To read this article in full, please click here

Automation Win: Recreating Cisco ACI Tenants in Public Cloud

This blog post was initially sent to the subscribers of our SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

Most automation projects are gradual improvements of existing manual processes, but every now and then the stars align and you get a perfect storm, like what Adrian Giacommetti encountered during one of his automation projects.

The customer had well-defined security policies implemented in Cisco ACI environment with tenants, endpoint groups, and contracts. They wanted to recreate those tenants in a public cloud, but it took way too long as the only migration tool they had was an engineer chasing GUI screens on both platforms.

Automation Win: Recreating Cisco ACI Tenants in Public Cloud

This blog post was initially sent to the subscribers of our SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

Most automation projects are gradual improvements of existing manual processes, but every now and then the stars align and you get a perfect storm, like what Adrian Giacommetti encountered during one of his automation projects.

The customer had well-defined security policies implemented in Cisco ACI environment with tenants, endpoint groups, and contracts. They wanted to recreate those tenants in a public cloud, but it took way too long as the only migration tool they had was an engineer chasing GUI screens on both platforms.