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Ransom DDoS attacks target a Fortune Global 500 company

In late 2020, a major Fortune Global 500 company was targeted by a Ransom DDoS (RDDoS) attack by a group claiming to be the Lazarus Group. Cloudflare quickly onboarded them to the Magic Transit service and protected them against the lingering threat. This extortion attempt was part of wider ransom campaigns that have been unfolding throughout the year, targeting thousands of organizations around the world. Extortionists are threatening organizations with crippling DDoS attacks if they do not pay a ransom.

Throughout 2020, Cloudflare onboarded and protected many organizations with Magic Transit, Cloudflare’s DDoS protection service for critical network infrastructure, the WAF service for HTTP applications, and the Spectrum service for TCP/UDP based applications -- ensuring their business’s availability and continuity.

Unwinding the attack timeline

I spoke with Daniel (a pseudonym) and his team, who work at the Incident Response and Forensics team at the aforementioned company. I wanted to learn about their experience, and share it with our readers so they could learn how to better prepare for such an event. The company has requested to stay anonymous and so some details have been omitted to ensure that. In this blog post, I will refer to them as X.

Initially, Continue reading

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Eliminate East-West Traffic Hair-Pinning

Networks must be designed to take into account the additional (hair-pinned) traffic routed through an appliance-based firewall.

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Domain Name System Security Extensions Now Deployed in all Generic Top-Level Domains – ICANN

Well huh, it wasn't done already ?

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Considerations for Host-based Firewalls (Part 2)

This is a guest blog post by Matthias Luft, Principal Platform Security Engineer @ Salesforce, and a regular ipSpace.net guest speaker.

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure to publish my first guest post here and, as to be expected from ipspace.net, it triggered some great discussion.

With this input and some open thoughts from the last post, I want to dive into a few more topics.

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Considerations for Host-based Firewalls (Part 2)

This is a guest blog post by Matthias Luft, Principal Platform Security Engineer @ Salesforce, and a regular ipSpace.net guest speaker.

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure to publish my first guest post here and, as to be expected from ipspace.net, it triggered some great discussion.

With this input and some open thoughts from the last post, I want to dive into a few more topics.

Application Engineering vs. (?) Network Engineering

One trigger for the initial post was the question whether host-based firewalls (HBFs), potentially combined with solutions to learn rulesets based on flows, are intrinsically better than central firewalls. While we discussed the mileage around that already, comments and questions emphasized how often we have to handle a “software engineering vs. network engineering” mentality – which should not involve any blame in either direction as this mindset is usually enforced by organizational structures.

For whatever it is worth, I can only stress the point that a strong collaboration between software and network engineering will resolve way more issues than any technology. I award myself a “Thanks, Captain Obvious” here, but I still want to make the point to try Continue reading

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BizOps: Powering Data-Driven Decision Making

Business and IT alignment is more vital than ever. What's needed is BizOps, a framework for data-driven decision making.

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You’re not imagining things, there is a serious chip shortage

If you’ve noticed components are hard to get these days, you are not alone. The supply of computing components can get a little tight around the end of the year but this year is especially bad, much of it due to Covid-19-related issues.Intel spent much of 2020 struggling with CPU shortages. In the latter half of the year it was hit with chipset shortages, with the B460 and H410 chipsets reportedly out of stock through the end of last year, and availability of the Z590 chipset is also constrained.AMD also has a problem: it can’t make enough chips. Some of its Ryzen processors, particularly the Ryzen 5 line, are immensely popular, and there are simply none to be had on Amazon, Newegg, or any other online retailer.To read this article in full, please click here

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You’re not imaging things, there is a serious chip shortage

If you’ve noticed components are hard to get these days, you are not alone. The supply of computing components can get a little tight around the end of the year but this year is especially bad, much of it due to Covid-19-related issues.Intel spent much of 2020 struggling with CPU shortages. In the latter half of the year it was hit with chipset shortages, with the B460 and H410 chipsets reportedly out of stock through the end of last year, and availability of the Z590 chipset is also constrained.AMD also has a problem: it can’t make enough chips. Some of its Ryzen processors, particularly the Ryzen 5 line, are immensely popular, and there are simply none to be had on Amazon, Newegg, or any other online retailer.To read this article in full, please click here

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Disaster recovery lessons from an island struck by a hurricane

(A hurricane devastated an island that held two data centers controlling mission-critical systems for an American biotech company. They flew a backup expert with four decades of experience to the island on a corporate jet to save the day. This is the story of the challenges he faced and how he overcame them. He spoke on the condition of anonymity, so we call him Ron, the island Atlantis, his employer Initech, and we don’t name the vendors and service providers involved.)Initech had two data centers on Atlantis with a combined 400TB of data running on approximately 200 virtual and physical machines. The backup system was based on a leading traditional backup software vendor, and it backed up to a target deduplication disk system. Each data center backed up to its own local deduplication system and then replicated its backups to the disk system in the other data center. This meant that each datacenter had an entire copy of all Initech’s backups on Atlantis, so even if one data center were destroyed the company would still have all its data.To read this article in full, please click here

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Disaster recovery lessons from an island struck by a hurricane

(A hurricane devastated an island that held two data centers controlling mission-critical systems for an American biotech company. They flew a backup expert with four decades of experience to the island on a corporate jet to save the day. This is the story of the challenges he faced and how he overcame them. He spoke on the condition of anonymity, so we call him Ron, the island Atlantis, his employer Initech, and we don’t name the vendors and service providers involved.)Initech had two data centers on Atlantis with a combined 400TB of data running on approximately 200 virtual and physical machines. The backup system was based on a leading traditional backup software vendor, and it backed up to a target deduplication disk system. Each data center backed up to its own local deduplication system and then replicated its backups to the disk system in the other data center. This meant that each datacenter had an entire copy of all Initech’s backups on Atlantis, so even if one data center were destroyed the company would still have all its data.To read this article in full, please click here

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Istio 1.8: A Virtual Machine Integration Odyssey

Tetrate sponsored this post. Jimmy Song Jimmy is a developer advocate at Tetrate, CNCF Ambassador, co-founder of ServiceMesher, and Cloud Native Community(China). He mainly focuses on Kubernetes, Istio, and cloud native architectures. In this article, I’ll give you an overview of

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The Hedge Podcast #65: Jacquelyn Adams and the Future of Work

Everyone in networking—and beyond networking, in fact—thinks about what the future of work might look like. Jacquelyn Adams joins Eyvonne Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White on this episode of the Hedge to discuss what work might look like based on this era of rapid change, and how you can prepare for that future.

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Internet traffic disruption caused by the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville

On Christmas Day 2020, an apparent suicide bomb exploded in Nashville, TN. The explosion happened outside an AT&T network building on Second Avenue in Nashville at 1230 UTC. Damage to the AT&T building and its power supply and generators quickly caused an outage for telephone and Internet service for local people. These outages continued for two days.

Looking at traffic flow data for AT&T in the Nashville area to Cloudflare we can see that services continued operating (on battery power according to reports) for over five hours after the explosion, but at 1748 UTC we saw a dramatic drop in traffic. 1748 UTC is close to noon in Nashville when reports indicate that people lost phone and Internet service.

We saw traffic from Nashville via AT&T start to recover over a 45 minute period on December 27 at 1822 UTC making the total outage 2 days and 34 minutes.

Traffic flows continue to be normal and no further disruption has been seen.

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How Change Review Boards Really Work to Fail

Its supposed to enable change but reality is about preventing change. 

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IBGP, IGP Metrics, and Administrative Distances

TL&DR: If you run multiple IGP protocols in your network, and add BGP on top of that, you might get the results you deserve. Even better, the results are platform-dependent.

One of my readers sent me a link to an interesting scenario described by Jeremy Filliben that results in totally unexpected behavior when using too many routing protocols in your network (no surprise there).

Imagine a network in which two edge routers advertise the same (external) BGP prefix. All other things being equal, it would make sense that other routers in the same autonomous system should use the better path out of the autonomous system. Welcome to the final tie-breaker in BGP route selection process: IGP metric.

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IBGP, IGP Metrics, and Administrative Distances

TL&DR: If you run multiple IGP protocols in your network, and add BGP on top of that, you might get the results you deserve. Even better, the results are platform-dependent.

One of my readers sent me a link to an interesting scenario described by Jeremy Filliben that results in totally unexpected behavior when using too many routing protocols in your network (no surprise there).

Imagine a network in which two edge routers advertise the same (external) BGP prefix. All other things being equal, it would make sense that other routers in the same autonomous system should use the better path out of the autonomous system. Welcome to the final tie-breaker in BGP route selection process: IGP metric.

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From AI to 5G, How Global Trends Will Transform Data Centers in 2021

Data centers are poised to undergo rapid change as businesses adjust to accelerated digitization of information.

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Add Friendly ID to a Rails 6 App

How to add nice URLs to your Rails 6 app using Friendly ID.

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George Sadowsky on the History of Networking

George Sadowsky was a pioneer in recognizing the importance of networking technology for economic development, particularly in developing economies. He has worked in over 50 countries to bring training and networking infrastructure to the local population. In this episode of the History of Networking, George recounts some of the early, pre-Internet, work in computer networking, and the development of many of the organizations that make the Internet work today. His web site can be found here.

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Reimagining Accelerators with Sparsity at the Core

There could be a new era of codesign dawning for machine learning, one that moves away from the training and inference separations and toward far less dense networks with highly sparse weights and activations. …

Reimagining Accelerators with Sparsity at the Core was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.