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You Can’t Do Everything, And That’s Okay

You’re a responsible human–a reliable person who does everything that’s expected and more. Congratulations! Here’s more work to do.

Yep, that’s the rub. If you’re good at your job and other people notice, you get never-ending opportunities to prove once again how good you are. More work to do, and more work to do, and more. The balance in your life is lost as you drown under a pile of opportunities and challenges with deliverables, due dates, and project managers scheduling recurring meetings to get status updates.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

If you’ve been through a few jobs, no doubt you’re familiar with this cycle. You leave the old job with a sense of relief, having transitioned your projects to others in a ceremony known as “the hand-off.” You chuckle a bit to yourself as your co-workers and manager who clearly didn’t grasp what all you were handling go glassy-eyed as you talk them through it.

You start the new job with a lightness in your heart. No projects. No due dates. No recurring meetings. The anxiety of getting familiar with a new company, figuring out your role, learning the politics, sure–there’s all that to contend with. But Continue reading

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Nigeria’s IXPs – Enabling Better Connectivity, Faster Internet Delivery, and Improving Internet Service

Nigeria grew its local Internet traffic from  30% to 70% in the past eight years, connecting more people, increasing speed, and reducing costs. They did this through Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), according to the Internet Society report Anchoring the African Internet Ecosystem: Lessons from Kenya and Nigeria’s Internet Exchange Points Growth.

Between 2012 and 2020, the number of peering networks has grown from 30 to 71 and new exchange platforms have been set up in Abuja, Kano, and Port Harcourt. More networks and more IXPs increased the amount of Internet traffic exchanged in Nigeria from 300 Mbps to peak traffic of 125 Gbps in Lagos.

Muhammed Rudman started the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) in 2006, when the industry was developing. Most networks did not peer in Nigeria. One major submarine cable, Sat3, offered services across the country with others getting service via VSATs. This meant ninety-nine percent of websites were hosted abroad.

“The terrain was tough,” says Rudman, an IT veteran and founding Chief Executive Officer of IXPN, which is based in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city. Approaching Internet service providers, he was often asked how many networks were already peering. Without any networks exchanging traffic, he’d often hear, “When you Continue reading

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BGP Routing Security Discussion on Linkedin

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Customer Spotlights at AnsibleFest 2020

AnsibleFest 2020 will be here before we know it, and we cannot wait to connect with everyone in October. We have some great content lined up for this year’s virtual experience and that includes some amazing customer spotlights. This year you will get to hear from CarMax, Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC, T-Mobile, PRA International and CEPSA. These customers are using Ansible in a variety of ways, and we hope you connect to their incredible stories of teamwork and transformative automation.

 

Customer Spotlights

Benjamin Blizard, a Network Engineer at T-Mobile, will explore how T-Mobile transformed from a disparate organization with difficulty enforcing standards to a collaborative group of engineers working from repeatable templates and processes. T-Mobile, a major telecommunications provider, uses Ansible Automation Platform to standardize processes across their organization. Ben will show how automation supports T-Mobile’s compliance standards, data integrity, and produces speed and efficiency for network teams. 

 

What Next?

Join us for AnsibleFest 2020 to hear from more customer like T-mobile talk about their automation journey. Make sure to go and register today and check out the session catalog that lists all the content that we have prepared for you this year. We look Continue reading

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Python Pieces: PyEnv and Venvs

In my last post, we talked about PyEnv and how it can help manage your local Python environments. As it turns out it can also help you manage virtual environments as well! However – pursuing this functionality took me down a rabbit hole that was a bit deeper than expected. The way that PyEnv works causes some behaviors (and on my end assumptions) to change which made me start questioning some of the things that I’ve always just taken for granted. In other words – prepare yourself to go down the rabbit hole with me.

At first glance PyEnv promised the same sort of awesome automagically context switching craziness that we saw previously work with Python versions. However – the virtual environment management implementation with PyEnv felt rather foreign (and maybe a little clunky?) to me. Most notably, as I pointed out in my last post, the .zshrc alias provided to make the auto activation piece work slows down my terminal immensely which is why I omitted using it. A slow terminal is about the worst thing I can think of…

That said – I still think it’s worth reviewing what it can offer so you can Continue reading

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Introducing Cloudflare Radar

Unlike the tides, Internet use ebbs and flows with the motion of the sun not the moon. Across the world usage quietens during the night and picks up as morning comes. Internet use also follows patterns that humans create, dipping down when people stopped to applaud healthcare workers fighting COVID-19, or pausing to watch their country’s president address them, or slowing for religious reasons.

And while humans leave a mark on the Internet, so do automated systems. These systems might be doing useful work (like building search engine databases) or harm (like scraping content, or attacking an Internet property).

All the while Internet use (and attacks) is growing. Zoom into any day and you’ll see the familiar daily wave of Internet use reflecting day and night, zoom out and you’ll likely spot weekends when Internet use often slows down a little, zoom out further and you might spot the occasional change in use caused by a holiday, zoom out further and you’ll see that Internet use grows inexorably.

And attacks don’t only grow, they change. New techniques are invented while old ones remain evergreen. DDoS activity continues day and night roaming from one victim to another. Automated scanning tools look Continue reading

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Speeding up HTTPS and HTTP/3 negotiation with… DNS

In late June, Cloudflare's resolver team noticed a spike in DNS requests for the 65479 Resource Record thanks to data exposed through our new Radar service. We began investigating and found these to be a part of Apple’s iOS14 beta release where they were testing out a new SVCB/HTTPS record type.

Once we saw that Apple was requesting this record type, and while the iOS 14 beta was still on-going, we rolled out support across the Cloudflare customer base.

This blog post explains what this new record type does and its significance, but there’s also a deeper story: Cloudflare customers get automatic support for new protocols like this.

That means that today if you’ve enabled HTTP/3 on an Apple device running iOS 14, when it needs to talk to a Cloudflare customer (say you browse to a Cloudflare-protected website, or use an app whose API is on Cloudflare) it can find the best way of making that connection automatically.

And if you’re a Cloudflare customer you have to do… absolutely nothing… to give Apple users the best connection to your Internet property.

Negotiating HTTP security and performance

Whenever a user types a URL in the browser box without specifying a Continue reading

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The Next Generation of Cognitive Campus Workspaces

Campus networks are undergoing another massive transition in the COVID teleworking era. With this fundamental shift and as administrators consider an interconnected IoT (Internet of Things) environment, the boundary between the office, home, teleworker and user is converging. Security concerns with ever-increasing threat vectors are substantiated. How does one secure an IoT environment and guard against malware and outbreaks? How is the network impacted as some workloads shift to the cloud? Why do we cope with wired and wireless silos? The challenge lies in successfully transitioning the existing siloed campus into an integral data-driven model for clients, users and devices from IoT to cloud with a common experience, while addressing security and availability needs with lower operational costs. These are the key requirements of the third-generation campus evolution as shown in the figure below.

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The Next Generation of Cognitive Campus Workspaces

Campus networks are undergoing another massive transition in the COVID teleworking era. With this fundamental shift and as administrators consider an interconnected IoT (Internet of Things) environment, the boundary between the office, home, teleworker and user is converging. Security concerns with ever-increasing threat vectors are substantiated. How does one secure an IoT environment and guard against malware and outbreaks? How is the network impacted as some workloads shift to the cloud? Why do we cope with wired and wireless silos? The challenge lies in successfully transitioning the existing siloed campus into an integral data-driven model for clients, users and devices from IoT to cloud with a common experience, while addressing security and availability needs with lower operational costs. These are the key requirements of the third-generation campus evolution as shown in the figure below.

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Recovering deleted files on Linux with testdisk

When you delete a file on a Linux system, it isn’t necessarily gone forever, especially if you just recently deleted it.Unless you rubbed it out with a tool such as shred, the data will still be sitting on your disk—and one of the best tools for recovering deleted files, testdisk, can help you rescue it. While testdisk has a wide range of functionality including recovering lost or damaged partitions and making non-booting disks bootable again, it’s also frequently used to restore files that were deleted by mistake.In this post, we’ll take a look at how you can recover deleted files using testdisk and what each step in the process looks like. Since the process requires quite a few steps, you’re likely to feel more comfortable running through them once you’ve done it a few times.To read this article in full, please click here

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Telstra’s Hijack effected many networks today!

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Post-Quantum Cryptography: Hype and Reality

Post-quantum cryptography (algorithms resistant to quantum computer attacks) is quickly turning into another steaming pile of hype vigorously explored by various security vendors.

Christoph Jaggi made it his task to debunk at least some of the worst hype, collected information from people implementing real-life solutions in this domain, and wrote an excellent overview article explaining the potential threats, solutions, and current state-of-the art.

You (RFC 6919) OUGHT TO read his article before facing the first vendor presentation on the topic.

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Post-Quantum Cryptography: Hype and Reality

Post-quantum cryptography (algorithms resistant to quantum computer attacks) is quickly turning into another steaming pile of hype vigorously explored by various security vendors.

Christoph Jaggi made it his task to debunk at least some of the worst hype, collected information from people implementing real-life solutions in this domain, and wrote an excellent overview article explaining the potential threats, solutions, and current state-of-the art.

You (RFC 6919) OUGHT TO read his article before facing the first vendor presentation on the topic.

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Improving Network Security By Effective Deflecting Strategies

Network deflection measures are essential for creating defensive "depth" and increasing the friction intruders face when entering a compromised system.

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FCC auctions should be a long-term boost for 5G availability

As the march towards 5G progresses, it’s apparent that more spectrum will be needed to fully enable it as a service, and the Federal Communications Commission has clearly taken the message to heart. 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises The FCC recently finished auctioning off priority-access licenses for Citizen’s Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum for 5G, representing 70MHz swath of new bandwidth within the 3.5GHz band. It took in $4.58 billion and is one of several such auctions in recent  years aimed at freeing up more channels for wireless data. In 2011, 2014 and 2015 the FCC auctioned off 65MHz in the low- to mid-band, between roughly 1.7GHz and 2.2GHz, for example, and the 700MHz band.To read this article in full, please click here

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Testing the Limits of a Quantum Hardware Market

D-Wave today announced another milestone in its quest to keep adding qubits, jumping from the previous generation 2000 qubit device to one with 5000. …

Testing the Limits of a Quantum Hardware Market was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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Countering the Rise of Adversarial ML 

The security community has found an important application for machine learning (ML) in its ongoing fight against cybercriminals. Many of us are turning to ML-powered security solutions like NSX Network Detection and Response that analyze network traffic for anomalous and suspicious activity. In turn, these ML solutions defend us from threats better than other solutions can by drawing on their evolving knowledge of what a network attack looks like. 

Attackers are well-aware of the fact that security solutions are using AI and ML for security purposes. They also know that there are certain limitations when it comes to applying artificial intelligence to computer security. This explains why cyber criminals are leveraging ML to their advantage in something known as adversarial machine learning. 

In this post I’ll explain just what adversarial machine learning is and what it is not. To start, the label itself can be a bit misleading. It sounds like criminals are actually using ML as part of their attack. But that is not the case. The simple explanation is that they’re using more conventional methods to understand how security solutions are using ML so that they can then figure out how to Continue reading

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Detecting Malware Without Feature Engineering Using Deep Learning 

Detecting Malware Without Feature Engineering Using Deep Learning 

Nowadays, machine learning is routinely used in the detection of network attacks and the identification of malicious programs. In most ML-based approaches, each analysis sample (such as an executable program, an office document, or a network request) is analyzed and a number of features are extracted. For example, in the case of a binary program, one might extract the names of the library functions being invoked, the length of the sections of the executable, and so forth. 

Then, a machine learning algorithm is given as input a set of known benign and known malicious samples (called the ground truth). The algorithm creates a model that, based on the values of the features contained in the samples, is the ground truth dataset, and the model is then able to classify known samples correctly. If the dataset from which the algorithm has learned is representative of the real-world domain, and if the features are relevant for discriminating between benign and malicious programs, chances are that the learned model will generalize and allow for the detection of previously unseen malicious samples. 

The Role of Feature Engineering 

Even though the description Continue reading

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Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and How the Two Fit into Information Security 

Everywhere I look, someone’s talking about machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI). These two technologies are shaping important conversations in multiple sectors, especially marketing and sales, and are at risk of becoming overused and misunderstood buzzwords, if they haven’t already. The technologies have also drawn the attention of security professionals over the past few years, with some believing that AI is ready to transform information security. 

Despite this hype, there’s still a lot of confusion around AI and ML and their utility for information security. In this blog post, I would like to correct some misperceptions. Let’s start by differentiating machine learning from artificial intelligence in general. 

Machine Learning vs. Artificial Intelligence: Understanding the Difference 

Artificial intelligence is the science of trying to replicate intelligent, human-like behavior. There are multiple ways of achieving this — machine learning is one of them. For example, a type of AI system that does not involve machine learning is an expert system, in which the skills and decision process of an expert are captured through a series of rules and heuristics. 

Machine Learning is a specific type of AI. An ML system analyzes a large data set in Continue reading

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Lateral Movement: What It Is and How to Block It 

In any given attack campaign, bad actors have a specific goal in mind. This goal may involve accessing a developer’s machine and stealing a project’s source code, sifting through a particular executive’s emails, or exfiltrating customer data from a server that’s responsible for hosting payment card information. All they need to do is compromise the system that has what they want. It’s just that easy. 

Or is it? 

In reality, it’s a little more complicated than that. When attackers compromise an asset in a network, that device usually is not their ultimate destination. To accomplish their goal, bad actors are likely to break into a low-level web server, email account, employee endpoint device, or some other starting location. They’ll then move laterally from this initial compromise through the network to reach their intended target. The initial compromise seldom causes severe damage. Thinking about this another way: if security teams can detect the lateral movement before the attackers reach their intended targets, they can prevent the attacker from successfully completing the mission. 

But what exactly is lateral movement, and how does it work? In this blog, we’ll look at some of the most common types of lateral movement and Continue reading