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Cloudflare Bot Management: machine learning and more

Introduction

Building Cloudflare Bot Management platform is an exhilarating experience. It blends Distributed Systems, Web Development, Machine Learning, Security and Research (and every discipline in between) while fighting ever-adaptive and motivated adversaries at the same time.

This is the ongoing story of Bot Management at Cloudflare and also an introduction to a series of blog posts about the detection mechanisms powering it. I’ll start with several definitions from the Bot Management world, then introduce the product and technical requirements, leading to an overview of the platform we’ve built. Finally, I’ll share details about the detection mechanisms powering our platform.

Let’s start with Bot Management’s nomenclature.

Some Definitions

Bot - an autonomous program on a network that can interact with computer systems or users, imitating or replacing a human user's behavior, performing repetitive tasks much faster than human users could.

Good bots - bots which are useful to businesses they interact with, e.g. search engine bots like Googlebot, Bingbot or bots that operate on social media platforms like Facebook Bot.

Bad bots - bots which are designed to perform malicious actions, ultimately hurting businesses, e.g. credential stuffing bots, third-party scraping bots, spam bots and sneakerbots.

Bot Management - blocking Continue reading

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AWS Networking 101

There was an obvious invisible elephant in the virtual Cloud Field Day 7 (CFD7v) event I attended in late April 2020. Most everyone was talking about AWS, how their stuff runs on AWS, how it integrates with AWS, or how it will help others leapfrog AWS (yeah, sure…).

Although you REALLY SHOULD watch my AWS Networking webinar (or something equivalent) to understand what problems vendors like VMWare or Pensando are facing or solving, I’m pretty sure a lot of people think they can get away with CliffsNotes version of it, so here they are ;)

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Close to the Edge

PE-CE routing in MPLS L3VPN is an important topic which confuses a lot of people. Thanks to EVPN, it is now used not only in ISP but also DC networks.

Fundamentals of PE-CE routing

Usually either static routing or eBGP …

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Data centers are shrinking but not going away

The cloud will not kill the data center, but it will transform it. That's one of the takeaways from the 2020 State of the Data Center report from AFCOM, the industry association for data center professionals.In the near term, construction will slow way down, which aligns with what IDC analyst Rick Villars told me about data center construction slowing after a big buildout. More than 60% of respondents to the AFCOM report said they have no plans to build a new facility in the next 12 months, although 53% said they'll have at least one data center in the works over the next 36 months. READ MORE: Supply-chain woes put the brakes on hyperscale data centersTo read this article in full, please click here

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AWS Redirect URL with Route 53 and S3

I previously hosted my domains with GoDaddy. In their service it was pretty trivial to redirect a URL from one domain to another. I own the domain bradleysearle.com and I redirect it to https://codingpackets.com/about. The process to do this is not as simple with AWS so in this post I...

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AWS Redirect URL with Route 53 and S3

How to redirect a URL using AWS Route 53 and S3.

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NVIDIA’s aggressive purchases could signal the era of open networking

NVIDIA’s plans to acquire Cumulus Networks, a pioneer of using open source for networking, is a sign that open networking is finally ready for a big leap forward.Open networking has been tightly coupled with software-defined networking (SDN) because the combination promises to make networks significantly more agile, open and easier to customize to specific needs. Cumulus has been working on it for years, and NVIDIA started pushing into it when it acquired Mellanox last week.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The question the Cumulus acquisition raises is “why now”? The concept of open networking has been hotly debated since SDN came into prominence. The concept is sound, and open systems will disrupt the network industry much as it did the compute space. Yet while Linux and open source are wildly successful in the compute industry, open source has yet to take off in networking outside of webscale networks and a handful of large organizations.To read this article in full, please click here

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Nvidia, Digital Realty Team Up on Enterprise AI

The new Data Hub product gives enterprises access to Nvidia’s AI infrastructure inside Digital...

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Daily Roundup: Nutanix Furloughs CA Workforce

Nutanix furloughed 25% of its workforce; IBM targeted 5G and edge deployments; and Microsoft Azure...

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Oracle Claims It Will Beat Salesforce at Cloud CRM

Much of that poise relies on the success of Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud, a bare metal framework that it...

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NVIDIA, Mellanox, and Cumulus

Recent press releases, Riding a Cloud: NVIDIA Acquires Network-Software Trailblazer Cumulus and NVIDIA Completes Acquisition of Mellanox, Creating Major Force Driving Next-Gen Data Centers, describe NVIDIA's moves to provide high speed data center networks to connect compute clusters that use of their GPUs to accelerate big data workloads, including: deep learning, climate modeling, animation, data visualization, physics, molecular dynamics etc.

Real-time visibility into compute, network, and GPU infrastructure is required manage and optimize the unified infrastructure. This article explores how the industry standard sFlow technology supported by all three vendors can deliver comprehensive visibility.

Cumulus Linux simplifies operations, providing the same operating system, Linux, that runs on the servers. Cumulus Networks and Mellanox have a long history of working with the Linux community to integrate support for switches. The latest Linux kernels now include native support for network ASICs, seamlessly integrating with standard Linux routing (FRR, Quagga, Bird, etc), configuration (Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc) and monitoring (collectd, netstat, top, etc) tools.

Linux 4.11 kernel extends packet sampling support describes enhancements to the Linux kernel to support industry standard sFlow instrumentation in network ASICs. Cumulus Linux and Mellanox both support the new Linux APIs. Cumulus Linux uses the open source Continue reading

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Midrange All-Flash Storage Market, Meet Dell EMC PowerStore

The new storage systems come with built-in vSphere integration enabling VMware virtualized...

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How the Network Effect Levels the Cybersecurity War Zone

Ian Baxter Ian Baxter is the Vice President of Pre-Sales Engineering at IRONSCALES and has more than 20 years of extensive industry experience in the information security, technology and communications fields, having held various positions including both individual contributor and systems engineering management roles. During his career, Ian has regularly presented at various industry events on security topics such as threat prevention, ransomware, and best practices. Prior to IRONSCALES, Ian served as Americas' Director of Data Center Sales for NetApp covering Canada, Latin America and the US. He's also worked for large multinational technology companies such as Palo Alto Networks, Foundry Networks/Brocade, Alcatel Lucent, and Fore Systems/Marconi. Ian is originally from South Africa, and now resides in the United States. Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, is renowned for many things, but perhaps none more so than his namesake law: 

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New 6 GHz Wi-Fi could add $153 billion to U.S. economy: report

Opening the 6 GHz band to Wi-Fi could add $153.75 billion to the U.S. economy over the next five years, according to a new study.In late April, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules that make 1,200 megahertz of spectrum in the 6 GHz band available for unlicensed use. Freeing up the chunk of 6 GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi is the biggest frequency allocation upgrade to the now aging wireless protocol in 10 years. Wi-Fi using 5 GHz spectrum – the last major touch-up – was introduced in 2009. The original 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi was introduced in 1997.To read this article in full, please click here

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Nvidia, after $7B Mellanox hardware deal, grabs Cumulus for big network software play

NVIDIA, a company known for developing advanced chips for artificial intelligence and high-speed gaming applications has is making a concerted effort to go after cloud-based data-center customers by acquiring Cumulus Networks for an undisclosed amount.Cumulus offers a Linux-based network operating system aimed at white box network gear users that supports large data-center, cloud and enterprise environments.  Its Cumulus Linux offering supports over 130 different types of networking hardware.To read this article in full, please click here

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Coalition Forms to Address Open RAN Policies

The Open RAN Policy Coalition has support from seven operators and 24 vendors, though it's...

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HPE’s Ungaro On Delivering Exascale For The Masses

When Hewlett Packard Enterprise finally closed on its $1.3 billion acquisition of supercomputer maker Cray in September, it was just over a month after the US Department of Energy announced Cray had completed a sweep in the country’s initial push into the exascale computing era. …

HPE’s Ungaro On Delivering Exascale For The Masses was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

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Microsoft Azure Sentinel Powers Open Systems’ Threat Detection

Open Systems’ customers liked the Sentinel technology, but wanted the threat detection and...

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How to Build and Test Your Docker Images in the Cloud with Docker Hub

Part 2 in the series on Using Docker Desktop and Docker Hub Together

Introduction

In part 1 of this series, we took a look at installing Docker Desktop, building images, configuring our builds to use build arguments, running our application in containers, and finally, we took a look at how Docker Compose helps in this process. 

In this article, we’ll walk through deploying our code to the cloud, how to use Docker Hub to build our images when we push to GitHub and how to use Docker Hub to automate running tests.

Docker Hub

Docker Hub is the easiest way to create, manage, and ship your team’s images to your cloud environments whether on-premises or into a public cloud.

This first thing you will want to do is create a Docker ID, if you do not already have one, and log in to Hub.

Creating Repositories

Once you’re logged in, let’s create a couple of repos where we will push our images to.

Click on “Repositories” in the main navigation bar and then click the “Create Repository” button at the top of the screen.

You should now see the “Create Repository” screen.

You can create repositories for your Continue reading

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Dell Takes A Clean Sheet Approach To Flash Storage

Dell’s groundbreaking $67 billion acquisition of EMC in 2016 was heralded by the vendor as a way to bring together two top-tier IT vendors with highly complementary parts to create an organization that could essentially provide for whatever technology needs their customers might have. …

Dell Takes A Clean Sheet Approach To Flash Storage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.