Tuesday, March 04, 2008 5:38 PM/EST
My colleague Michael Vizard covered Cisco's announcement of the ASR 1000 at CeBIT. I'm anxious to get a look at Cisco's new ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Router with Cisco IOS XE. The platform is supposed to be able to offer high availability for IPsec VPN, firewall services, NetFlow event logging, and DDoS detection and mitigation without stopping. Like I said, very interesting and I'm looking forward to getting a look at the device. In the meantime, poking around on Cisco's site yielded this gem for IT managers: a significant change in Cisco's maintenance policy for IOS XE. In the Cisco IOS XE Software End-of-Life Strategy document Cisco will start releasing IOS XE software every four months instead of waiting for a feature queue to fill as is the case for IOS. The good news is that this means network managers will be able to schedule maintenance on a predictable...
Thursday, October 04, 2007 2:58 PM/EST
The Transportation Authority of Marin Web site was hacked to link to porn sites, causing the Federal agency that oversees .gov domains to temporarily remove ca.gov from Domain Name System servers. The porn links were removed and California and Federal IT workers scrambled to get ca.gov back online before major havoc was unleashed. The TAM (Transportation Authority of Marin) site is still hacked up with (non-functioning) links to Web pages selling diet pills. Although the links no longer work, the fact that there is still bad code in the page means that someone is not, in my opinion, diligently seeking to secure the site. When I told Dianne Steinhauser, the executive director of the Marin transportation authority, that the site was still hacked she said, "I'm frustrated." Because the site provides no emergency services, my advice to her was shut it down until she's able to hire a competent site...
Monday, August 20, 2007 8:37 PM/EST
"Virtual Honeypots" is a must-read book that should be added to any security professional's bookshelf today. It's my "analyst's choice" for the month of August and well worth going out to your local bookstore to pick up a copy. Niels Provos and Thorsten Holz provide one of the best reference guides to honeypots currently available. The authors--Provos is a staff engineer at Google, and Holz a Ph.D. student at the University of Mannheim--go through the development of the honeypot through the lens of network and system monitoring. By setting up an observation system to see how it is probed, attacked or compromised, IT security pros can get a better idea of how to defend the systems under their care. While the book is easily accessible to any IT person, those with at least some experience with Linux--and with the willingness to use a Linux-based platform--will get the most out of...
