Networks

On the Success of Malware

There's often a lot of discussion about whether a piece of malware is advanced or not. To a large extent these discussions can be categorized as academic nitpicking because, at the end of the day, the malware's sophistication only needs to be at the level for which it is required to perform -- no more, no less. Perhaps the "advanced" malware label should more precisely be reattributed as "feature rich" instead. more

Cloud Is the New Mainframe

Cloud computing, from a business and management perspective, has a great deal in common with mainframe computing. Mainframes are powerful, expensive and centralized pieces of computing equipment. This is in line with their role as infrastructure for mission-critical applications. For these types of applications, mainframes can be fairly efficient, even though they tend to need large teams of support specialists... Cloud computing is a new style of computing... more

Is FttH Future-Proof Infrastructure?

Telecoms engineers from all of the major telecoms services and equipment companies around the world agree that FttH is the only future-proof telecommunications technology. So who should we trust - the technology experts or politicians with different agendas? If there had been a division of opinion among these experts it would have been necessary to investigate it; but if they are all in agreement it is safe to follow their advice. more

Another Day, Another Set of Hacking Attacks. News At 11.

While reading Reuters I came across a news article indicating that a number of high profile agencies - from the United Nations to the Canadian Government to government of Taiwan - were broken into over a period of the past five years. ... I'll say it right now, even though I haven't been briefed on it. It was China. more

Pentagon Reveals Largest Ever Loss of Defense Data in Cyberattack

The Associated Press published an article today that the Pentagon revealed that earlier this year, they suffered one of its largest ever loss of sensitive data to a foreign government by a cyberattack. ... It's hard to say what's right and what's wrong. On the one hand, the Secretary of Defense says that the cyberwar is very real. On the other hand, the cyberczar Howard Schmidt said that there is no cyberwar and instead government needs to focus its efforts to fight online crime and espionage... more

IPv6 Enabled Networks Before and After World IPv6 Day

In our last post on CircleID, Measuring World IPv6 Day - First Impressions, we showed exactly when World IPv6 Day participants switched on IPv6 on their networks (by way of announcing DNS AAAA records). Now, a few weeks after World IPv6 Day, it's interesting to see what the longer-term effects have been. more

8 Security Considerations for IPv6 Deployment

Feb. 3, 2011, came and went without much fanfare, but it was a milestone for Internet stakeholders, whether they knew it or not. On that Thursday, the last available IPv4 addresses were allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Though some Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) have a reasonable inventory of IP addresses that could last another year or two, the days of "new" IPv4 address allocations are largely over. more

What is Internet Protocol Address Management?”

The number of web-based devices is expanding at an exponential clip, virtualization is making a very static environment dynamic, and now with the exhaustion of IPv4 and the oncoming complexities of IPv6 network operators must reevaluate what IP Address Management (IPAM) really is. The goal of this post is to define the various functions that make up IP Address Management. more

Internet Service Quality Measured from Thousands of Locations

RIPE Atlas, the new active measurements network maintained by the RIPE NCC, gives you a way to easily measure the quality of your Internet services. RIPE Atlas is designed in such a way that it can collect data for analysis from a great number of locations on the Internet. The actual measurement devices, or "probes", are so small that they can be easily deployed in a home environment. more

New Record Set in Ultra Fast Data Transmission

Scientists led by a team at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have broken a record for data transmission, sending data at 26Tb/s on a single laser beam over 50km. To put this into context, the researchers suggest that this is the equivalent of transferring the contents of 700 DVDs per second, or the entire collection of the Library of Congress in ten seconds.
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Understanding the Modern DDoS Threat

The breadth of cyber threats that an organization must engage with and combat seemingly change on a daily basis. Each new technology, vulnerability or exploit vector results in a new threat that must be protected against. Meanwhile some forms of attack never appear to age -- they remain a threat to business continuity despite years of advances in defensive strategy. One particularly insidious and never-ending threat is that of the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. more

Defending the Network Several Times Over

Modern networks can be attacked in a variety of ways, meaning that companies need different types of protection. This article explains some of the risks involved, and provides some easy ways to deal with them. more

The Internet Lost in Translation

In 1949 a Bell Laboratory researcher, Claude Shannon, published a paper on a new science of "Information". Bell Labs had sponsored the research with the goal of improving phone networks but was not prepared to embrace the full implications of the new science which made explicit the distinction between information in the information sense and information encoded in numbers or bits... more

Average Connection Speeds on Mobile Networks Fastest in Greece, Says Akamai

In the fourth quarter of 2010, a mobile provider in Greece (GR-1) had the highest average connection speed, at just over 4.5 Mbps, according to Akamai's latest State of the Internet Report. "The mobile providers in Slovakia and Russia that had previously been reported as having the highest average connection speeds were removed from consideration in the fourth quarter, as further research determined that their autonomous systems carried a mix of traffic from fixed and mobile connections." more

Study Reports on Baseline of Global IPv6 Adoption

A new research on native IPv6 traffic across six large providers in North America and Europe suggest that despite fifteen years of IPv6 standards development, vendor releases and advocacy, only a small fraction of the Internet has adopted IPv6. "The slow rate of IPv6 adoption stems from equal parts of technical/design hurdles, lack of economic incentives and general dearth of IPv6 content." more