Year: 2014

June 30, 2014 Leave a Comment
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One Team. One Fight. Our Fight for LLS.

Here at Cisco, records aren’t meant to be broken…   They are meant to be shattered!image003   Especially when those records are for a great cause. And this past Father’s Day, everyone smiled just a bit wider knowing that the entire organization came together to make a difference.

I am so proud of our Cisco team for raising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). The LLS’s successful Man and Woman of the Year campaign concluded on June 14 in Washington, D.C. This 10-week campaign raised a total of $1.62 million for LLS, which is $200,000 more than any previous campaign.

Since 1949, LLS has been raising money and fighting to cure leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma. Today, it is the world’s largest non-profit health organization dedicated to supporting the fight against blood cancer by funding research, education and patient services. Continue reading “One Team. One Fight. Our Fight for LLS.”



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Patrick Finn

No Longer at Cisco

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The Napkin Dialogues: Nexus Programmability, Part I

I know that I take a different approach to learning new things than most people. At least, I know my approach is different than the way people present them. The good news is that when I get something, I really get it. However, when looking at the juggernaut that is “Software-Defined X,” or even “programmability,” I know that I’m still a long, long way away from feeling like I have a handle on it.

When I wrote the previous blog post on some of the key “Open” terms were in programmability, I was overjoyed to find out that there were a few people who also had difficulty getting a grip on this too.

In other words, I’m not alone!

There is still a bewildering amount of information that I still need to learn, however, and it seems to me that if I resonated with a few people about these high-level topics, there are probably a few more who are curious about what lies beneath as well. Fortunately I work for a company (and with a lot of people) who have been willing to help me. Continue reading “The Napkin Dialogues: Nexus Programmability, Part I”



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J Metz

Sr. Product Manager

Data Center Group

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Security and Collaboration – Top of mind for IT and OT (Operational Technologies) professionals

During the past ENTELEC event held in Houston, I had the opportunity to chat with Shawn Birch – Partner Development Consultant At Tait Communications to ask him about his impressions of the shows and what would be the key care-abouts of IT people during this Oil and Gas event.

Shawn Birch in the Cisco ENTELEC booth
Shawn Birch in the Cisco ENTELEC booth

Tait Communications is a multinational global radio communications company with headquarters based in Christchurch, New Zealand. The company has offices in 20 countries and employs approximately 1000 staff.  Tait develops voice and data radio technologies, exporting about 95% of products from its Christchurch manufacturing base.

Tait specializes in designing, deploying, supporting, and servicing complete mission-critical unified communication solutions in industries such as Oil and Gas and it is a Global Advance technology partner of Cisco around collaboration solutions and #IoT.

Here it is a short transcript of the things I found very relevant from our conversation:

ENTELEC ClaraA 2 compressed
Cisco booth during ENTELEC

From your experience and point of view what were the key concerns and topics of interest of the customers during ENTELEC?  “Convergence of voice, video and data and secure networks for digital oilfield.”

What did we showcase together in the show floor and the key benefits for the customers? “Tait showcased Unified Critical Communication two- way radio solutions integrated together as one through the power of Cisco IPICS (Interoperability and Collaboration System). This is a robust solution that enables and allows improvements in operational efficiency without compromising security. The approach of this solution is to protect the investment in legacy systems and migrate to the next generation of critical communications”

What was the overall reaction of the customers to our demo/presentation?  “Excited about the opportunity to blend state of the art Tait two-way radio solutions into the secure umbrella of the Cisco network in support of Unified Critical Communications with multi-modal integration of PTT, (Push to Talk) technology from anywhere, anytime and with any device.”

What will be a key takeaway/final thought you would like to share with our blog-readers? “Be prepared for the future, the IoT solutions will transform the way the people do business in digital oilfields as we continue to merge technologies trough unified critical communications.”

Cisco Focused on the same care-abouts: Security and Collaboration. You can read more about ENTELEC from Peter Granger (Heads up on What You’ll See) here, and Roberto De La Mora here (What Does it Mean to You?) . During the event Cisco showcased two new use case solutions as well,  but those topics deserve a whole blog. We will keep you posted!!!….

 



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Clara Alvarado

Solutions Marketing Manager

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IoT in Manufacturing: Insights and Best Practices

IoT Webcast Manufacturing net

Recently, the second of a two-part Manufacturing.net webcast series on ‘The Internet of Things ’ (IoT) wrapped with a deep dive on the very real business advantages and outcomes that are enabled when IoT is fully applied to Manufacturing operations. One of the speakers, David Gutshall, Infrastructure Design Manager at Harley-Davidson Motor Company, highlighted many advantages he’s experienced with deployments of the Converged Plant-wide Ethernet solution architecture from Cisco and Rockwell Automation. In the webcast, David talked about “greater manufacturing flexibility across the supply chain, where … we can collate data across the factory (and enterprise) … and have experienced a substantial reduction in downtime.”  He described that with an IP-enabled Connected Factory, “what used to take hours or days to triage and troubleshoot problems now takes seconds.” Expanding on the topic, David said “when we bring a new machine online, it essentially works with the network out-of-the-box,” yielding greater flexibility and significantly reducing new model NPI (New Product Introduction) cycles and time to market.

Similar companies, like General Motors, have leveraged this industrial automation and controls system (IACS) architecture, which GM calls ‘Plant Floor Control Network’ (PFCN), to reduce downtime by as much as 75% and to drive out hundreds of $millions in plant engineering, operations and maintenance costs associated with factory expansions and modernizations. Both GM and Harley identify one of the biggest advantages of a standardized yet flexible factory automation infrastructure is the acceleration of NPI offerings and advancement into new markets. Over the past decade, GM with partners has been able to gain a leading share of passenger vehicles produced in China, Brazil and other emerging markets. And as Harley rolls out their recently announced LiveWire electric motorcycle, I suspect that an integral part of their strategy includes the American manufacturing renaissance vision for a dynamic, fun, flexible factory of the future. Take a look at this inspirational video from Harley describing the modernization and transformation of their existing York Manufacturing Facility:

Continue reading “IoT in Manufacturing: Insights and Best Practices”



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Chet Namboodri

Senior Director

Global Private Sector Industries Marketing

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Is Your Team Prepared for a Cyber Attack? Get Ready with CyberRange Training

The fire alarm went off in my building again, but fortunately, it was only a drill. By now, we are all used to the periodic fire drills for emergency preparedness in our workplaces. But have you ever wondered if there is a similar exercise possible for a cyber attack? The same logic applies. Your team will be better prepared to handle a disaster if they are trained for it.

Seeing is believing: Today I am excited to share this video from our Cisco Korea team that showcases Cisco CyberRange.

Continue reading “Is Your Team Prepared for a Cyber Attack? Get Ready with CyberRange Training”



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Arvind Jain

Sr. Product Manager, Advanced Services

Security Solutions

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Threat Spotlight: A String of ‘Paerls’, Part One

This post was co-authored by Jaeson Schultz, Joel Esler, and Richard Harman. 

Update 7-8-14: Part 2 can be found hereVRT / TRAC

This is part one in a two-part series due to the sheer amount of data we found on this threat and threat actor. This particular attack was a combined spearphishing and exploit attempt. As we’ve seen in the past, this can be a very effective combination.

In this specific example the attackers targeted a feature within Microsoft Word — Visual Basic Scripting for Applications. While basic, the Office Macro attack vector is obviously still working quite effectively.  When the victim opens the Word document, an On-Open macro fires, which results in downloading an executable and launching it on the victim’s machine. This threat actor has particularly lavish tastes.  This threat actor seem to target high-profile, money-rich industries such as banking, oil, television, and jewelry.

Discovering the threat

The VRT has hundreds of feeds of raw threat intelligence, ranging from suspicious URLs, files, hashes, etc.  We take that intelligence data and apply  selection logic to it to identify samples that are worthy of review.  Using various methods from machine learning to dynamic sandbox analysis, we gather details about the samples – producing indicator of  compromise (IOC), and alerts made up of multiple IOCs.

During our analysis we took the last 45 days’ worth of samples, and clustered them together based on a matching set of alert criteria.  This process reduced over a million detailed sample reports to just over 15 thousand sample clusters that exhibit similar behavior.  Using this pattern of similar behavior, we were capable of identifying families of malware.  This led us to discover a Microsoft Word document that downloaded and executed a secondary sample, which began beaconing to a command and control server.

The Malicious Word documents & Associated Phishing campaign

The attacks we uncovered are an extremely targeted spear phish in the form of an invoice, purchase order, or receipt, written specifically for the recipient.  For instance, the following is an example message we observed that purportedly came from “Maesrk”, the shipping company.

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Continue reading “Threat Spotlight: A String of ‘Paerls’, Part One”



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Craig Williams

Director

Talos Outreach

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Cisco Executive Volunteers to Help Typhoon Victims

web_johnThis blog post was written by guest blogger John Baekelmans, Chief Technology Officer for Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities organization in the U.K. In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, John volunteered in the Province of Samar, in the community of Daram, the Philippines, from May 1 to 17, 2014.

I am sure most of you remember the deadly Typhoon Haiyan at the end of 2013. Haiyan, known as Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines, was one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded, which devastated portions of Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, on November 8, 2013. It is the deadliest Philippine typhoon on record, killing at least 6268 people in that country alone. Haiyan is also unofficially the strongest typhoon ever recorded in terms of wind speed. As of January 2014, bodies were still being found.

I know this because I was there. In addition to my day job as CTO for Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities program, I also lead Cisco’s Europe, Middle East, and North Africa Disaster Incident Response Team and am a volunteer in the National Disaster Fast Response Rescue team called V-MED of Flanders, Belgium. Having been an officer in the Fire Brigade in Belgium gave me the opportunity to join this fast-response rescue team. I have been to many major disasters around the world in the past 10 years — in Myanmar, Haiti, Pakistan, Chile, and many other places. Haiti was the worst in devastation and personal impact, but Haiyan came close because of the level of poverty and the lack of primary needs.

Haiyan is the deadliest typhoon on record in the Philippines, killing at least 6,268 people in that country alone. Photo courtesy The Telegraph
Haiyan is the deadliest typhoon on record in the Philippines, killing at least 6,268 people there. Photo courtesy The Telegraph

Continue reading “Cisco Executive Volunteers to Help Typhoon Victims”



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Alexis Raymond

Senior Manager

Chief Sustainability Office

June 27, 2014 Leave a Comment
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Open Source at The Large Hadron Collider and Data Gravity

I am delighted to announce a new Open Source cybergrant awarded to the Caltech team developing the ANSE project at the Large Hadron Collider. The project team lead by Caltech Professor Harvey Newman will be further developing the world’s fastest data forwarding network with Open Daylight. The LHC experiment is a collaboration of world’s top Universities and research institutions, the network is designed and developed by the California Institute of Technology High Energy Physics department in partnership with CERN and the scientists in search of the Higgs boson, adding new dimensions to the meaning of “big data analytics”, the same project team that basically set most if not all world records in data forwarding speeds over the last decade, and quickly approaching the remarkable 1 Tbps milestone.

Unique in its nature and remarkable in its discovery, the LHC experiment and its search for the elusive particle, the very thing that imparts mass to observable matter, is not only stretching the bleeding edge of physics, but makes the observation that data behaves as if it has gravity too. With the exponential rise in data (2 billion billion bytes per day and growing!), services and applications are drawn to “it”. Moving data around is neither cheap nor trivial. Though advances in network bandwidth are in fact observed to be exponential (Nielsen’s Law), advances in compute are even faster (Moore’s Law), and storage even more.  Thus, the impedance mismatch between them, forces us to feel and deal with the rising force of data gravity, a natural consequence of the laws of physics. Since not all data can be moved to the applications nor moved to core nor captured in the cloud, the applications will be drawn to it, a great opportunity for Fog computing, the natural evolution from cloud and into the Internet of Things.

Congratulations to the Caltech physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists working on this exciting project. We look forward to learning from them and their remarkable contribution flowing in Open Source made possible with this cybergrant so that everyone can benefit from it, not just the elusive search for gravity and dark matter. After all, there was a method to the madness of picking such elements for Open Daylight as Hydrogen and Helium. I wander what comes next…



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Michael Enescu

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Is your Business ready for 802.11ac?

This week we finished our biggest product announcement in recent memory.The various teams worked hard to bring out to our partners and customers products that delivered maximum quality, flexibility and value.

One of the products included was the new Cisco Small Business WAP371 Wireless Access Point. This Access Point is the first 802.11ac model in the portfolio representing a paradigm shift in the way you as a business owner can improve wireless performance for your business. This new model has a dual radio, includes a Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) Power-Over-Ethernet (PoE) LAN port and has the ever-popular Single Point Set-up capability. The WAP371 also features Captive Portal for guests, and like the rest of the wireless portfolio, offers simple set-up and deployment with an intuitive user interface and set-up wizards.

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But this release raises the question regarding exactly why you should think about upgrading your small business wireless network.

Nasser Tarazi, Product Manager for the Cisco Small Business Wireless Access Points, talks about reasons why to take a look at the all-new WAP371.

“Right now is a good time for Small Businesses to consider upgrading their wireless networks from older 802.11 technologies to 802.11ac. First-off, 802.11ac is three times faster than it’s predecessor, 802.11n. The use of Multiple-Antenna, Multiple-in, Multiple-out technology (MIMO) reliably delivers this boost in performance providing for a much better user experience.”

Nasser goes on, “We expect over 70% of mobile devices will be 11ac-enabled by 2016. Like mentioned before, 11ac is three times faster than 11n, so from business-critical to social media applications, improved wireless high-speed performance will ensure your applications will run smoothly, reliably. Also, range is better, even for 11n enabled devices.”

“Security is on every business owner’s mind. 802.11ac is more secure than 11n. And in fact, 11ac is also more power efficient, which can result in a 30% improvement in battery life for your wireless devices such as mobile phones and tablets. Finally, 11ac provides for greatly improved client density, so high-client use cases such as schools, churches, and other organizations will greatly benefit from the upgrade to 11ac.”

Check out our FAQ and the WAP371 product page for more information.

Thanks for your time!

Marc and Nasser



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Marc Nagao

Product Manager

Small Business RV Series Routers