Exordium In the previous installment of the onePK series, you received a crash course on Cisco’s onePK. In this article, you’ll take the next step with a fun little exposé on onePK’s C API. You will learn how to write a simple program to reach out and connect to a network element. This is staple […]
Exordium Cisco’s One Platform Kit (onePK) is a fantastic toolkit for building custom applications that interact with your Cisco routers and switches. Using onePK, you can build automation directly into the network and extend all sorts of functionality using Cisco devices. The first in a three-part blog series, this article will introduce onePK to the reader, explain […]
Prologue On April 10, 2013, a collective of politically motivated hacktivists announced a round of planned attacks called #OPUSA. These attacks, slated to begin May 7, 2013, are to be launched against U.S.-based targets. #OPUSA is a follow-up to #OPISRAEL, which were a series of attacks carried out on April 7 against Israeli-based targets. Our goal here is to […]
The Compressed Pcap Packet Indexing Program (cppip) is a tool to enable extremely fast extraction of packets from a compressed pcap file. This tool is intended for security and network folk who work with large pcap files. This article provides a complete discussion of the tool and is split into two parts.
The Common Vulnerability Reporting Framework (CVRF) is a security automation standard intended to make your life easier by offering a common language to exchange traditional security and vulnerability bulletins, reports, and advisories. You can read more about it on the official ICASI CVRF 1.1 page, in my CVRF 1.1 Missing Manual blog series, or in […]
In this article, you will be provided a thorough treatise on an in-house developed tool for parsing and validating CVRF documents aptly named "cvrfparse". The article is split into two parts. The first part, intended for CVRF document producers and consumers, is a hands-on manual detailing how to use cvrfparse. The second part, intended for burgeoning Python programmers, explores some of the inner workings of the tool.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is the protocol leveraged within the Internet´s distributed name and address database architecture. Originally implemented to make access to Internet-based resources human-friendly, DNS quickly became critical infrastructure in the intricate behind-the-scenes mechanics of the Internet, second only to routing in its importance. When DNS becomes inaccessible, the functionality of many common Internet-based applications such as e-mail, Web browsing, and e-commerce can be adversely affected—sometimes on a wide scale. This short blog will explore some real-world examples of DNS abuse. I'd like to welcome and thank Andrae Middleton for joining me as a co-author and presenting his expertise on this article. There are a few different types of DNS attacks: cache poisoning, hijacking attacks, and denial of service (DoS) attacks (which primarily include reflection and amplification). In the news as of late are widespread and focused DoS attacks. Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO), with its distributed sensors, is able observe and measure various aspects of the global DNS infrastructure. What follows are two vignettes detailing recent Internet DNS DoS attacks against the Internet's DNS infrastructure. We will see that, though the attacks are different, the results are similar and the countermeasures and mitigations are the same.
