Recent media reports have focused on a mass SQL injection attack involving a malware domain named lizamoon.com. While the lizamoon.com domain is new, this particular series of SQL injection compromises is actually several months old. Cisco ScanSafe logs record the first instance on 20-sep-10 21:58:08 GMT. Since then, various malware domains have been used for a total of 42 domains signifying 42 separate occurrences of these compromises since September 2010. Lizamoon.com was the 41st of these.
Cisco ScanSafe data reveals that from Sept 2010 to Feb 2011, all the compromises were on smaller, low traffic sites. Any encounters likely resulted from Web searches for very niche topic areas. As a result, the number of encounters with these compromised websites remained very low. Most importantly, this attacker is employing severe throttling such that only 0.15% of encounters even result in live content delivery. The remaining 99.85% of encounters are non-resolvable at the time of encounter. The result is a negligible rate of actual encounter with live content.
Recently, during my daily “let’s see what’s happening today” routine, I read an article that struck me in an eerie — better yet, intriguing — manner. The gist of the story is that a crime ring syndicated from cyber space, consisting of Internet-savvy folks and run-of-the-mill thieves, managed to purchase (let’s just call it what it is, steal) thousands of dollars in products while conducting shopping sprees at Apple stores.
Few people in the world would disagree that a network firewall is an essential component for any size datacenter. In fact, operating without one could be considered by many to be network asset suicide! But adding a firewall to an existing datacenter is by no means a trivial task. In fact, the amount of work that would be required to re-cable every physical interface to properly tie it in with the rest of the network is enough to make many network administrators think twice about just how badly they really need that shiny new firewall, versus just sticking with what they have. Add to that the additional rack space, power, cooling, and management required by the new device, and some serious ROI questions may be raised.
Attacks on businesses of all sizes occur in essentially the same way. But they succeed much more often on smaller companies than on larger ones.
Information Week Analytics refers to small businesses as “filet mignon” for hackers and malware; it says the primary threat is external penetration into the business’s network.
Small businesses often rely on cheap, consumer-class technology, even at the external network interface—the router. Cheap routers jeopardize security, operational efficiency, and employee productivity. Their cost structure simply precludes business-class performance and security.
I don’t know about you , but I want to be well prepared for the March 30th Cisco announcement
Listening to Cisco SVP Bill Brownell’s invitation, we can definitely expect some very interesting product news, but more importantly a new round of conversations about the right fabric-infrastructure, especially in the context of cloud computing.
That’s why we will have special guests such as John McCool, Soni Jiandani and Tim Gillis in addition of Forrester Research and IDC (see my previous blog)
So as I was willing to be well prepared, I found this interesting blog from Ivan about data center fabric architecture , which obviously grabbed also the attention of some of our smart engineers
