Year: 2015

September 23, 2015 1 Comment
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It’s That Time Again—Announcing the Cisco IOS & XE Software Security Advisory Bundled Publication

Today, we released the last Cisco IOS & XE Software Security Advisory Bundled Publication of 2015. As a reminder, Cisco discloses IOS vulnerabilities on a predictable schedule (the fourth Wednesday of March and September each calendar year).  Last cycle, we began including Cisco Security Advisories addressing vulnerabilities in Cisco IOS XE Software in this publication.  This change was a direct result of your feedback, and we hope the timeline and additional “bundling” continues to allow organizations to plan and ensure resources are available to analyze, test, and remediate vulnerabilities in their environments.

Today’s edition of the Cisco IOS & XE Software Security Advisory Bundled Publication includes three advisories that affect the following technologies:

  • IPv6 First-Hop Security
  • SSH Version 2 (SSHv2)
  • Cisco IOS XE Software

You may recall that Cisco announced enhancements to the Cisco IOS Software Checker last year. As my colleague Kevin Saling shared, the tool can display first-fixed software release data based on the combination of Cisco IOS Software releases and Cisco Security Advisories selected. Users can now quickly identify the first release that addresses all vulnerabilities disclosed in the selected advisories.   Continue reading “It’s That Time Again—Announcing the Cisco IOS & XE Software Security Advisory Bundled Publication”

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Erin Float

Project Manager

Security Research and Operations Group

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SYNful Knock Scanner

This post was authored by William McVey.

Update 9/23: We updated the tool to version 1.0.1

Talos is constantly researching the ways in which threat actors are evolving to exploit systems. Recently, a piece of persistent malware coined as “SYNful Knock” was discovered on Cisco routers. While this malware attack is not a vulnerability, as it had to be installed by someone using valid credentials or who had physical access to the device, Cisco has published an Event Response Page for customers to provide the information needed to detect and remediate these types of attacks. We are also working with partners to identify compromised systems.

The most recent addition to the toolkit Cisco is providing customers comes after the Cisco PSIRT worked with internal teams and customers to acquire copies of the malware. Talos has now developed a tool for customers to scan their own network to identify routers that may have been compromised by this specific malware. The tool works by scanning devices and networks, looking for routers answering the SYNful Knock malware.

Note: This tool can only detect hosts responding to the malware “knock” as it is known at a particular point in time. This tool can be used to help detect and triage known compromises of infrastructure, but it cannot establish that a network does not have malware that might have evolved to use a different set of signatures.

Continue reading “SYNful Knock Scanner”

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Talos Group

Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group

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Invest In Yourself to Get the Greatest Returns

The gift of education is the gift that keeps on giving. Getting your higher education degree is a critical element of success for most professionals these days. But education shouldn’t stop with your college experience.

Ongoing training is also necessary to maintain your competitive edge. This is especially true for sales professionals who act as consultants to their customers. Keeping up with industry changes, new methodologies and customer concerns are an absolute necessity. More importantly, ongoing training results in more money! A training analysis showed that training geared for sales and marketing professionals resulted in 24% higher profit margins and an increase in sales of up to 6.5% (Learndash.com, 2013).

So there are two primary focus areas for training when it comes to sales professionals. First, learn the basics. There are fundamental processes that every salesperson should master to enjoy consistent success. The earlier you learn these fundamentals in your career, the better off you will be. But even the best salespeople will get away from the basics the longer they stay in business. It’s not at all uncommon to see sales professionals succeed in their first year of business only to watch them fall into a slump during their second or later years because they get away from the basics.

Taking refresher courses on the fundamentals will keep you sharp. Some of the basics include territory planning, cold calling techniques and negotiation/closing skills just to name a few. Do you know how to mine your install base customers? Only focusing on net new leads? The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%  (, 2013).

Continue reading “Invest In Yourself to Get the Greatest Returns”

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Karin Surber

Sr. Global Business Development Manager

Global Partner Strategy and Planning

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Cognitive Research: Fake Blogs Generating Real Money

Summary

In the past several months Cisco Cognitive Threat Analytics (CTA) researchers have observed a number of blog sites using either fake content or content stolen from other sites to drive traffic to click on ad-loaded web sites. We have observed traffic volume up to 10,000 requests per hour, targeting hundreds of sites. The estimated lifetime of this campaign is at least 9 months. With a single click worth anywhere from $0.01 and $1, these scams can yield substantial returns for their owners.

Fake blogs are not new, but these actors are operating with a slightly different MO. Effort has been made to evade web reputation based blocks and hide from the eyes of investigators. First, we observe a large number of similar sites with word-based and topic-based generated domain names. These sites look like benign travel-related blogs full of content at first sight. Secondly, most of the intermediate infrastructure will redirect a random request away towards Google, making the investigation more difficult.

The general traffic pattern was observed as follows:

  1. Large numbers of requests arrive from infected clients to the fake blog sites. To look less suspicious, the requests look like search queries – for example: cruiserly.net/search/q/greyhounds.
  2. There is a series of redirects via intermediate sites, which are already associated with click-frauds – for example: findreek.com.
  3. These redirects bring the clients towards another set of fake sites, with travel related names (e.g. tourxperia.com), this time these sites have no content.
  4. Finally, clients are sent to browse arbitrary web sites to generate clicks and/or revenue.

Details of the analysis follow: Continue reading “Cognitive Research: Fake Blogs Generating Real Money”

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Michal Svoboda

Technical Leader

Cognitive Threat Analytics

September 22, 2015 Leave a Comment
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Summary: Five Keys to Success Leading Digital Business Transformation

mriegelHere’s a summary of Mike Riegel’s latest blog on the IoE Blog site that reaches out to all those in the energy industry, both oil & gas and power utilities:

“As we explored in my previous blog, today’s rampant pace of innovation can be likened to a Digital Vortex, where ideas, technologies, and even entire industries are swept to the center of the Vortex — recombining and merging into disruptive new business models.”

In Mike’s blog he talks about how digital business transformation is critical for all industries. However, Cisco’s Digital Vortex research revealed, 45 percent of companies don’t consider digital disruption a board-level concern. That’s worrying. Mike goes on to talk about the level of complacency, and how organizations had better watch out – there’s a disrupter increasingly in your industry!

The blog elucidates of five key areas which, if adopted, can enable success for those wanting to thrive in the new digital business environment:

  • Lead from the top down
  • Create the Workforce of the future
  • Merge Business Processes and Technology
  • Ideate and innovate FAST (FAST IT)
  • Cultivate the Partner Ecosystem

So, the blog concludes, it is the incumbents that can thrive as the agile disrupters if they play their cards right in this business digitization arena. Singular point-digitization is not enough. Comprehensive digitization is the way forward, involving people, process, data, and things. Find out more about the Digital Vortex  by clicking on the link (the subject of Mike’s next blog).

Refinery factory at the Port of Los Angeles, California, USA
Refinery factory at the Port of Los Angeles, California, USA

 

What do you think – are you ready to be a disruptor in the Energy Industry, or be disrupted?

My take: The good news is that the utilities companies are at lower risk than others, and oil and gas companies even less, according to the report. Those organizations have embraced digitization and recognize the disruption will most likely come from within, probably owing to the large barrier to entry for outsiders (unlike Amazon taking on retail for example).

Still, don’t be complacent – your competitors are waiting to take further digital business steps, and take market share. You can find out more about cisco digital solutions for oil and gas and power utilities by clicking on the links.

Let me know what you think!

 

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Peter Granger

Senior Sales Transformation Manager

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NterOne Automates Applications Deployments with Cisco ACI

This June in San Diego, I had the pleasure of meeting Dan Stanton, Trainer and Subject Matter Expert at NterOne, a global IT training and consulting company.  Dan shared his challenges to create great digital experiences for NterOne’s students.  Dan and his team have to support virtual IT training in many different time zones and must undertake twenty or so dynamic reconfigurations every week.  NterOne is like many enterprise customers except they are sped up to a high rate of change.

Dan runs a multi-hypervisor environment which made ACI a perfect match.  Please listen to Dan share his use cases and how they positively impact NterOne’s business in the interview below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wHgvVqMfdw&list=PLFT-9JpKjRTAB1jxPP0GT_PEdI6Hu32TQ&index=1

For more information and insights into ACI See:

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Case Study: NterOne

www.cisco.com/go/aci

Getting Started with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) in the Small-to-Midsize Commercial Data Center

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Harry Petty

Director

Data Center and Cloud Marketing

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IoT Innovation: Accelerating Rapidly and Exponentially

Co-Innovation. Hyper-Collaboration. Sharing Economy.

Whatever you call it, it’s clear to me that the global community of innovators around the Internet of Things (IoT) keeps accelerating — rapidly and exponentially. I have personally experienced this disruptive growth in just the past three months, especially in how co-innovators are focusing more and more on solutions for the public and private sectors.

I wrote here three months ago that I anticipated greater participation in Cisco’s 2nd annual Innovation Grand Challenge, which we launched on June 22nd. I was expecting solid, steady growth of entries in key industry markets, such as Manufacturing, Smart Cities and Energy/Utilities.

But we were completely overwhelmed by the response!

Alex Internet of ThingsBy the time entries were closed two weeks ago (Sept. 7), we had received more than 3,000 entries in more than 100 countries from startups, incubators, entrepreneurs and independent developers. That’s three times the number of submissions as the first year of the competition and more than all four of our annual Grand Challenges combined. The top 10 countries with the most entries reflect the geographic scope and diversity of IoT innovation: United States, India, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Mexico, the Russia, and Indonesia.

In the past three months, we Continue reading “IoT Innovation: Accelerating Rapidly and Exponentially”

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Alex Goryachev

Senior Director, Innovation Strategy & Programs

Corporate Strategic Innovation Group

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Enhancing the Splunk experience with Cisco UCS

According to scientists, the age of smartphones has left humans with such a short attention span that even a goldfish can hold a thought for longer. On an average, human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in year 2000 to 8 seconds in today’s smart-world.

What does this mean for Splunk Enterprise ? Continue reading “Enhancing the Splunk experience with Cisco UCS”

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Bharath Aleti

Product Manager, UCS Big Data Solutions

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WAN Automation Engine and Segment Routing: Two Great Solutions Even Better Together

Are you looking to deliver an intelligent, dynamic and highly optimized programmable network where applications have control in how they explicitly traverse the end-to-end network?

If so, you have probably been watching the Application Engineered Routing story unfold since it was launched in March 2015. For those of you following this developing chapter in the end-to-end application control play book, you might have read the past few blogs by my colleague, Frederic Trate (here and here) or even watched Dave Ward, Cisco CTO and Chief Architect, present on engineering the network for applications on the main stage at MPLS World Congress 2015 earlier this year (see Featured Content). Continue reading “WAN Automation Engine and Segment Routing: Two Great Solutions Even Better Together”

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Gina Nienaber

Marketing Manager

SP Infrastructure