March 16th, 2008
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November 27th, 2007
An outage struck the networking giant Monday morning and continued to affect parts of the Web site for hours. The company, which uses its site for e-commerce, support, and work with business partners, said in a statement it’s investigating.”Earlier this morning, Cisco.com experienced some issues that impacted access to certain applications on the site,” Cisco said in a statement midmorning Monday, but the San Jose, Calif.-based company didn’t immediately say what parts of the site were down. “Currently, Cisco.com is accessible and we are in the process of conducting a thorough investigation to determine the cause and full impact. We thank our customers, partners and other site users for their patience.”
Cisco Outage
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November 6th, 2007
The United States is starting to look like a slowpoke on the Internet. Examples abound of countries that have faster and cheaper broadband connections, and more of their population connected to them.
What’s less clear is how badly the country that gave birth to the Internet is doing, and whether the government needs to step in and do something about it. The Bush administration has tried to foster broadband adoption with a hands-off approach. If that’s seen as a failure by the next administration, the policy may change.
Should the government step in?
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August 17th, 2007
Open source innovator and SNORT® creator, Sourcefire, Inc. today announced the acquisition of leading open source gateway anti-virus technology provider, ClamAV. Sourcefire will continue to develop and offer ClamAV as an open source (GPL) solution, while also leveraging it throughout the commercial Sourcefire Enterprise Threat Management (ETM) offerings.
Opensource Antivirus
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April 2nd, 2007
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was created after the attacks on September 11, 2001 as a kind of overriding department, wants to have the key to sign the DNS root zone solidly in the hands of the US government. This ultimate master key would then allow authorities to track DNS Security Extensions (DNSSec) all the way back to the servers that represent the name system’s root zone on the Internet. The “key-signing key” signs the zone key, which is held by VeriSign. At the meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Lisbon, Bernard Turcotte, president of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) drew everyone’s attention to this proposal as a representative of the national top-level domain registries (ccTLDs).
Homeland Security DNSSec
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March 20th, 2007
JUNEAU, Alaska - Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disk drive containing an account worth $38 billion.
And the only backup was the paperwork itself — stored in more than 300 cardboard boxes.
Where did my 38billion go?
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March 8th, 2007
Now we all partly understand why Cisco gear is a bit more expensive, others taking advantage of top notch service. I have heard of such cases previously but have never seen it publicized so widely with so much network equipment and money being stolen. Cisco often speaks about counterfeit equipment being sold on ebay and cutting into their profits as well.
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - A Massachusetts businessman who resold Cisco Systems Inc. networking gear was arrested on charges he defrauded the technology company out of millions of dollars by cheating its program to replace broken or defective hardware.
Michael Daly, 53, of Danvers, Mass., was arrested Tuesday and was scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday in Boston federal court, according to federal prosecutors. After preliminary hearings in Boston, his case will be moved to San Jose, prosecutors said.
San Jose-based Cisco makes the routers and switches that direct data traffic over computer networks, and the parts Daly obtained were worth between $995 to $25,000 each, prosecutors said. Some of the proceeds were used to buy classic cars.
Cisco Fraud Case
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January 21st, 2007
I spoke recently with an old friend who is a bandwidth broker. He buys and sells bandwidth on fiber-optic networks around the world. And he told me something that I found not completely surprising, but I certainly hadn’t known: Google controls more network fiber than any other organization. This is not to say that Google OWNS all that fiber, just that they control it through agreements with network operators. I find two very interesting aspects to this story: 1) that Google has acquired — or even needs to acquire — so much bandwidth, and; 2) that they don’t own it, since probably the cheapest way to pick up that volume of fiber would be to simply buy out any number of backbone providers like Level 3 Communications.
Why?
The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television.
Cringely’s Pulpit On Google Taking over the internet
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December 20th, 2006
Okay, this story is hitting too close to home, in more ways than one. Quoth the article …
The government needs a search warrant if it wants to read the U.S. mail that arrives at your home. But federal prosecutors say they don’t need a search warrant to read your e-mail messages if those messages happen to be stored in someone else’s computer.
That would include all of the Big Four e-mail providers — Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and Google — that together hold e-mail accounts for 135 million Americans.
Scary, huh? My recommendation is to always, always encrypt your email. There are several methods of obtaining “digital certificates” to sign your email messages with. Start using them 
-Edd
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November 6th, 2006
Securityfocus alerts us that another new zero-day exploit for Microsoft systems has appeared, capable of compromising fully patched IE 6/7 systems when a user visits a malicious website.
More ZeroDay Eploit
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