OK, this is an ambitious idea, but the two articles on Titan Rain and the lack of IT security training has planted a bug under the saddle so to speak…. I don’t know how many parts will be in this series. In fact, I may add to it from time to time even after an initial series. This is intended as a “crash course” in the essentials of network security. It’s aimed at the home users and managers of small networks (small business owners?) that haven’t thought about network security before and maybe will be a reference of some value even to those that are more intermediate. The essentials of network security will be covered in the first few posts.
Category: Networking
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The origins of the internet
The internet was developed essentially with a couple of goals in mind. One of those goals was to have a distributed means of communications that would be resilient to nuclear attack. The idea was this, if we have traffic, (data) that can take one of several paths to a destination, then a fatal attack on one of the communication hubs does NOT have to take down the whole connection. Anyway… there’s an article over at the Register with an interview with one of the individuals that had this groundbreaking idea.
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Connectivity issues
Our ISP here was out this afternoon. (Cable and internet) for a bit before I had to run to an appointment, so I got a bit behind in entries. It’s interesting though, Charter has been really pushing their new telephone service lately. Which is all well and good, but I’ve thought many times, if I were to get phone service from Charter how many times a year I’d be without phone service? How would I have called to report the outage today? (Carrier pigeon) – cell phone is the expected answer I’m sure, but….
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Handy Online Network Tools
Most of the time when I need to do a Dig or whois or traceroute I’m at a machine that I can use a good command line version of these essential network utilities. However, there are always times when you’re at a PC or situation that is either missing some of those, or you’d rather not run the utility on the machine for other reasons. Fortunately, many of these can be found online. For a long time, I’ve kept SamSpade.org in the back of my mind as a good utility address. There you’ll find Whois lookups, reverse IP -> domain lookups, traceroutes, etc. One thing I didn’t find though on the page was Dig…
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Linksys changing WRT54G wireless router
Linux devices has a story on the Linksys WRT54G wireless routers. The WRT54G has been known for quite a while to be running linux and a community has sprouted up with customized software to add many neat features to the access points. However, Linksys is moving to VxWorks as the operating system for the routers in a move that will cut memory and flash sizes installed. (VxWorks is more of an embedded OS and many other network hardware makers have made the move.)
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Worldnic DNS server outage teaches lesson…
Incidents.org has a post on a DNS server outage for Worldnic. Which effects a number of Network Solutions customers. Apparently they’re aware of the problem and are working on a fix. It doesn’t affect EVERY Network Solutions customer, there are some specifics…
To clarify the impact to the casual reader:
Not all customers of Network Solutions are affected.
No root or TLD servers are known to reside on these machines.
It’s “just” individual domains that are affected, but it might be a lot of them.
Only domains that have all their namervers on these machines will have significant impact.
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Cogent cut takes down major internet backbone
Cogent has suffered a major outage of one of their main internet backbone connections. It appears that this link is having a big affect on the “internet health”. Comcast seems to be relatively hard hit with connectivity issues from this. It appears that the Northeast US and Southeast may have sporadic outages depending on the ISP. I’ve had a few peculiar net experiences this morning, but I’m not sure if this connectivity problem is what I’ve seen.
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New Orleans Datacenter STILL up and running
Of course the thoughts and prayers of the nation and indeed the world are with those in the Gulf Coast area of the U.S. and particularly the situation in New Orleans. I ran across an amazing story of a webhost that is based in New Orleans and their datacenter is still running. They are keeping a blog of the goings on there.
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New protocol to identify location of access point users?
Intel has developed a new technology that will more precisely identify where a wireless user is. The previous approach has used signal strength to more than one access point as a guage. This new approach uses a time-stamped packet from two access points. The difference between the packet stamp and the arrival time will give a more precise measure of where the mobile user is.
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More on Wireless networking security
Sunbeltblog has a flurry of posts today. This one muses on wireless networking (in)security. One of the points that they make is that there are “acceptable” levels of security depending on your circumstance. In other words, if you’re miles from nowhere and feel comfortable with WEP (which is breakable) fine.