NETWORKING

In March, IT professional association CompTIA nervously pondered what affect COVID-19 and work-from-home mandates would have on its members and its core mission of delivering training and vendor-neutral IT certifications. “When you have this kind of upheaval, what does that mean in terms of education?” says James Stanger, chief technology evangelist at CompTIA. Surely it would take a back seat to more pressing business issues. Turns out, certifications have “massively continued” their upward trend, he…

Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we’ve observed between January 15 and January 22. As with previous roundups, this post isn’t meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we’ve observed by highlighting key behavioral characteristics, indicators of compromise, and discussing how our customers are automatically protected from these threats. As a reminder, the information provided for the following threats in this post is non-exhaustive…

Take back control with an integrated security platform In a makeshift SOC in the corner of his home, Matt starts his day with an alarm going off on his computer. There are four monitors ganged together, multiple consoles on each one of them, and numerous empty coffee mugs. This probably draws a snapshot of what’s been real for many of us. On top of the never-ending list of alerts in his inbox every morning, he is building playbooks, threat hunting, scanning news for the latest attack updates, and investigating alerts. Coffee stopped working a couple of hours ago. Matt wished he had more…

For the first year since the dot-com bubble popped, IT salaries were largely flat in 2020, and tens of thousands of jobs were lost in 2020, according to a report from independent management consultants Janco Associates. Hardest-hit were middle management jobs at both large enterprises and smaller companies, where salaries actually dropped by about 0.08%, while executive and staff-level jobs remained steady or grew by a similarly small amount. “What’s been hard hit, mostly, are…

Many customers are starting to look at third party tools such as Terraform and Ansible to deploy and manage their infrastructure and applications. In this five-part series we’ll introduce Terraform and understand how it’s used with Cisco products such as ACI. Over the coming weeks this blog series will cover: Introduction to Terraform Terraform and ACI​​​​​​​ Explanation of the Terraform configuration files Terraform Remote State and Team Collaboration Terraform Providers…

There are a lot of commands available on Linux for looking at network settings and connections. In today’s post, we’re going to run through some very handy commands and see how they work. ifquery command One very useful command is the ifquery command. This command should give you a quick list of network interfaces. However, you might only see something like this —showing only the loopback interface: $ ifquery –list lo If this is the…

Welcome to 2021, the year our distributors and their partners fulfill a grand promise I have been preaching throughout my multiple decades at Cisco. Digital transformation for small and mid-sized businesses offers an inherent opportunity for our partners. Cisco, our distributors, and the VARs and MSPs they serve share a common goal to drive business growth and efficiencies for our customers, and now technology has thrown the gates of opportunity wide open for small and…

When former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai left office on Jan. 20, 2021, his departure was greeted with hoots of derision. His crime? Destroying net neutrality. Now, President Joe Biden has named FCC member and net neutrality champion Jessica Rosenworcel to chair the Commission. This is a big step forward for net neutrality’s return.  While President Donald Trump and Pai helped destroy net neutrality to the advantage of major ISPs and telecoms, Rosenworcel…

In cybersecurity, nation states, cyber criminals, hacktivists, and rogue employees are the usual suspects. They fit nicely into categories like external attackers or insider threats. But what about our essential suppliers, partners, and service providers? We rely on them, sometimes inviting them in to help manage our networks and internal systems. It’s easy to overlook them as possible pathways for cyberattacks. But the shocking cyberattack discovered in December shined a bright light on supply chain…

Big challenges require big solutions. But when it comes to technology for coronavirus vaccine access and administration, many of those big solutions already exist. As you read this, COVID-19 vaccines are being rolled out in different capacities around the world. The troubling news is, getting the vaccines to the public is continuing to present an evolving array of challenges. Limited availability, complex transportation and storage, and phasing are all creating confusion. The good news is…