security

Prologue On April 10, 2013, a collective of politically motivated hacktivists announced a round of planned attacks called #OPUSA. These attacks, slated to begin May 7, 2013, are to be launched against U.S.-based targets. #OPUSA is a follow-up to #OPISRAEL, which were a series of attacks carried out…

Prologue The Compressed Pcap Packet Indexing Program (cppip) is a tool to enable extremely fast extraction of packets from a compressed pcap file. This tool is intended for security and network folk who work with large pcap files. This article provides a complete discussion of the tool and is split…

Great challenges can bring great opportunities to any business, and with the inevitability of cloud on the horizon, IT organizations will need to embrace this change. Taking the first, second or even third step can be scary, but the return on taking such risks will pay off so long as the IT organiza…

Often it is quite surprising how long old, well-known vulnerabilities continue to be exploited. Recently, a friend sent me an example of a malicious script used in an attempted attack against their server: The script attempted to exploit the Horde/IMP Plesk Webmail Exploit in vulnerable versions of…

The Common Vulnerability Reporting Framework (CVRF) is a security automation standard intended to make your life easier by offering a common language to exchange traditional security and vulnerability bulletins, reports, and advisories. You can read more about it on the official ICASI CVRF 1.1 page,…

UPDATE: Webcast information is also now available at the Cisco Live 365 site Many network security administrators are struggling to keep their network “up-to-date” with the constant release of new vulnerabilities and software fixes. At the same time, they’re under pressure to provi…

At 10:30 UTC one of the botnet spam campaigns we discussed yesterday took a shift to focus on the recent explosion in Texas. The miscreants responded to the tragic events in Texas almost immediately. The volume of the attack is similar to what we witnessed yesterday with the maximum volume peaking a…

Security is a tough nut that can’t be cracked by one alone—neither technology nor research, neither corporations nor start-ups, and neither products nor processes. None of these alone can crack the security nut. The most important part of the problem and solution is people! Nothing beats the efforts…

Wow! We just published our tenth bundle of Cisco IOS Software Security Advisories and what a ride it’s been!! Way back when in the fall of 2008 when we produced our first Cisco IOS Software Security Advisory bundle, we had no idea of the impact that this delivery format would have on us intern…