Every year, we try to pull back the curtain on the future of application delivery by looking at those trends and technologies that impact it the most. Containers. Cloud. Digital Transformation. Automation. All have an impact on applications and their architectures, which in turn has significant implications for application delivery and the businesses that rely…

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Depending on third parties is inescapable. Every organization needs software, hardware, Internet connectivity, power, and buildings. It’s unlikely they’re going to do all those things themselves. That means that organizations must be dependent on others outside themselves. With that dependence comes risk. F5 recently partnered with Ponemon Institute to survey CISOs. In the report, The Evolving…

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This isn’t your mama’s botnet. This is a proper botnet. If you were the world’s best IoT botnet builder and you wanted to show the world how well-crafted an IoT botnet could be, Reaper is what you’d build. It hasn’t been seen attacking anyone yet, and that is part of its charm. But, what is…

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Figure 1: Demonstration of a split-tunnel attack4 Email Retrieval attacks The two major protocols associated with email retrieval are Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). Both protocols connect to an email server to download new messages over a TCP/IP connection.5POP3 is much simpler and easier to implement, but only allows…

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In part I of this series, I explored some of the issues surrounding the fact that we have managed to build networks so large and complex that it is essentially impossible to grasp any significant fraction of network activities without asking for help from… the network itself. In this installment, I delve into some actual techniques…

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So, what’s the issue when it comes to encryption and quantum computing? Today’s asymmetric encryption algorithms, which are primarily used for key exchanges and digital signatures, are considered vulnerable to quantum computers. For example, using today’s traditional, digital, transistor-based computers, it’s estimated it would take 6 quadrillion CPU years to crack a 2048-bit RSA decryption key.7 But,…

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Destruction, loss of data, intellectual property theft, fraud, embezzlement, disruption to business, restoration—globally, the costs of dealing with hacking, which were estimated at $3 trillion in 2015, are projected to double to $6 trillion annually by 2021.1 Yet under US law, it’s illegal to attack the hackers back. Way back in February, a Georgia Republican…

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Executives are slowly but surely recognizing the ramifications of providing the wrong answer when asked the questions: “Prior to the breach, did we train our employees in the acceptable use of company assets? Did we train them about what they could and could not do?” Do you work for a company that requires employees to sign…

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  Email Headers An excellent source of internal configuration information can be gleaned from email headers. Attackers can simply fire off a few email inquiries to folks at an organization and see what they can find. Here’s a typical email header using our example company, Boring Aeroplanes, from our phishing example. Note both internal and…

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My favorite color, by the way, is black. Or at least it will be until something darker comes along. While marginally better than asking for personal information that is just as easily discovered on the web —your mother’s maiden name, where you were born (my mother claims it was in a barn based on my…

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