November 24, 2020

Why securing the DNS layer is crucial to fight cyber crime

When left insecure, DNS servers can result in devastating consequences for businesses that fall victim to attack. Terry Bishop, solutions architect at RiskIQ, says: “Malicious actors are constantly looking to exploit weak links in target organisations. A vulnerable DNS server would certainly be considered a high-value target, given the variety of directions that could be taken once compromised. “At RiskIQ, we find most organisations are unaware of about 30% of their external-facing assets. That can be websites, mail servers, remote gateways, and so on. If any of these systems are left unpatched, unmonitored or unmanaged, it presents an opportunity for compromise and further potential exploit, whether that is towards company assets, or other more valuable infrastructure such as DNS servers are dependent on the motives of the attacker and the specifics of the breached environment.” Kevin Curran, senior member at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and professor of cyber security at Ulster University, agrees that DNS attacks can be highly disruptive. In fact, an improperly working DNS layer would effectively break the internet, he says.

The Dark Side of AI: Previewing Criminal Uses

Criminals' Top Goal: Profit, If that's the high level, the applied level is that criminals have never shied away from finding innovative ways to earn an illicit profit, be it through social engineering refinements, new business models or adopting new types of technology. And AI is no exception. "Criminals are likely to make use of AI to facilitate and improve their attacks by maximizing opportunities for profit within a shorter period, exploiting more victims and creating new, innovative criminal business models - all the while reducing their chances of being caught," according to the report. Thankfully, all is not doom and gloom. "AI promises the world greater efficiency, automation and autonomy," says Edvardas ?ileris, who heads Europol's European Cybercrime Center, aka EC3. "At a time where the public is getting increasingly concerned about the possible misuse of AI, we have to be transparent about the threats, but also look into the potential benefits from AI technology." ... Even criminal uptake of deepfakes has been scant. "The main use of deepfakes still overwhelmingly appears to be for non-consensual pornographic purposes," according to the report. It cites research from last year by the Amsterdam-based AI firm Deeptrace , which "found 15,000 deepfake videos online..."

Flash storage debate heats up over QLC SSDs vs. HDDs

Rosemarin said some vendors front end QLC with TLC flash, storage class memory or DRAM to address caching and performance issues, but they run the risk of scaling problems and destroying the cost advantage that the denser flash technology can bring. "We had to launch a whole new architecture with FlashArray//C to optimize and run QLC," Rosemarin said. "Otherwise, you're very quickly going to get in a position where you're going to tell clients it doesn't make sense to use QLC because [the] architecture can't do it cost-efficiently." Vast Data's Universal Storage uses Intel Optane SSDs, built on faster, more costly 3D XPoint technology, to buffer writes, store metadata and improve latency and endurance. But Jeff Denworth, co-founder and chief marketing officer at the startup, said the system brings cost savings over alternatives through better longevity and data-reduction code, for starters. "We ask customers all the time, 'If you had the choice, would you buy a hard drive-based system, if cost wasn't the only issue?' And not a single customer has ever said, 'Yeah, give me spinning rust,'" Denworth said. Denser NAND flash chip technology isn't the only innovation that could help to drive down costs of QLC flash. Roger Peene, a vice president in Micron's storage business unit, spotlighted the company's latest 176-layer 3D NAND that can also boost density and lower costs.

Instrumenting the Network for Successful AIOps

The highest quality network data is obtained by deploying devices such as network TAPs that mirror the raw network traffic. Many vendors offer physical and virtual versions of these to gather packet data from the data center as well as virtualized segments of the network. AWS and Google Cloud have both launched Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)traffic/packet mirroring features in the last year that allow users to duplicate traffic to and from their applications and forward it to cloud-native performance and security monitoring tools, so there are solid options for gathering packet data from cloud-hosted applications too. The network taps let network monitoring tools view the raw data without impacting the actual data-plane. When dealing with high sensitivity applications such as ultra-low-latency trading, high quality network monitoring tools use timestamping with nanosecond accuracy to identify bursts with millisecond resolution which might cause packet drops that normal SNMP type counters can’t explain. This fidelity of data is relevant in other high quality applications such as real-time video decoding, gaming multicast servers, HPC and other critical IOT control systems. 

How to create an effective software architecture roadmap

The iteration model demonstrates how the architecture and related software systems will change and evolve on the way to a final goal. Each large iteration segment represents one milestone goal of an overall initiative, such as updating a particular application database or modernizing a set of legacy services. Then, each one of those segments contains a list of every project involved in meeting that milestone. For instance, a legacy service modernization iteration requires a review of the code, refactoring efforts, testing phases and deployment preparations. While architects may feel pressured to create a realistic schedule from the start of the iteration modeling phase, Richards said that it's not harmful to be aspirational, imaginative or even mildly unrealistic at this stage. Since this is still an unrefined plan, try to ignore limitations like cost and staffing, and focus on goals. ... Once an architect has an iteration model in place, the portfolio model injects reality into the roadmap. In this stage, the architect or software-side project lead analyzes the feasibility of the overall goal. They examine the initiative, the requirements for each planned iteration and the resources available for the individual projects within those iterations. 

How new-age data analytics is revolutionising the recruitment and hiring segment

There are innumerable advantages attached to opting for AI over an ordinary recruitment team. With the introduction of AI, companies can easily lower the costs involved in maintaining a recruitment team. The highly automated screening procedures select quality candidates that in turn will help the organization grow and retain better personnel – a factor that is otherwise overlooked in the conventional recruitment process. Employing AI and ML automates the whole recruitment process and helps eliminate the probability of human errors. Automation increases efficiency and improves the performance of other departments of the company. The traditional recruitment process tends to be very costly. Several teams are often needed for the purpose of hiring people in a company. But with the help of AI and ML, the unnecessary costs can be done away with and the various stages of hiring can all be conducted on a single dedicated platform. Additionally, if the company engages in a lot of contract work, then AI can be used for analysing the project plan and predicting the kinds, numbers, ratio and skills of workers that may be required for the purpose. The scope of AI and ML cannot be undermined by the capabilities of current systems.

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