War tests Ukrainian telecom, internet resilience

One year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country’s overall resilience and defiance has been inspiring, but telecommunications and internet connectivity has grown much more difficult.Initially the country’s internet network mostly withstood with some outages and slowdowns, but that has changed over time as the aggressors devote more effort in destroying physical locations and deploying malware and other cybersecurity weapons.For example, researchers at Top10VPN recently reported some distressing analysis including:To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Government-imposed internet shutdowns impacted 1.9 billion people in first half of 2022

Internet shutdowns by governments across the world impacted 1.89 billion citizens globally in the first half of 2022, a 22% increase when compared with the second half of 2021.A recent report compiled by VPN service provider Surfshark found there were 66 state-mandated internet blackouts imposed across six countries and territories during the period: Burkina Faso, India, Jammu and Kashmir, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and Sudan. Local shutdowns were observed in India, Jammu and Kashmir region, and Pakistan, while Burkina Faso, Kazakhstan, and Sudan chose to cut down internet connections nationwide.While there was an overall decrease in the number of internet shutdowns during the period—72 cases in the first half of 2022 compared with 84 reported in the second half of 2021—the number of people impacted was much higher, as reliance on the internet has increased globally.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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FCC looks into BGP vulnerabilities, in light of Russian hacking threat

The FCC is launching an inquiry into security issues surrounding the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a widely used standard used to manage interconnectivity between large portions of the Internet.The move, announced Monday, was issued in response to “Russia’s escalating actions inside of Ukraine,” according to the commission’s notice of inquiry.BGP is, in essence, a method of ensuring that independently managed networks that make up the global internet are able to communicate with one another. Its initial design, which the FCC said is still in widespread use today, does not contain important security features, meaning that, simply by misconfiguring its own BGP information, a bad actor could potentially redirect Internet traffic wherever it sees fit. This could let that attacker send incorrect information to its targets, read and compromise login credentials, or simply shut down whichever kinds of traffic it wishes.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Gartner: 8 security trends facing the enterprise

As organizations become less centralized they face new security challenges that require new ways of addressing threats that will change the basic fabric of network security, according to Gartner analysts.A persistent challenge adapting to these changes is the skills gap–finding IT pros with the technical know-how to meet evolving security issues, Peter Firstbrook, Gartner vice president and anayst told attendees at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2021 Americas.Gartner: IT skills shortage hobbles cloud, edge, automation growth
“Cybersecurity teams are being asked to secure countless forms of digital transformation and other new technologies, and if they don’t have those skilled practitioners they move toward managed or cloud-delivered services where they might not have as much control as they’d like,” Firstbrook said.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Don’t let subdomains sink your security

If your enterprise has a website (and one certainly would hope so in 2021!), it also has subdomains. These prefixes of your organization’s main domain name are essential for putting structural order to the content and services on your website, thus preventing online visitors from instantly fleeing in terror, disdain, or confusion.Large enterprises can have thousands of subdomains. IBM, for example, has roughly 60,000 subdomains, while Walmart.com has “only” 2,132 subdomains.What is DNS and how it works
Whatever value subdomains bring to enterprises–and they bring plenty–they present more targets for bad actors. Why, just last year the subdomains of Chevron, 3M, Warner Brothers, Honeywell, and many other large organizations were hijacked by hackers who redirected visitors to sites featuring porn, malware, online gambling, and other activities of questionable propriety.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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Fortinet CEO: Network and security technologies give rise to security-driven networking

The network and security industries both continue to evolve at a rate never seen before.  Historically, security and network operation teams have worked in parallel with one another, sometimes being at odds with each other’s goals.However, that is changing as businesses rely on their networks to operate. It’s fair to say that today, for many companies, the network is the business. As this happens, network and security technologies need to be more closely aligned giving rise to the concept of security-driven networking.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
In this post, ZK Research had a chance to sit down with the co-founder and CEO of Fortinet Ken Xie to discuss the future of networking and security. To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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How SD-Branch addresses today’s network security concerns

Secure software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has become one of the hottest new technologies, with some reports claiming that 85% of companies are actively considering SD-WAN to improve cloud-based application performance, replace expensive and inflexible fixed WAN connections, and increase security.But now the industry is shifting to software-defined branch (SD-Branch), which is broader than SD-WAN but introduced several new things for organizations to consider, including better security for new digital technologies. To understand what’s required in this new solution set, I recently sat down with John Maddison, Fortinet’s executive vice president of products and solutions.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

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