SAS is storming SCSI, claims array maker
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LSI Logic goes SAS-only for SMB arrays Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) is fast taking over from parallel SCSI, claimed LSI Logic as it launched a range of SAS-only storage systems aimed at small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).â¦
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CEO Robert Conway reveals Array's edge for finding partners and cruising the competitive landscape.
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When the Hypersonic Missile Technology team at COLSA Corporation and the U.S. Army need to model hypersonic flight on a computer system, they&#146;ll no longer have to wait two months to get results. They now can use one of the world&#146;s largest and most powerful computers: a supercluster of 1,566 64-bit, dual-processor Apple Xserve G5 servers. [Sep 14]
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(InfoWorld) - As director of research at the SANS Institute, Alan Paller has a unique window from which to view the U.S. governmentâs efforts to secure its vast computer networks. An original member of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, Paller has had the ear of high-level White House officials.Â  Paller has also been a reliable critic of the governmentâs cybersecurity plans, which he says are ineffective and mired in bureaucracy. Last week, Paller was at it again, joining Eric Byres, Director of Industrial Cyber Security at Symantec to talk about cyberattacks on SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems that manage the nationâs critical infrastructure. Ahead of that event, Paller told InfoWorld Senior Editor Paul Roberts that SCADA hacks have already happened and that on the five-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. gets an âFâÂ  for protecting its computers from hackers, terrorist or otherwise. InfoWorld: Weâve been hearing about the threat of terrorist cyberattacks for years. Is the threat for real? Alan Paller: It is a real threat, but itâs an interesting threat. What you have happening today is that terrorists are using cybercrime to get the money to buy the bombs to blow people up. But theyâre not using cyberattacks against physical things. There have been two cases that are very secret where SCADA systems that run power plants were taken over, but the crime was about extortion -- you know, âIf you donât pay us weâre going to do something bad.âÂ  In some cases the guys have proven that they can do damage by running a test denial of service attack, or a test outage. IW: Conventional wisdom was that SCADA systems are too old and idiosyncratic to be easy targets. What has changed? AP: The difference is that companies have added Windows systems to replace unknown operating systems, and then connected them to their networks, which are connected to the Internet. GAO did a great report on this back in 2004. Most of the attacks we hear about arenât aimed at SCADA systems, theyâre aimed at corporate networks, but once youâre on the network you can get into these (SCADA) systems. IW: Why should enterprise IT people care about the security of SCADA systems? AP: The big shock to us was all the places where control systems are used. NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] did a study that found SCADA systems were common in the electric, water, oil and gas, chemical, pharmaceutical, pulp and paper, food and beverage, discrete manufacturing, durable goods, air and rail transportation, mining and metallurgy industries. So tell me whatâs not covered there. Almost anyone who works in a major industry has this stuff on their plate.Â  IW: Is there any evidence that foreign governments are privy to information on how to attack SCADA systems in the U.S.? AP: Well, you have the statement Gen. Lord gave that the military has lost terabytes of sensitive information to the Chinese government. [Editorâs Note: Maj. Gen. William Lord told GCN in August that âChina has downloaded 10 to 20TB of data from NIPRNet, the DoDâs Non-Classified IP Router Network.â] That was the first public âoopsâ that weâve heard. It was an admission at the highest level that weâve spent all this money and systematically the Chinese have been able to come in and steal this information. IW: Recently, an article in Foreign Affairs criticized the U.S. government for playing defense on cybersecurity and missing the way terrorists are using the Internet to organize and raise money. Is that fair? AP: Youâre giving [the government] too much credit for having an active defense. They donât have an active defense. What they have is a lot of reports that have been written. Just one consulting firm increased their staff writing (cybersecurity) reports from four people to 200 in the last five years. As one chief of staff told me, the best thing to do with those reports is to pile them in front of our buildings so the terrorists canât use a car bomb to get us. IW: If you had to give the U.S. government a grade on cybersecurity, what would it be? AP: It would have to be an F. I mean, if you canât secure the boxes that you have, that would have to be an F.
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Sasser&#39;s damage was extensive, affecting 18 million computers around the world ranging from millions of at home users to thousands of companies.
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The Motion Picture Association of America&#39;s war on piracy took an unexpected turn this week with a new lawsuit. This time, instead of targeting pirates directly the MPAA has sued two microchip makers, Sigma Designs, Inc.
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Save the caribou with disk Supermicro has a new line of 3U SAS storage systems its punting as "Earth-friendly" boxen. Which is fine. Everyone says that. But let's step back and consider that.â¦
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This article discusses the discovery of compromised machines in large enterprise environments, and offers some suggestions on correlating NIDS and HIPS logs to avoid false positives.
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(Source: Seagate)  This paper will help you better understand the significance of this inflection point, as well as the specific challenges presented by parallel SCSI and the corresponding advantages of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS).
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MySpace, AGs in deal over sex-offender data &gt;&gt; Advertisement &lt;&lt;  ALERT: "How A Hacker Launches A Blind SQL Injection Attack Step-by-Step"!" - White Paper  Blind SQL Injection can deliver total control of your server to a hacker giving them the ability to read, write and manipulate all data stored in your backend systems! Download this *FREE* white paper from SPI Dynamics for a complete guide to protection! https://download.spidynamics.com/1/ad/bsq.asp?Campaign_ID=701600000004c29
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iStor claims speed record for single-chip iSCSI controller An iSCSI developer said it has bucked the trend towards using standard servers to power storage appliances, instead using specialist chips that it designed itself.â¦
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SCO Group's faltering attack on Linux faces another threat as Big Blue files motion seeking dismissal of contract claims.
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Security researchers find a "highly critical" security flaw in Oracle's JInitiator ActiveX control.
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TechWeb - Rumors that Dell may be considering Advanced Micro Devices' server chips are again causing a stir.
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With new rankings due soon, SGI, IBM and others jostle for bragging rights. Also: Speedy Mac system gets speedier.
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The Linux adversary again demands evidence from Big Blue and cites allegedly contradictory testimony.
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The rise of customized malware is forcing security software vendors to change their tactics quickly and begin using customers' machines as their initial line of threat detection intelligence, according to a new report from Yankee Group.Echoing recent comments made by industry leaders like Symantec -- which is considering white-listing techniques, among many other emerging plans, to thwart the trend toward so-called server-side polymorphism -- Yankee Group Analyst Andrew Jaquith writes in a new research note that "herd intelligence" will be one of the most effective ways for vendors to detect and address increasingly customized threats.By turning their customers' endpoint devices into malware collectors that can funnel information about new attacks back into their global networks of threat sensors and scanning technologies, Jaquith said, security applications vendors may make faster progress in stemming the tide of lower profile, smaller volume threats.As malware authors have begun enlisting more malware toolkits and other technological means to create a greater number of attack variants than can be found and processed by honeypots and signature-based security software tools, the analyst said, it will become vital for vendors to aggregate threat data using customers' computers.Some smaller vendors, including ESET, Panda Security, Prevx, and Sana Security, have already begun working in such a fashion, turning their deployed endpoints into collectors.Larger vendors looking to add that type of technology to their pallets could seek to acquire one of those vendors, Sana in particular, to advance their plans more rapidly, Jaquith contends.The idea is simple, according to the analyst. If attackers are going to attempt to create different attacks for nearly every individual user, then security software vendors must use their customers' machines as their eyes and ears for discovering and addressing those variants.On the flip side, as the vendors amass information about new attacks, they can simultaneously help other customers determine whether new applications or Web sites are dangerous or safe to use, the analyst said."When an unknown binary attempts to execute, the client-side agent sends detailed telemetry information to a remote centralized server and asks whether it is good, bad, or unknown," said Jaquith. "The server makes a disposition decision based on all the collective history accumulated by the herd. By pooling information about all executing programs across its installed base, the herd makes smarter decisions and can confer immunity faster to new variants."As part of the effort, security vendors may also need to begin sharing more of that information with their rivals to create a larger network effect for thwarting malware on a global basis, according to the expert.It may be hard to convince rival vendors to work together because of the perception that it could lessen differentiation between their respective products and services, but if the process clearly aids on the process of quelling the rising tide of new malware strains, the software makers may have little choice other than to partner, he said."By turning every endpoint into a malware collector, the herd network effectively turns into a giant honeypot that can see more than existing monitoring networks," said Jaquith. "Scale enables the herd to counter malware authors' strategy of spraying huge volumes of unique malware samples with, in essence, an Internet-sized sensor network."Herd intelligence is not without its downsides However, despite the advantages of moving to a herd mentality model, the expert recognizes that there might be significant obstacles for vendors to overcome in making such a transition -- including the cost of shifting away form their existing malware signature creation and distribution methodology.Among the biggest issues for anti-malware vendors to consider is the issue of false positives as many legitimate or nefarious programs may be misclassified by one vendor or the other, and behavior detection-based tools will still be needed to keep an eye out for sites and applications that have been compromised.Customers may represent another hurdle, Jaquith said, as not all companies will initially be comfortable with sharing the necessary level of access with vendors, and some may fear that such a system could offer new opportunities for data loss. Prevx, for one, is already dealing with the issue of privacy by guaranteeing that the only information being sent over its pipelines from customer PCs is related to executable files.An even larger problem could be the "data glut" generated by the herd anti-malware networks."Telemetric data provided by herd endpoints will be substantial," said Jaquith. "Anti-malware vendors will need to spend significant millions of dollars of capital to create scalable infrastructures to collect, process, and store data furnished by endpoints."The white lists of legitimate applications maintained by anti-virus vendors will also need to be updated frequently to address the release of approved programs and patches, a process that will require even additional levels of cooperation between many different types of software makers, he said.Along similar lines, Symantec researchers recently detailed a new program through which they are gathering detailed information about software applications installed onto the computers of customers using its desktop anti-malware suite.Using an opt-out participation model, the experiment studies the behavior and distribution details of individual programs to help make recommendations to users about which programs they decide to install or avoid."Right now, this is just a long-term research project, but we hope that as we get more users involved in the system, we can truly get a better idea of what is on people's computers so that we can identify malicious software based on the demographics of who is using it versus what it does," said Carey Nachenberg, a senior member of Symantec's Security Research team."We're hoping to get more clarity through the large base of users we have," he said. "By collecting this data, we should be able to get the most comprehensive view of the usage patterns to derive reputation information for everything they use."