Have hackers now become industrialised, to the extent that they now represent an exponentially increased threat to not only individuals and business, but Government and worryingly the education sector as well?

That’s the striking conclusion of a new report from data security specialists Imperva. It even goes as far as comparing the emerging industrialization of hacking to the way in which the 19th century Industrial Revolution advanced methods and accelerated assembly from single to mass production. “The result” Imperva warns “is that today’s cybercrime industry has transformed and automated itself to improve efficiency, scalability and profitability”.

The ‘Industrialization of Hacking’ report has uncovered a plot to infect educational servers worldwide with Viagra ads that download malware to the victim when they visit the infected pages, hosted on otherwise legitimate educational sites.

This is just one example of the increasingly industrialised methodology being implemented by hackers to automate an as yet unreported search engine manipulation scheme which has already infected hundreds, and quite possibly thousands, of .edu and .ac.uk servers with these infected Viagra ads.

“This attack on academic institutions highlights how hacking has become industrialized infecting servers from major institutions including UC Berkeley, Ohio State, University of Oxford and more” explained Imperva CTO Amichai Shulman, who continued “ironically, this technique is the most prevalent method used to create havoc in cyberspace, yet remains virtually unknown to the general public”.

It would appear that over the years there has emerged a clear definition of roles and responsibilities within the hacking community. Think of these as developing to the point where they provide a supply chain resembling, in many ways, a drug cartel.

Indeed, you can see a division of labour within this highly industrialised hacking community that encompasses researchers, farmers and dealers. The researcher looks for vulnerabilities in applications and frameworks, selling what they discover to criminal groups and turning a profit in the process. Farmers, on the other hand, are primarily responsible for maintaining and increasing a botnet presence through the medium of mass infection, again looking to carve a profit and often working on a per infected zombie basis. Which just leaves the dealers who, just like their drug cartel counterparts, are tasked with the distribution of the end product, in this case a malicious payload, and who also earn their keep on a commission only basis. Everyone makes some money, the criminals running the gangs make a big one of course.

If these guys are, indeed, making educational servers a target now then it’s a worrying move and one which is likely to cause a headache for network admins across campus on a global basis.

Let us know here at IT Pro if you have seen an increase in malicious activity within your academic domain, and what you have been doing to combat it.

OK, I admit that it doesn’t have quite the same immediate appeal as a fat man eating more sausage rolls in a minute than I could manage in a month, or a bunch of lithe students squeezing into a very small car. However, as record breakers go it’s still a pretty interesting one if you are a network tech professional.

Huawei informs me that it has set a new data record for a downlink dual carrier test for Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution (EDGE) of 564Kb/s. To put that in some kind of sausage roll eating perspective, 564Kb/s is twice as fast as existing EDGE networks and could mean that 2G users could soon see 3G services such as live video over their GSM networks.

The Huawei EDGE+ technology has, I am informed, been able to lower network latency at the same time as increasing data rates and delivering improved quality of service. What does that mean? well, it means that it becomes possible for mobile phones to receive real-time streaming media from the Internet with lower latency. Nice. The fact that network operators are able to migrate from EDGE to EDGE+ by way of relatively straightforward, and therefore very cost effective, software updates is also worthy of note. What does that mean? Well, that means the costs to the user are unlikely to be prohibitive. Nicer!

There’s no mention of how networks will cope with the increased demand that such services would bring, of course. I suspect not very well if the built-for-purpose ones such as the O2 3G network can fail so spectacularly with delivering iPhone data traffic for example.

Huawei spokesperson He Gang says “this milestone demonstrates Huawei’s continued commitment towards driving GSM evolution, the world’s most widely deployed technical standard with the largest mobile subscriber base. Huawei’s advanced EDGE+ technology enhances flexibility for operators building their 3G networks and provides a seamless high-speed data service experience”.

Usually the kind of crystal ball rubbing industry predictions that start arriving at this time of year are fairly upbeat affairs. Not so when it comes to the batch announced at the telecoms and media Industry Outlook event in London which, to be honest, were pretty depressing on the whole.

Heck, you know it’s not going to be a fun ride when the press release includes in the strap line “2010: a year of slow recovery” and mentions “cost control” in the same breath.

The organisers of the annual Industry Outlook event, Informa Telecom & Media, and specifically the Chief Research Officer Mark Newman who, speaking at the event, insisted that it had “selected the most compelling and critical predictions from across all our research areas”. Mark if these are the most compelling then I recommend anyone working in these sectors put up the barricades, make sure they have enough tins of baked beans to last a year, and take 2010 off.

If you are feeling just a little too happy for a freezing cold, grey and dismally wet Sunday lunchtime, read on and prepare to be brought back down to a suitably depressing level.

Let’s start with: Mobile LTE commercial launches will slip to 2013/2014 but LTE’s role as a provider of rural broadband connectivity will gain momentum. Apparently, 2010 will be a “year of further LTE trials” but “progress towards commercial services is likely to be slow”.

Or how about: Operator app stores will struggle to compete with handset-manufacturer initiatives. Informa predicts that operators will be “unable in most cases to compete with Apple and other vendors in global reach, brand coolness and agility”.

This one is a bundle of joy as well: Mobile operators will make small steps towards a de facto functional separation in order to position themselves to address the demand for 3rd party connected devices and applications. The use of the words ’small steps’ in a prediction is always a giveaway that things are not good, as they are often used in place of phrases such as ‘going down the pan’ or ‘missing the boat’ in my experience. Informa says that unless operators “give full autonomy to wholesale units, we believe they will be too slow to succeed in shifting internal mindsets”.

I also liked: Fixed broadband operators will experiment with new business models in a bid to end the “arms race” of increasing speeds and declining prices. As Informa notes, operators have to address the need to grow revenues in saturated markets, pointing out that a major effect of declining prices and increasing bandwidth has been “the emergence of mass markets for the consumption of on-line video and music, which other players are now better placed to profit from”.

There was some good news in the predictions though, such as the continued importance of widgets in harnessing the power of the mobile web, open Internet apps being embraced by IPTV operators and an extension of coverage and reduction of costs through network sharing and outsourcing being on the cards.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and cheer myself up by reading some Kafka while listening to Radiohead…

With apologies to The Eagles:

Cisco stood in the doorway; I heard the marketing yell
And I was thinking to myself, this could be heaven or this could be hell

Now that Cisco Systems has landed with both feet firmly in the server business with the launch of its Project California ‘Unified Computing System’ the big question is will it rock the competition?

Certainly the whole point is to try and top the data centre charts with a mix of networking and virtualisation beats that Cisco hopes will worry the likes of old rockers IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Talk by Cisco CEO of “25 percent or more of the data centre market” might, however, be a little premature.

Not that there is anything inherently wrong with the UCS concept, which brings together both Ethernet networks and Fibre Channel storage with a single 10 Gbit/s FCoE link and so reduces cards and cabling while embedding a VMWare co-developed virtualisation module for server hopping fun in the switch.

Tim Stammers, a senior analyst at Ovum, reckons that Cisco’s move could “signal a milestone in the convergence of computing and networking.” According to Stammers businesses will want to buy their unified management systems from one supplier rather than stitching it together from multiple sources, which puts Cisco in a strong position. “Alongside the servers” Stammers explains “Cisco is also promising networking gear that it says will simplify connections to racks of virtualised blade servers.” Which could, in effect, mean Cisco server blades in the Nexus switch, eliminating complex I/O protocols between server application and network transport layers.

The small matter of competition is also something that Cisco might not need ne as worried about as some, generally speaking the competition itself it has to be said, are claiming. After all,
Cisco is already in competition with HP and IBM on the networking front. While HP has a small share of the high-end data centre networking market (Procurve switches) and IBM partners with Juniper, Cisco pretty much owns the data centre network side of things. “That” Stammers insists “highlights Cisco’s huge strength in a coming unified market.”

Of course, the question remains as to whether a networking giant such as Cisco can become a systems management player? But then again, on the flipside, server and systems suppliers need to become networking management specialists in order to survive in this new space.

There will be an avenue of opportunity as the Cisco market stalls, waiting for industry standards ratification for the FCoE protocol, but that is expected to close by the start of the summer. Which happily coincides with the scheduled release dates for the new Cisco blade server family of course.

As The Eagles sang: “They gathered for the feast, They stab it with their steely knives, But they just can’t kill the beast.” Which just might sum up the problems IBM and HP face in dealing with Cisco over the coming year.

It appears that a professional penetration tester with some 17 years experience in the job has managed to hack his way through from an unnamed civilian government agency network right into the heart of a not at all civilian FBI crime database in less than six hours from start to finish.

The report reveals how the security consultant at PatchAdvisor was able to uncover unpatched vulnerabilities within the government agency web server and network during a routine and otherwise harmless scan. This kick started a chain of events that began with grabbing logins being reused on a number of enterprise systems which then became open to inspection, and in turn revealed unsecured account details to provide the pen tester with Windows domain admin privileges. As anyone who has the slightest experience on either side of the hacking fence will recognise, this has become a classic case of an escalation-of-privileges exploit.

So it should come as no surprise that it led to the ability to access a police workstation on-site, nor that in turn this led to the pen tester being able to install monitoring software upon it to discover applications connecting to the FBI National Crime Information Center database. If he had so wished, and it seems he did not, then the next step would have been installing a keylogger to grab the logins required to access it.

I guess the moral of this tale comes down to the obvious and oft repeated mantra of no matter how solid the security further up the food chain (in this case that FBI database) if the small fish are allowed to swim freely around at the bottom of the tank then eventually some shark is going to come along and gobble up everything. Patch management coupled with sensible firewalling of that police network could surely have prevented what has become something of an embarrassing as well as potentially serious, in the face of the ongoing war on terror, security slip up.

Virgin Media, together with Nortel and Juniper Networks, has successfully conducted a North-South 40G trial over a live commercial network covering 217 miles of the current 10G network infrastructure. As far as I am aware this is the first time such a trial has been attempted in the UK, certainly the first to be successful or I am pretty damn sure the PR companies would have been shouting about it given the competition in the domestic broadband market right now.

It all took place, so I am reliably informed, late in April and involved carrying live 40Gbps wavelength traffic across that 350km optical network span using Nortel core optical kit and Juniper Networks T-series core routers with 40Gbps interfaces. By deploying 40Gbps technology in this way, Virgin was able to increase the performance of both IP/MPLS and optical networks as well as, obviously, the overall capacity. Perhaps most importantly, however, it showed that Virgin Media is up providing a dynamic 40G wavelength service over the entire length of its Nortel supplied Common Photonic Layer: that’s 2500km nationwide to be precise.

The April trial itself happened between the Manchester and London PoPs where the Juniper Networks high-performance T-series core routers are located. It is the first time that 40Gbps transport has happened over a commercial network carrying live traffic over the 40G wavelengths in the UK without any regeneration, external dispersion compensation or costly Raman amplification by using the Nortel 40G Adaptive Optical Engine WDM transponder technology. This allows those 40Gbps wavelengths to be deployed “immediately” and in conjunction with the fact that the existing Juniper T-series router cores can be upgraded to 40G ports means that, hopefully, more effective deployments of next generation services can be achieved for a relatively low incremental investment.

“Our aim for this trial was to ensure we continue to meet the growing capacity needs of the high-speed services we deliver and provide a quality experience for Virgin Media customers,” said Daniel Hennessy, director of Technical Architecture, Virgin Media. “Our strategic suppliers have demonstrated very clearly how existing network assets can be scaled to meet the growth in demand associated with evolving customer behavior and step changes in the products provided as part of our high-speed broadband proposition. Our optical network will provide a solid foundation for growth as it takes advantage of technology designed to avoid electrical regeneration and where possible reduce the incremental cost of scaling transport capacity.”

Which just leaves me to ask the question: so when will a Virgin Media 50Mb service be available in my South Yorkshire village? Actually, when will any Virgin Media cable be available in my village? Never, oh, I see. Still, the thought was nice while it lasted…