U.S. Cyber Command - Some Deep Background

It is not common knowledge, but we began discussing the need for a cyber command in the mid-1990s; but it was the Langley Cyber Attack in 1997 that started the momentum toward making a future cyber command a reality.   I don’t want to rehash well-documented historical events in this post.  Instead, I will focus [...]

U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOMM)

As someone who, as a consultant, proposed a Cyber Command for the USAF over a decade ago, it is good to see the DOD moving in that direction with the proposed US Cyber Command.    Cyberspace is a critical operational dimension. I first referred to this in a 1997 MILCOM paper co-authored with Lt. Col. [...]

A Hidden Danger in Cloud Computing

Back in the days when I was happily spending time on the operations floor in computing centers, we always observed that the greatest security threats to our systems were well-intended operators who make simple mistakes.  No hacker or criminal ever brought down a network like the bored network guy on the late shift who decided [...]

Creative E-Trade and Similar Salami Scams - Ignorance is Bliss

Here is one of my favorite news stories of the week, Guilty Plea for Man Behind Creative E-Trade Scam.
In this funny story, Michael Largent, 23, of Plumas Lake, CA, wrote a simple  Internet script that opened more than 58,000 online accounts at places like E-trade and Schwab.   Largent used fake names to automatically open [...]

The Promises and Perils of Twitter

One year ago I penned Event Processing in Twitter Space, and today parts of the net are buzzing about Twitter.
In a nutshell, Twitter is a one-to-many communications service that uses short messages (140 chars or less). Following on the heels of the blogging phenomena, Twitter has been primarily used for microblogging and group communications.
Twitter, and [...]

Real CEP News: Amazon Announces Elastic MapReduce

Yesterday Amazon announced the public beta of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a web-based service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data.  Amazon Elastic MapReduce utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage [...]

A Review of Zabbix - Zabbix Rules! (Part 2)

In A Review of Zabbix - Zabbix Rules! (Part 1) we provided a brief introduction to Zabbix in the context of network and security management.  In this post I will discuss Zabbix as an event processing platform.
Zabbix is like most event processing platforms.  Zabbix provides both agent-initiated events as well as server-requested events.  [...]

A Review of Zabbix - Zabbix Rules! (Part 1)

It was 1992, the Internet was still an uncertain “dream technology” by scientists, and I was working at SprintLink.   My role was the lead systems engineer to set up the network and security management center for SprintLink and Managed Router Network (MRN) team.
We used HP Open View Network Node Manager (NNM) for our core network [...]

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