A supply chain attack is a cyberattack that targets less secure elements of an organization, be it their third-party API integrations, remote manufacturing facilities, and specifically, weak networks and systems. The term “supply chain” often elicits thoughts of manufacturing processes and logistics, or the process of getting goods such as groceries from the farmer’s fields to the shelves of a grocery store. In cybersecurity, the supply chain refers to all of the above and more, including hardware and software that ends up in the hands of consumers, businesses, and governments.
Internet communication would not be possible without the Domain Name System (DNS). For humans to interact with computers, there is a need for a translator that can translate human readable addresses into addresses that a computer can understand and act upon. Thus, DNS is used to translate computer readable binary into and from human readable IP addresses. DNS takes the process a step further by having records associating IP addresses to their respective common language addresses.
About a week ago, Sean Flynn, a contributing writer for Deal News, wrote a short article with the title What is a Mesh WiFi Network?. The article is definitely short, and slightly inaccurate in its definition of extended WiFi networks, and wholly misleading on the context of mesh WiFi networks. To ensure folks understand the differences between the two and why both exist, let’s define what each of these are, their pros and cons, and in what environments they are suited for.
Here’s a scenario:
You’ve just received a request from the development team that the testing virtual machine (VM) needs to “move” to the production environment network immediately to support faster deployment of tested and approved applications and updates. No big deal right? It’s a simple process of changing the VM’s IP configuration, updating some firewall rules in the data center, updating the local network, and do it all in the time the development team allotted during business hours.
We use networks everyday, whether we are posting something on Facebook or Twitter from our mobile phones, catching up on the latest news in an online magazine, or binge watching our favorite shows on Netflix or Hulu. Networks are incredibly complex, yet for those in the know, they are all at once beautiful, intuitive, and a pain to manage, monitor, and protect. Networks serve as the backbone of every business, organization, government, school, and home.
On March 14th, Facebook, and another of their platforms, Instagram, were reportedly down due to some kind of outage. According to Kate O’Flaherty, a freelance cybersecurity journalist, in an article written for Forbes, yesterday’s outage was the worst since 2008. There was speculation that Facebook had become a victim of a cyber attack, a DDoS attack, which would not be altogether surprising given the amount of flak they have received for data breaches and security issues over the last 18 months or more.