Cisco UCS Automation Series, Part I – Getting Started with UCS PowerTool

You WANT to Automate! But Where to Start?

You want to automate but not sure where to start or what tools to use or even what processes can be automated and if the thing you want to automate is even automatable. Does it offer an API? If it does, is there an SDK? Are there samples of what can be done? What has been done? How much can be done? A lot of questions typically bog down the process, mire you in indecision and eventually you give up!

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Thank You Cisco ISR G2 2900 and 3900 Series Routers

Over the past 9 years, the Integrated Services Router (ISR) G2 router portfolio has helped tens of thousands of Enterprise and Service Provider customers build, secure, grow, and transform their businesses. It has been the most successful router product line in the history of branch networking.

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Introducing executive dashboards in CTA

No security risk assessment is complete without the executive summary section. Something that can answer the high level questions security teams get asked including “how secure are we?”, “what threats are affecting our network today?” and “how healthy is our network?” We have recently revamped the Cognitive Threat Analytics dashboard to provide answers to these questions and more.

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Malware stealing gigabytes of your data as seen by Cognitive Threat Analytics

Overview

Recently, about 50 users across 20 companies were alarmed by the Cisco Cognitive Threat Analytics (CTA) about a malware that exfiltrates gigabytes of data from their computers. An example of such CTA detection:

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Cisco & MapR set a Software Defined Storage World Record

66 years in the making!

It sounds like a long time, but first we had to wait for a few milestones to precede us:

◈ 1951 – UNIVAC pioneers use of magnetic tape for storage
◈ 1993 – Severe Tire Damage is the first band to live stream
◈ 2007 – Netflix launches their streaming media business

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Analyzing Network Traffic with Encrypted Traffic Analytics

Today, knowing who is using your network is table stakes. What’s essential is knowing how the network is being accessed, what applications are being used, when they are used and most importantly, whether or not those applications are safe enough and compliant with your organization’s policies.

Independent testing company Miercom recently carried out a comprehensive set of tests to evaluate traffic analysis capabilities of Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture & Huawei’s Agile Solution along with a few other test areas.

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Cognitive Research: Learning Detectors of Malicious Network Traffic

Malware is constantly evolving and changing. One way to identify malware is by analyzing the communication that the malware performs on the network. Using machine learning, these traffic patterns can be utilized to identify malicious software. Machine learning faces two obstacles: obtaining a sufficient training set of malicious and normal traffic and retraining the system as malware evolves. This post will analyze an approach that overcomes these obstacles by developing a detector that utilizes domains (easily obtained from domain black lists, security reports, and sandboxing analysis) to train the system which can then be used to analyze more detailed proxy logs using statistical and machine learning techniques.

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