Sep 082014
 

Guest post by Sophie Davidson

Modern day criminals are no longer entering banks with ski masks and pistols. Today’s felons are moving into cyberspace to accomplish their nefarious goals.

Remember the old adage, “a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime”? It turns out this maxim holds a lot of weight with regards to DDoS cybercrime.

Double DDoS

Recent research from BT revealed that about 41% of online businesses surveyed were victims of DDoS in the last 12 months. The more notable findings of the research showed that, of those attacked, over 78 percent were subsequently hit a second time shortly thereafter.

Distributed Denial of Service attacks or DDoS encompass a large variety of cyber threats designed to overwhelm a target’s server, or jam up their network. By disrupting a target’s resources, the hackers succeed in preventing normal traffic (such as users or customers) from passing through.

The effects of these attacks are potentially devastating. After being hit by a strong attack, it takes on average at least 12 hours to offer full service back to users.

What can happen in 12 hours? This sort of disruption could mean losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. Or, perhaps worse, the trust between the user and the online business, built up over months or years, could be lost in a matter of minutes.
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Aug 212012
 

This is an article of mine, first published on Wazi

Every organization must monitor its infrastructure’s uptime and performance. While the popular Nagios application is a good general-purpose monitoring program that you can extend with plugins to handle just about any task, you may do even better by employing Cacti as a graphical front end to RRDTool‘s data logging and graphing functionality. Cacti was developed specifically to monitor and collect performance information, while Nagios is more oriented toward state changes, such as noting whether a daemon is up or down.

RRDTool stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. Cacti provides templates to gather and show information such as system load (CPU, RAM, disks), users connected, MySQL load, and Apache load, all of which can affect the performance of your site.

Cacti’s front end is completely PHP-driven. It supports data gathering via different methods such as scripts in any language and SNMP.

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Apr 152012
 

Monitoring how much bandwidth is used is a fundamental task to check the status of your servers, or just your desktop, so i always test new tools to see if i find something good. This is the third article of this series and in this one i’ll take a look at Bmon, speedometer and Nload.

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More Fun with Wireshark Filters

This is an article of mine, first published on Wazi You can read the first part here In this article we’ll see how apply BPF filters to wireshark to show the details of an HTTP session, an e-mail session and how to monitor who is visiting a certain site from our local network. Finally I […]

Manage your bandwidth with Trickle

Sometimes it’s useful to limit the bandwidth used by some of your programs, perhaps you want to limit your Browser or FTP client, and they dont’ have a native way to limit the input and/or output bandwidth they are using, there is a small application that can solve this problem for you: Trickle trickle is […]