Weekend Reads 032720

In this blog, the first of a new series on uCPE, I take a look at why communications services providers and enterprises should invest in uCPE-based services and the business opportunities these are already bringing to the early adopters. —Simon Stanley

Shadowserver provides free daily live feeds of information about systems that are either infected with bot malware or are in danger of being infected to more than 4,600 ISPs and to 107 national computer emergency response teams (CERTs) in 136 countries. In addition, it has aided the FBI and other nations’ federal law enforcement officials in “sinkholing” domain names used to control the operations of far-flung malware empires. —Krebs on Security

The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that due to the coronavirus outbreak, it’s waiving the familiar 3.4-ounce limit for liquids and gels—for hand sanitizer only.* You may now bring a bottle of Purell as large as 12 ounces onto the plane to assist in your constant sanitizing of yourself, your family, your seat, your bag of peanuts, and everything else. All other liquids and gels, however, are still restricted to 3.4 ounces. —Dan Kois

The most important finding is that the average data consumed by households grow by 27% from 2018 to 2019 – in the fourth quarter of 2019 the average US home used 344 gigabytes of data, up from 275 gigabytes a year earlier. —Doug Dawson

This post starts by discussing the Internet connection from the AWS VPC Control Plane operation perspective. The public AWS documentation only describes the basic components, such as an Internet Gateway (IGW) and a subnet specific Implicit Routers. —Toni Pasanen

Remote work is here to stay. The coronavirus crisis is making companies and employees increasingly more comfortable about working from home or out of the office. —Alexandre Lazarow

Many U.S. government Web sites now carry a message prominently at the top of their home pages meant to help visitors better distinguish between official U.S. government properties and phishing pages. Unfortunately, part of that message is misleading and may help perpetuate a popular misunderstanding about Web site security and trust that phishers have been exploiting for years now. —Krebs on Security

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks remain a popular attack vector but have undergone changes as cybercriminals shift their strategies. Today’s attackers are turning to mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to diversify and strengthen their DDoS campaigns, research shows. —Kelly Sheridan

Following our initial blog on the subject of Internet sites and domains seeking to profit from the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis, we dug deeper into the topic. Appdetex looked at keywords within domain names, website content, social media handles and marketplace listings that would likely be related to the coronavirus outbreak.

It’s easy to think of urban cable systems as up-to-date and high tech and ready and able to deliver fast broadband speeds. While this is true in some cities and in some neighborhoods, the dirty secret of the cable industry is that their networks are not all up to snuff. Everybody is aware of the aging problems that have plagued the telephone copper network – but it’s rare to hear somebody talking about the aging of the cable company copper networks. —Doug Dawson

This last might be a little controversial, but the point is the way you handle data has real-world consequences. We often want to “sanitize” the work we do by disconnecting it from the consequences, but you cannot.

Note: Henk has pointed out that since the original article was posted, Neil Ferguson has “clarified” the comments discussed in the article below. Rather than taking the link down, however, I’ve included this note here—because the original point was not whether he anyone was right or wrong, only that caution is in order when dealing with these things. This article also points out a few of the issues in dealing with data of this kind—again, the point is to remember we should have some humility when we are doing things that impact real lives.

British scientist Neil Ferguson ignited the world’s drastic response to the novel Wuhan coronavirus when he published the bombshell report predicting 2.2 million Americans and more than half a million Brits would be killed. After both the U.S. and U.K. governments effectively shut down their citizens and economies, Ferguson is walking back his doomsday scenarios. —Madeline Osburn