Citibank announced that over 200,000 customer bank account information records were stolen in the latest round of cyber-attacks to hit multinational corporations. Citibank is one of the Largest of the US banks and the breach is embarrassing, however identifying the cause of the breach and sealing any vulnerability is more important, as is protecting and notifying the affected customers.

Early indications are that the breach is being played down by Citigroup. At the moment the bank claims only 200,000 customers are affected, however reports from overseas where the bank conducts major operations are claiming that as many as 21 million US card holders could be affected.

Whatever the truth behind the competing claims, one thing is certain – network security is more important than ever. Networks are increasingly porous, in that they are being accessed at increasing points around the “hard shell” of the traditional network security model. Instead of one major gateway where security muscle is deployed, we now see multiple mobile devices, connecting to the network, exchanging data and decoupling to go elsewhere. Customers transact business from Smartphones, business partners share databases and portable storage devices are everywhere.

Stealing customer information should not be easy, but the traditional network security model is now outdated. Businesses must assess their security needs in the current light of how networks are being used and where the emerging threats are coming from. It is of little use to deploy state-of-the-art detection and prevention solutions at the gateway only for someone with a USB stick to plug into a machine and download customer information or other sensitive data. Security demands that a holistic approach is undertaken to ensure that security protocols are implemented throughout the network and the business organization. This means only allowing those authorized to have access to data being controlled in how they access it, and also what they do with it while they are working on the network, or indeed offline.

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We’re seeing an increase in malware hitting the networks and users, both business and individual customers at the moment. A major issue is that despite the increasing complexity of the systems and networks we are using, malware itself can be frighteningly simple, and yet so very effective. A good example of what we mean are the recent BitB attacks (BitB stands for “Boy in the Browser”), which are a simplified version of the MitB attacks (Man in the Browser).

BitB is a trojan which adds a single line of code to the hosts file on your machine. Adding this single line of code means when you type in a web address you are rerouted to another web address, which is made up to mimic the one you think are visiting. This is seen when attacking a user to obtain their banking information for instance. A big problem is that unless you know what you are looking for (i.e. you know how to interpret the hosts file) you will not have a clue until the money is gone from your account.

Some good news however, as both Google and Facebook have decided to “man up” to their security responsibilities. Facebook has commenced deployment of a fully secure https connection, even over a wireless network. Firesheep was an attack which opened Facebook accounts with ease, providing they were being used over a wireless network. As a result of the improved https service, Firesheep has bitten the dust.

Google has been beefing up security too, having already introduced https security for Gmail accounts as a default. Now Gmail users are finding they are being asked to verify themselves using two-way authentication – when you sign up for the service, you must give a cell phone number to receive an automated call or text message with the authentication code to gain access.

This post is brought to you by PlanitTech.com

WAN optimization is a frequently cited solution for making effective use of bandwidth resources and opening the door to the deployment of much more productive business solutions such as VOIP. Theer are two major arguments used against WAN optimization, however neither stands up to close scrutiny when the options are put on the table.

The first argument against WAN optimization is formed from “do nothing” – this is a resistant, “carry on as we are” mentality. Many IT managers already understand that bandwidth availability is a major constraining factor on business operations which rely on the network. The trend is for users and businesses, not just the client business but those it is working with, to utilize ever greater bandwidth hungry applications and network traffic is also increasing as networks become more porous. Customers expect access to their data and applications on the company network, business partners want to integrate their systems with yours and the result is that there is more and more traffic being generated.

Something has to give, and in such instances it is usually a question of either make better use of what you have or buy more bandwidth.

Buying more bandwidth is expensive, and it is also not efficient in terms of making the most of what you have. From a business productivity and financial efficiency viewpoint, simply buying more bandwidth is not really effective, nor is it positioning the business to take advantage of the growing rise of bandwidth hungry business productivity solutions available, such as VOIP.

WAN optimization is able to address both the commercial and IT imperatives. Though there is usually a need for an additional appliance, for instance to accelerate traffic or to allow for effective load-balancing, the bulk of the process involves reviewing network traffic and processes to remove redundancy. In some instances as much as 90% of network traffic can be eliminated by a combination of removing superfluous network traffic or by utilizing local storage procedures to handle network-wide downloads better. The result is a reduced bandwidth requirement and the ability to improve network performance with an exceptionally short payback period (typically less than a year).

Moving desktops to a virtualized environment presents several challenges, not least “Boot Storming”, however there are significant benefits to be gained from following through.  There is also the challenge of handling storage allocation in a virtualized environment, with users no longer relying on applications and data being stored on local machines, but instead being accessed from a centralized storage center.

Boot Storms occur when large numbers of users start logging onto machines at the same time. This is similar to peak-time traffic jams occurring during commuter hours in the morning and evenings. Network and storage resources can rapidly become overloaded and fail unless steps are taken to manage mass start-ups, and the key is to be found in thin provisioning of resources at the client-side.

By “rationing” resources on the client-side, this will leave spare storage capacity at the server farm and allow for dynamic allocation of resources as they are required. Dynamic allocation is essential if all users are to enjoy a seamless experience in a virtualized environment, however there is also the issue of managing network resource allocation for other network operations in addition to user demands. Having spare storage allocation is also required because it is very, very difficult to estimate storage allocations amongst a large number of individual desktop users (unless a granular survey is carried out which will be time consuming and highly expensive).

Managing the master images is also essential to render virtual desktops to the users. However, at the same time it is important to reduce duplication as much as possible to ensure server side resources are conserved effectively and the virtualization implementation is able to proceed on a cost effective basis.

Moving desktop users to a virtualized does carry significant benefits for the client. Support and security updating costs are dramatically reduced because IT management and resources only need to be deployed at the data center rather than be applied disparately across the business. Updates and security solution deployments can all be managed centrally as well and downloaded to individual client machines. In addition, running user support is cheaper because again, rather than an individual tech visit to a client machine, the problem will reside in the server-side.

IT infrastructure is more than a mission-critical asset; it is a business-critical asset. Without the IT infrastructure a business has in place today, it is highly doubtful whether many companies could survive for more than a day or two if anything happened to that asset. Many management executives confuse mission-critical for business-critical – the two concepts are not the same – mission-critical resources will impact upon a particular business segment or activity, but losing a mission-critical asset does not mean the loss of the business. Losing a business-critical asset means a very real and very high risk of losing the business itself.

In this light, IT infrastructure is as valuable and necessary to a business as its premises or staff.

Yet IT infrastructure is usually relegated to a subsidiary role in business planning, without true consideration of the contribution to the overall risk profile of the business. In addition, IT assets are typically added in a reactive manner, such that the overall IT infrastructure becomes a patchwork of added components, workarounds and disparate systems. This significantly increases the risk of failure of the infrastructure and multiplies the headaches for staff tasked with managing them.

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A recent survey by Afcom of IT managers and decision makers has been published this month. Afcom is a leading data center professionals association and issued a survey on IT trends and practices. The survey shows that of the members who responded to the survey, 15% responded that they have no business continuity plans in operation and a startling 40% had no security policy in situ to handle mobile application and online security threats.

Unfortunately, this is a situation which is seen repeatedly across the country, across almost every business sector and underpins the exposure many businesses have to online-launched security threats.

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The foundation of Sentara’s industry-leading healthcare network is an electronic medical records (EMR) system from Epic Systems that integrates information originating from a multitude of sites, users, applications, and compute platforms. To support hosts based on UNIX® in the EMR infrastructure, the company needed a highly available and scalable storage solution. Sentara had originally implemented a pair of HP StorageWorks XP12000 disk arrays. The objective in expanding this storage architecture was to deliver an equivalent class of availability to Windows hosts, while simplifying provisioning and other storagemanagement processes.

“In architecting our electronic medical records system, we knew it was essential to implement high-availability storage,” says Joseph Rowell, manager of Enterprise Architect Solutions at Sentara Healthcare. “Any downtime, even for upgrades, disrupts medical staff and compromises their ability to deliver responsive, quality care.”THE SOLUTION Accelerate, enhance, and streamline data protection with NetApp V-Series storage virtualization solution.   The Sentara team evaluated storage solutions from two incumbent vendors, along with the NetApp V-Series storage virtualization solution, which got the team’s attention right away. PLANIT Technology Group designed and implemented the solution. Rowell says that the system’s positive results early on led Sentara to extend its 90-day proof-ofconcept evaluation to a 120-day in-depth evaluation of the NetAp

Virtualization is bringing immense cost savings, especially in the storage arena, however the key to maximizing performance and cost savings lies in how companies manage and deploy virtual machines within a SAN infrastructure.

More than 90% of virtual machines (VM) now reside within a SAN storage infrastructure, and VM popularity continues to increase rapidly.  Storage managers are under pressure to find ways to streamline and speed up the provisioning process, but for many IT departments this is still a laborious, manual chore.  The provisioning process is increasingly complicated because VM storage is being deployed across a mix of drive types to leverage greater ROI from existing infrastructure investment.

To ensure cost savings are maximized and that future growth is not constrained, there are three key issues to consider:

• Reliability;
• Availability; and
• Scalability.

SAN infrastructure for providing the setting for a virtualized data center is preferred because they satisfy all three of these criteria.  SANs are also being designed with virtualization in mind, which means that they are able to operate more effectively and meet the needs of mission critical applications so essential to business operations today.  SANs are also able to meet peak access demand, exponentially increasing data volumes and handle the increasing number of applications and users utilizing the company data store.

SANs possess some key features which make them an obvious choice for conversion to a virtualized environment:

• Connectivity – SANs meet industry standards, such as T10 and T11, means that they are compatible across most industry hardware components;
• Clustering and data sharing – SANs deliver flexibility in storage planning and design, so you can make use of their ability to provide centralized or distributed storage as you need;
• Consolidation of storage – SANs allow multiple servers to effectively share data and resources;
• Bandwidth – policies can be set to handle variable load conditions;
• Scalability – additional servers and storage expansion is easily managed; and
• Backup – data is no longer backed up by the server, but by an independent protocol (Network Data Management Protocol or NDMP).

Businesses are churning out massive amounts of data as the ability to capture information increases and the impact of stringent government legislation and regulatory standards imposes a need to retain data for years takes hold.  In addition, data is being moved around the company networks and around the world at dizzying speeds, which makes planning contingencies for when something fails even more complex.

Your choice is to throw up your hands and self-insure, in the hope that lightning will not strike.

The problem is that you are going to suffer an outage, and unless you have adequate disaster recovery and business continuity strategies in place, you are going to get hurt…badly.

Business outages can strike at any time and for the most innocuous of reasons.  Virgin Blue, the Australian arm of Virgin Airways, suffered a series of outages which plagued the company for 11 days in September.  The bill is looking to top USD $19 million. more…

The FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center created a joint non-profit organization to monitor and report on cyber crime developments – the Internet Crime Complaint Center (ICCC).  The ICCC is responsible for tracking cybercrime incidents in the United States and in 2009 it recorded more than $590 million dollars in business losses and costs due to hacking incidents.  This was more than a doubling of the total on the previous year.

This figure is just the tip of the iceberg because it only represents the raw data cost – it does not factor in the cost of putting the data loss right, the interruption to the business nor the actual cost of the stolen data being used, such as compensating the victim and the cost of tracking down the criminal perpetrators.

When all of the costs are factored into the equation, then the figure comes out around $115 billion dollars each year (according to the US Government Accountability Office).

Why the big increase?

The last year has seen a huge spike in Web traffic which is due to rapid adoption of a wide range of consumer electronics which are internet ready.  This includes smart phones, iPods, iPad, tablets, laptops, net books and a plethora of other devices.  As an example, it is difficult to buy a Blu-Ray player for more than $200 which is not internet capable.

In addition to the number of devices accessing the internet, there has been a change in how users are making use of the Web.  Online social networks are primary sources of malware but they are also the online destination for many users.  There is a significant rise in the use of online video which is creating challenges when it comes to monitoring and inspecting such internet traffic for malware.

In addition, the criminals have gotten much more sophisticated and attacks are not simply about making a mess of your data or putting graffiti on your website.  Hacking and cybercrime is now a major business and the target is as mundane as a credit card record – one verified record will sell for $10 on the black market and even a small retailer will hold thousands of such records.