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This episode was recorded on Sunday March 13, 2016 with Dominik and Mike.

Chit Chat

• Network Phenomenons in the real world: The Ant Mill >> the effect of a network broadcast storm is also present in ant rotation cycle – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu7mzTPHeJI
• CryptoWall is becoming a bigger and bigger problem for both large and small enterprises. I spent the past week fighting CryptoWall infection after infection, restoring more than 250,000 files from backup or shadow copies. The latest version that hit encrypted the actual file names which made restoring the files even more difficult.
  https://threatpost.com/updated-cryptowall-encrypts-file-names-mocks-victims/115285/

Infamous war stories

• Dominik – A new cleaning company is brought in to thoroughly clean the office and they decide that it will be easier for them if they disconnect all the cables under the desk and then just reconnect them all again when they are done. The following morning the staff find the network down and eventually stumble upon the fact that the cleaning company has moved some of the cables which results in a large number of network loops requiring an all day effort to clean up and resolve.
• Mike – The original Doom game (I mistakenly referred to it as Quake in the podcast) used IPX broadcast packets to communicate between clients. I was working in the computer lab back in the mid to late 1990’s as a student assistant. These were the days or WordPerfect for DOS. Students start telling me that nothing was working, they can’t launch any applications from the Novell NetWare server and they can’t print. Eventually I find two students at the back of the lab playing the very early version of Doom. The frames were essentially flooding the entire network preventing pretty much everything from working.
  http://kotaku.com/memories-of-doom-by-john-romero-john-carmack-1480437464

Interesting News and Events

• Cisco Live Berlin and Tech Field Day Extra
• Security vulnerabilities in multiple firewall vendors including Juniper/Netscreen, Fortinet, Cisco ASA, Palo Alto
• Tech Field Day Roundtables at HPE Aruba Atmosphere 2016 in Las Vegas, NV

How to Improve Yourself?

The Internet is a wealth of knowledge and experiences just waiting to be tapped. You should leverage that resource to help expand your understanding and depth of knowledge by doing some simple research. This is especially important when working with resellers and/or vendors that are looking to sell you the latest gadget. They will rarely tell you the shortcomings of their product or solution, instead you need to pull it out of them and decide if those issues are relevant to your moving forward with the product or solution.

Specific resources such as Tech Field Day and Packet Pushers are great places to start.

What tools are you using?

I’ve been recently struggling some with 802.11b/g (2.4Ghz band) RF interference issues. I did some research (see I’m following our own advice) and found WiSpy from MetaGeek. I have some reading and learning to-do first but it looks like a really useful promising tool.

Cheers!