TechSNAP - Episodes Tagged with “Epyc”

428: RAID Reality Check

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 01 May 2020 00:15:00 -0700

We dive deep into the world of RAID, and discuss how to choose the right topology to optimize performance and resilience.

Plus Cloudflare steps up its campaign to secure BGP, and why you might want to trade in cron for systemd timers.

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424: AMD Inside

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 00:15:00 -0800

Cloudflare recently embarked on an epic quest to choose a CPU for its next-generation server build, so we explore the importance of requests per watt, the benefits of full memory encryption, and why AMD won.

Plus Mozilla's rollout of DNS over HTTPS has begun, a big milestone for Let's Encrypt, and more.

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411: Mobile Security Mistakes

Jupiter Broadcasting — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 00:15:00 -0700

We take a look at a few recent zero-day vulnerabilities for iOS and Android and find targeted attacks, bad assumptions, and changing markets.

Plus what to expect from USB4 and an upcoming Linux scheduler speed-up for AMD's Epyc CPUs.

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Google says hackers have put ‘monitoring implants’ in iPhones for years | Technology | The Guardian — Their location was uploaded every minute; their device’s keychain, containing all their passwords, was uploaded, as were their chat histories on popular apps including WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage, their address book, and their Gmail database.
Project Zero: A very deep dive into iOS Exploit chains found in the wild — We discovered exploits for a total of fourteen vulnerabilities across the five exploit chains: seven for the iPhone’s web browser, five for the kernel and two separate sandbox escapes.
Project Zero: In-the-wild iOS Exploit Chain 1 — This exploit provides evidence that these exploit chains were likely written contemporaneously with their supported iOS versions; that is, the exploit techniques which were used suggest that this exploit was written around the time of iOS 10. This suggests that this group had a capability against a fully patched iPhone for at least two years.
Project Zero: In-the-wild iOS Exploit Chain 3 — It’s difficult to understand how this error could be introduced into a core IPC library that shipped to end users. While errors are common in software development, a serious one like this should have quickly been found by a unit test, code review or even fuzzing.
Project Zero: JSC Exploits — In this post, we will take a look at the WebKit exploits used to gain an initial foothold onto the iOS device and stage the privilege escalation exploits. All exploits here achieve shellcode execution inside the sandboxed renderer process (WebContent) on iOS.
Project Zero: Implant Teardown — There is no visual indicator on the device that the implant is running. There's no way for a user on iOS to view a process listing, so the implant binary makes no attempt to hide its execution from the system. The implant is primarily focused on stealing files and uploading live location data. The implant requests commands from a command and control server every 60 seconds.The implant has access to all the database files (on the victim’s phone) used by popular end-to-end encryption apps like Whatsapp, Telegram and iMessage.
iPhone Hackers Caught By Google Also Targeted Android And Microsoft Windows, Say Sources — Multiple sources with knowledge of the situation said that Google’s own Android operating system and Microsoft Windows PCs were also targeted in a campaign that sought to infect the computers and smartphones of the Uighur ethnic group in China.
Google's Shocking Decision To Ignore A Critical Android Vulnerability In Latest Security Update — Despite immediately acknowledging the vulnerability and confirming in June that it will be fixed, Google had not provided an estimated time frame for the patch.
Android Zero-Day Bug Opens Door to Privilege Escalation Attack, Researchers Warn | Threatpost — “In the unlikely event an attacker succeeds in exploiting this bug, they would effectively have complete control over the target device,” he told Threatpost. Once an attacker obtains escalated privileges, “it means they could completely take over a device if they can convince a user to install and run their application,”
Why 'Zero Day' Android Hacking Now Costs More Than iOS Attacks | WIRED — "During the last few months, we have observed an increase in the number of iOS exploits, mostly Safari and iMessage chains, being developed and sold by researchers from all around the world. The zero-day market is so flooded by iOS exploits that we've recently started refusing some them"
Linux 5.4 Kernel To Bring Improved Load Balancing On AMD EPYC Servers — The scheduler topology improvement by SUSE's Matt Fleming changes the behavior as currently it turns out for EPYC hardware the kernel has failed to properly load balance across NUMA nodes on different sockets.
USB4 is coming soon and will (mostly) unify USB and Thunderbolt | Ars Technica — The USB Implementers Forum published the official USB4 protocol specification. If your initial reaction was "oh no, not again," don't worry—the new spec is backward-compatible with USB 2 and USB 3, and it uses the same USB Type-C connectors that modern USB 3 devices do.

407: Old School Outages

Jupiter Broadcasting — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 22:00:00 -0700

Jim shares his Nagios tips and Wes chimes in with some modern tools as we chat monitoring in the wake of some high-profile outages.

Plus we turn our eye to hardware and get excited about the latest Ryzen line from AMD.

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Third parties confirm AMD’s outstanding Ryzen 3000 numbers | Ars Technica — AMD debuted its new Ryzen 3000 desktop CPU line a few weeks ago at E3, and it looked fantastic. For the first time in 20 years, it looked like AMD could go head to head with Intel's desktop CPU line-up across the board. The question: would independent, third-party testing back up AMD's assertions?
The Internet broke today: Facebook, Verizon, and more see major outages | Ars Technica — Last week, Verizon caused a major BGP misroute that took large chunks of the Internet, including CDN company Cloudflare, partially down for a day. This week, the rest of the Internet has apparently asked Verizon to hold its beer.
It was a really bad month for the internet | TechCrunch — In the past month there were several major internet outages affecting millions of users across the world. Sites buckled, services broke, images wouldn’t load, direct messages ground to a halt and calendars and email were unavailable for hours at a time.
Cloudflare outage caused by bad software deploy (updated) — For about 30 minutes today, visitors to Cloudflare sites received 502 errors caused by a massive spike in CPU utilization on our network. This CPU spike was caused by a bad software deploy that was rolled back.
How Verizon and a BGP Optimizer Knocked Large Parts of the Internet Offline Today — Today at 10:30UTC, the Internet had a small heart attack. A small company in Northern Pennsylvania became a preferred path of many Internet routes through Verizon (AS701), a major Internet transit provider.
Getting started | Prometheus — This guide is a "Hello World"-style tutorial which shows how to install, configure, and use Prometheus in a simple example setup.
prometheus/node_exporter — Prometheus exporter for hardware and OS metrics exposed by *NIX kernels, written in Go with pluggable metric collectors.
Using netdata with Prometheus — Prometheus is a distributed monitoring system which offers a very simple setup along with a robust data model. Recently netdata added support for Prometheus.
prometheus/nagios_plugins — Nagios plugin for alerting on prometheus query results.
RobustPerception/nrpe_exporter — The NRPE exporter exposes metrics on commands sent to a running NRPE daemon.
m-lab/prometheus-nagios-exporter — The Prometheus Nagios exporter reads status and performance data from nagios plugins via the MK Livestatus Nagios plugin and publishes this in a form that can be scrapped by Prometheus.
Comparison to alternatives | Prometheus — Prometheus is a full monitoring and trending system that includes built-in and active scraping, storing, querying, graphing, and alerting based on time series data.
Quality server monitoring solution using NetData/Prometheus/Grafana — I’m going to quickly show you how to install both netdata and Prometheus on the client and server. We can then use grafana pointed at Prometheus to obtain long-term metrics netdata offers.
Monitoring stack by using Grafana + Prometheus + Netdata — This monitoring stack you can monitoring in real-time by Netdata and see the history by using Grafana.
Monitoring Agent · NCPA — New to NCPA? See some of the awesome features present in the Web GUI and API, available on any operating system.
Nagios 101: Understanding the Fundamentals - Nagios
Nagios Documentation

Episode 360: AMD Flaws Explained

Jupiter Broadcasting — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 12:00:00 -0700

We cut through the noise and explain in clear terms what’s really been discovered. The botched disclosure of flaws in AMD products has overshadowed the technical details of the vulnerabilities, and we aim to fix that..

Plus another DNS Rebinding attack is in the wild and stealing Ethereum, Microsoft opens up a new bug bounty program, Expedia gets hacked, and we perform a TechSNAP checkup.