Observium: Network monitoring with intuition

Observium (which you can access here) is a low-maintenance auto-discovering network monitoring platform supporting a wide range of device types, platforms and operating systems including Cisco, Windows, Linux, HP, Juniper, Dell, FreeBSD, Brocade, Netscaler, NetApp and many more. Observium focuses on providing a beautiful and powerful yet simple and intuitive interface to the health and status of your network.
Professionally developed and maintained by a team of experienced network engineers and systems administrators, Observium is a platform designed and built by its users.
Observium Community is available free to everyone and recieves updates and features twice annually.
Observium Professional adds priority access to daily updates and new features for a small yearly fee.

Using OPENDNS on a Mikrotik

At the office we use a Mikrotik which is connected via fibre to Cool Ideas. We use OpenDNS as a Information Security tool. It prevents ransomware and bots from becoming major incidents within the office.

The router is scheduled to do a daily update via script of the OpenDNS settings. Below is the example:

:local opendnsuser "user@domain.co.za";
:local opendnspass "itsprivate";
:local opendnshost "office";

:log info "OpenDNS Update";
:local url "https://updates.opendns.com/nic/update";
/tool fetch url=($url . "\3Fhostname=$opendnshost") user=("$opendnsuser") password=("$opendnspass") mode=https dst-path=opendnsupdate.txt
:local opendnsresult [/file get opendnsupdate.txt contents];
:log info "OpenDNS: Host $opendnshost - $opendnsresult";

PUE: to compare is human – to improve is divine (part of the DS PUE series of articles)

Yes, I know – it’s an inadequate distortion of an old, clichéd proverb. Yet, I say this too often in client meetings and peer discussions, “Don’t compare the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of your data centre to that of another because it’s a pointless exercise. - Lee Smith Read the article here about Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) in data centres on our website.

Vulnerablity management for dummies

Download vulnerability management for dummies provided by Qualys here.

The Hours of WannaCry from the Cisco Umbrella Blog

In the span of just 10 days, two large-scale, wormable attacks grabbed international headlines. First, a phishing campaign posing as a Google Docs sharing request gained access to Google accounts then spread across its victim’s contacts, and now, a ransomware campaign with a bite, named WannaCry, autonomously infected vulnerable systems leveraging an exploit leaked on the internet. In the early minutes of the attack, we worked with our Talos counterparts to analyse the behaviour of WannaCry and protect our customers. We were also particularly proud to see that our Investigate product helped MalwareTech reduce WannaCry’s impact. In this post, we hope to give you a retrospective analysis of what we’ve observed during the first critical hours of the event.
Read more here.

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