14 articles Tag network

Inside AT&T Network Operation Center

by on June 2, 2013, 0 comments

Every time we go online, make a phone call, send an SMS, we use the networks of large operators. These are large technical constructions and they need permanent monitoring and maintenance to work as we expect (which is: we don’t notice they are even there).

Network Operations Centers (NOC) are the institutions where network operators concentrate experts and technology to permanently check parameters of the networks, fix problems, and detect malfunctions and malware. Through their unique position, these NOCs are usually heavily shielded from the outside world.

This video gives a short insight into the Global NOC of AT&T (Bedminster, NJ), including a glimpse on their visualisations and an interview with Chuck Kerschner (Director of Network Operations at AT&T).

Friedmann and Kerschner in front of the video wall of the AT&T GNOC (click image for video)Friedmann and Kerschner in front of the video wall of the AT&T GNOC

Although Lex Friedman of TechHive asks the “right questions” (i.e. the questions we have as well), the answers are often a bit short and too general to learn a lot from them. Still, an interesting video for inspiration.

View on the large shared dashboard at AT&T (in the video at 1:20)View on the large shared dashboard at AT&T (in the video at 1:20)

A little more detais are availble here as audio, and in an WSJ article about a specialist working at AT&T to prepare for unusual traffic spikes.

Even closer to the SASER/Siegfried project are (Information) Security Operations Centers (SOCs) – note that Kerschner is mostly concerned with storms or technical outages, not with security threats like viruses or botnets. Steve Roderick is the colleague at the AT&T center responsible for security.

 

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Google+ Ripples

by on April 18, 2013, 0 comments

Google+ Ripples is a visualization of the spread of public posts in the social network Google+. Signed-up members of Google+ can select any public post and have a look at the spread of the post through the network. Only reposts that are set to public are shown in this visualization, so the visualization doesn’t show the reposts of people in their private circles.
The selected post is shown in the middle of the visualization. Reposts are represented by circles labeled with the person’s name that shared the post. Arrows show which person shared which post. If a shared post is shared again, the shared’s post circle becomes bigger. The spread of a message over time can be observed by using the timeline slider at the bottom of the diagram. It is also possible to zoom into diagram, which becomes very helpful when looking at posts that were reposted a lot of times.
The circles have different colors assigned, though it is not clear to me, what these are expressing.

I think generally this is an interesting approach of visualizing “contagion” in a network. It clearly identifies people that are more “contagious” than other people, which could be explained by these people having more social ties in the social network, having something like a leadership role or it could just mean that these people’s friends are more interested in the topic than other people’s friends that didn’t reshare their post. The zoomable user interface is a good way of providing focus and context by interaction. It allows for quite large numbers of elements to be displayed hiding detail information when it is zoomed out, providing more and more information with every zoom-in step.
Some aspects of the interface are worth discussing: For example, why do the circles of reshared posts have to be that large taking away a lot of space? Posts that reshare a post don’t necessarily have to be inside the circle. Also the interface could show all the reposts including the privately shared without providing the name of the sharing person.

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Stanford Dissertation Browser

by on April 3, 2013, 0 comments

Stanford-Dissertation-Browser-electrical-engineering-625x608The Stanford Dissertation Browser is an interactive tool to explore similarities between different fields of study at Stanford University by examining the language used in the different PhD publications. Fields of study are arranged around a circle with one field of study in the centre. For the subject in the centre similarities with other fields are shown by the distance to the centre. The closer the circles, the more common the language these fields share.

For example, if you select Electrical Engineering the field Computational Science will move close to the centre, which is not a big surprise. When selecting Music, however, Computational Science also moves very close to the centre. Something you might not expect, at least not to this degree. With a slider at the bottom different years can be selected. The different years are shown all the time in the diagram by very subtle grey circles, which display year and field of study, if you hover over them. In this way you get an overview over the distribution over time and can get more details by moving the timeline slider to select specific years.

This way of visualizing a network is similar to the method the research group Research on Complex Systems at Northwestern University used in their visualization of the structural change in the international flight network. In a similar manner, one particular node was put into focus, surrounding nodes being closer to this node when these two nodes were strongly connected by many links. The same ist the case with the different fields of study. The more words they share, the more connections or links are there between these fields, moving them closer together.

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Visualizing connectivity of airports during Eyjafjallajökull eruption

by on April 3, 2013, 0 comments

Eyjafjalljökull2 The Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics department at Northwestern University hosts several research projects that deal with complex networks. One of these projects deals with the effect of the ash cloud covering Europe in April 2010 for several days. The reaearch group tried to shed light on the question in what way the event has changed the structure of the complex network that is formed by the flight connections by all the airports around the world. The way they did this was not by looking at the overall topology of the network, but rather by looking at single nodes, the different airports, and calculating their shortest-path length before and after the eruption. The shortest path doesn’t describe the geographical distance between two airports, but rather the connectivity between them. So the more flights occur between two airports, the shorter is its path.

These calculations are shown in a special kind of circular before-after diagrams with one particular airport in the centre of a red circle surrounded by dots that represent all the airports that are connected. It is not clear what exactly the red circle describes. According to the website it is the “approximate distance of the world from Atlanta”. However, it is clearly some kind of threshold. Looking at Atlanta airport before the event we can see that there are several airports within the red circle, mostly North-American, but also some big others like Frankfurt, London or Hongkong. After the event, however, these have been pushed out of the circle, while in general most of the other nodes have been pushed further away from the circle, thus increasing their shortest-path length.

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Fighters in a Patent War

by on April 3, 2013, 0 comments

PatentWarsThis network visualization by the New York Times shows patent suits of the ten biggest actors (like Apple, Samsung, Motorola etc.) in the mobile phone market. Suits between these ten companies are represented by orange arrows, while suits against one of the ten companies by other parties are colored grey and suits of one company against other parties have a blue color. These other parties are not more specifically detailed. The total amount of different arrows one company has are arranged in a circle with the effect that the cirle becomes bigger, the more incoming or outgoing suits one company has.

This visualization caught my attention primarily because of the arrangement of the arrows. Thinking of computer networks different segments of the circle could visually encode different ports and their connections in a network. Further research is needed to investigate, if this might prove helpful for security administrators.
Also, for such a visualization it might be more revealing to put more emphasis on the direction of the connections, e.g. by color. Differentiating the direction only by the little arrowhead, as we can observe in the New York Times graphic is a little hard to recognize. For applications such as monitoring a network these kinds of weak differentiations are not enough.

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LogRhythm

by on February 7, 2013, 0 comments

LogRhythm

LogRhythm is a SIEM that can be applied either in smaller organizations as a single software instance or in midsize to large organizations as a combination of different software applications. It offers log management, event management, reporting, user and file integrity monitoring. The product is easily and quickly deployed due to a helpful configuration wizard. Though LogRhythm is capable of event correlation, compared to its competitors it’s very basic and optimized for the most common use cases. Gartner has positioned the product in their Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management as one of the leaders.

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Sentinel, Security Manager (NetIQ)

by on February 6, 2013, 0 comments

NetIQ Sentinel

The company NetIQ offers two SIEM solutions: Sentinel and Security Manager. Sentinel is a product originally offered by Novell. With the recent acquisition of the company by NetIQ there are two products overlapping in their functionality. In the future all functionality will be merged into the Sentinel solution. Sentinel’s strength lies in event correlation and real-time event management. Security Manager lacks this functionality and focuses more on host- and agentbased monitoring capabilities for server platforms, something missing in most SIEMs. Sentinel is a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2012

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Enterprise Security Manager (McAfee)

by on February 6, 2013, 0 comments

McAfee NitroSecurityMcAfee NitroSecurity 2

McAfee NitroSecurity is a software that offers SIEM functionality and log management in one single tool separating it from other SIEM systems. It is scalable and has a high performance, which makes it especially useful for organizations that need to analyse huge numbers of events. The company itself emphasizes the speed of the product as an outstanding feature. It is one of the five products positioned as leader in the Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management.

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Q1 Labs (IBM)

by on February 6, 2013, 0 comments

IBM offers an extensive security system solution called Q1 Labs. This includes several products for different security aspects, like, for example, QRadar Log Manager for collecting, archiving and analyzing network and security event logs or QRadar SIEM for real-time analysis of security alerts and correlating data from different sources to detect any threats. The product distinguishes itself from other products by its ability to collect and process NetFlow data, by deep packet inspection (DPI) and behavior analysis for all supported event sources. According to Gartner it can be considered one of the leaders in the field (Gartner 2012).

QRadar SIEM Dashboard

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HP Enterprise Security Products and ArcSight

by on February 5, 2013, 0 comments

ArcSight ESM DashboardIn their business unit ESP (Enterprise Security Products) Hewlett Packard offers several security tools in three different areas: Application Security (Fortify), Information Security (ArcSight) and Network and Cloud Security (Tipping Point). While Fortify is targeted at software security, ArcSight can be considered a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system. TippingPoint is a defense system against cyber attacks and threats.
According to Gardner ArcSight can be considered as one of the leaders in the field of SIEMs. There are different ArcSight SIEM solutions available depending, if you are  interested in recording and analyzing log information or if you are focussing on real-time security events. The choice for one of the solutions is also dependent on the size of your network.

Though ArcSight is one of the most popular products on the market on the market it has its shortcomings:

“ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager is complex in terms of deployment and performance management.”

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