Archive for September 15, 2015

HP To Slash Up Tp 30,000 Jobs

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 15, 2015 by itnerd

News is breaking that HP is planning on slashing up to 30,000 jobs as it splits into two companies. Here’s the highlights:

  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise will split from the current Hewlett-Packard entity and will primarily sell servers and software that corporations use to run their operations.
  • The staff reductions represents about 10% of H-P’s 300,000-person workforce
  • The costs for those reductions will trigger a $2.7 billion charge to earnings that will begin to appear with the company’s October-ending fourth-quarter financial statement
  • In addition to severance costs, the charge to earnings includes $700 million in cost reductions from things such as lease and property disposals
  • If all goes according to plan, there will not be a need for future job cuts.

The last part is going to be key. Since Meg Whitman became CEO, she’s cut about 85,000 jobs. The company cut about 55,000 under prior restructuring plans. Now HP has not had a great track record when it comes to acquiring companies, rightsizing, downsizing and the like. Example: HP’s disastrous 2011 acquisition of Autonomy, the British software firm for which it later said it overpaid by more than $5 billion. Whitman’s predecessor, Léo Apotheker, was fired by the HP board of directors after that deal. Or the EDS deal where a massive amount of jobs were slashed.

My guess is that we’ll be revisiting this soon enough, and it will not go well. Stay tuned.

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Heartbleed Rises From The Dead To Threaten Us Once Again

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 15, 2015 by itnerd

Much like zombies from the hit TV show “The Walking Dead,” Heartbleed is back. A tool called Shodan was used to seek out internet-of-things (IoT) connected devices and figure out if they’re threatened by Heartbleed. Here’s what the owner of the company posted on his Twitter feed at the end of that search:

https://twitter.com/achillean/status/643706828057018368/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Of the 200,000 or so vulnerable devices, 57,272 were housed in the United States. Germany was second with 21,060 Heartbleed-prone devices and China had 11,300. France was fourth with 10,094 followed by the UK with 9,125. Chances are these are things like home routers, Internet cameras, Internet connected light switches and the like. If you factor in the fact that this is a year after Heartbleed freaked people out, one wonders why we’re still taking about it and why people haven’t secured themselves from Heartbleed. That of course assumes that updates that address this are available. For older devices that may not be the case. Thus it may be possible that we’ll always have devices that are prone to getting pwned via Heartbleed on the Internet forever. That’s something that we may live to regret.

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Pwned Cisco Routers Spotted In The Wild Globally

Posted in Commentary with tags , on September 15, 2015 by itnerd

This is scary if you’re someone who runs a network with Cisco hardware. It’s come to light via FireEye/Mandiant that more then a dozen compromised router infections have been found in the wild, all targeting Cisco hardware as part of sophisticated attempts to hack into corporate and government networks. In short, if an attacker pwns a router since it sits on the edge of your network, they pwn your network. Now Cisco is aware of this and put out an advisory last month. But that was based on theory. That’s now changed as the Mandiant team found 14 instances of this attack, dubbed SYNful Knock, in four countries: Ukraine, the Philippines, Mexico, and India. What’s worse is that this style of attack has little risk of being detected because nobody watches these devices from a security standpoint. Which means that you might be pwned and not know it.

The threat is summarized in a blog post here. It’s worth a read if you run a network with Cisco gear. And let’s be frank, what large scale company doesn’t?

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