Networking

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Vodafone New Zealand has announced it will start moving customers using legacy copper landlines — plain old telephone service or POTS — onto newer services. These customers will be moved to voice over fibre, wireless, UltraFast HFC, or copper broadband, with the POTS service to be switched off in April next year, the telco said. “All Vodafone copper phone customers will have the option to move to a broadband-based calling service to stay connected. Depending on where they live and their personal circumstances, that might be using fibre, wireless broadband, UltraFast HFC, or copper broadband access technology,” Vodafone NZ experience and commercial director Joe Goddard said. The first set of customers that will transition away from legacy copper landlines will be those still using old Spark, previously known as Telecom NZ, copper phone networks. According to Goddard, this amounts to around 10,000 connections. Other New Zealand telcos, like Chorus, have also started cutting copper phone and broadband services, with the switch-offs starting last month in areas where fibre uptake is “already high”. Around 5,000 Chorus customers, which comprises less than 1% of the telco’s copper network customer base, will have their services withdrawn by the end of the year. The decision to cut off copper networks was in response to the Commerce Commission’s final Copper Withdrawal Code being released in December, the telco said.

Across the Tasman Sea, Vodafone Australia brand owner TPG Telecom launched its first sustainability strategy, which is aimed at creating various initiatives for creating a responsible and sustainable business. The strategy features four pillars — customer wellbeing, environmental responsibility, inclusion and belonging, and the digital economy — and identifies 20 corporate responsibility and sustainability commitments. Among those commitments is a vow to implement a “harmonised approach” to gender pay equity across its Australian workforce by 2022 and increase female representation across leadership, STEM functions, and overall workforce in Australia by 2024. The female representation targets are a 45% increase for leadership, 35% increase for STEM functions, and 20% increase for overall workforce. It also said it would increase representation for people identifying as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, LGBTQI+, or with a disability. TPG has also committed to using only renewable electricity for its Australian operations by 2025, which entails working with suppliers to reduce packaging and increase packaging resource recoverability across products and networks.In terms of customer wellbeing, these commitments range from developing a customer vulnerability policy or framework, to increasing customer awareness of how to detect scams and theft, to offering services that help educate families and children about how to stay safer online.  Related Coverage More

The mission of Dress for Success Indianapolis is to empower women to achieve economic independence by providing a network of support, professional attire and the development tools to help women thrive in work and in life.”I have been in a position to receive, and now I am in a position to give.” Char Dunlap knows the strain of struggle. Now she offers help and hope to those who are striving to realize their own dreams of economic empowerment. “I have seven children,” she beams.  “And, if my life had not been made different, their lives would not have been made different. There’s a ripple effect to benefitting just one person. Some of the people I help now… Well, I used to be that person.”

A total makeover. That’s what Dunlap discovered when she walked through the doors of Dress For Success (DFS) Indianapolis. She was looking for clothes because she couldn’t afford an interview suit; she ended up clothed in something that suited her much better.  The mission of Dress for Success Indianapolis is to empower women to achieve economic independence by providing a network of support, professional attire and the development tools to help women thrive in work and in life. DFS aims to provide women with the supportive services they need to make life transitions that result in achieving self-sufficiency and socioeconomic advancement. Dress for Success Indianapolis is one of more than 150 Dress for Success affiliates in 30 countries worldwide. “Confidence,” she emphasizes, “I became clothed in confidence.  I developed as a leader by recognizing that I could be one. (DFS) empowered me to make career changes that I otherwise would not have made were it not for the coaching and the mentoring and the learning I received.” And she’s not the only one. “Back in 1999, I don’t think people really could have realized when DFS opened in the basement of a church that today we would serve over 18,000 local women with interview, workwear attire and career services,” Julie Petr, Executive Director of DFS Indianapolis reminisces. “That’s a lot of ladies! Some of our clients have been with us for years and years, and a few of them have been with us for two decades. What starts out with a client coming to us for clothing often transitions to her seeking out career services and then joining the Professional Women’s Group, or the PWG, as we call it.” Services that paved the path to economic empowerment were in demand prior to the pandemic.  Now the need is rising exponentially. “The pandemic has been hard on all of us personally and professionally, especially women,” remarks Indiana Lt. Governor Suzanne Crouch. “And women of color have been disproportionally impacted by COVID-19. A Berkings Institute survey reveals one in four women who became unemployed during the pandemic reported the job loss was due to a lack of childcare. Another survey confirmed that women’s jobs were almost twice as vulnerable during the pandemic as men’s jobs.” The Lt. Governor decided to step out of her comfort zone and to walk in the shoes of the women she was reading about. She stepped onto the catwalk as a runway model for the DFS Indy annual fundraiser, Stepping out in Style, along with the women DFS serves.

The single evening event features 12 women from the community as amateur models. The women represent diverse backgrounds, bodies, and beliefs — what unites them is an indomitable spirit. “I was going in for an interview about two days after I walked into DFS,” Linda Rousseau, a DFS client and 2021 model recalls: “My spirits were down. I had lost my job six months prior.  When I came in and got the outfit I was going to wear to my interview, the woman that sat across from me told me about the Professional Women’s Group (PWG). I felt really, really confident when I walked out of DFS, and I said to myself, ‘Yes, I will assist others to believe in themselves’.” PWG is a place where women go for more than career services. “The PWG is a sisterhood,” DFS Indy Executive Director Petr explains. “It’s a place where women celebrate their successes, they pull each other up, and they also support each other when times aren’t so good. DFS put out a survey in 2020 that indicated that 90% of our female clients were suffering and were impacted by COVID-19. We had to be resourceful and creative and transition so we could help women who needed those jobs. Our career services transitioned to virtual programs, and the clothing transitioned to curbside pick-up and delivery. We rely on a village of volunteers.” Volunteers like Brandi Davis-Handy, Chief Public Relations Officer for AES, and Karen Mangia, VP of Customer & Market Insights for Salesforce, who co-chaired the 2021 Stepping Out in Style Gala.

“Dress For Success is an organization I’ve supported for a long time due to their mission of helping drive women towards economic independence”, Davis-Handy describes. “I was truly honored to co-chair the Executive Leadership Team during such a pivotal time in our community.  Knowing how much this pandemic has impacted women pushed me to want to raise as much funds as possible. I was beyond thrilled to see organizations and women from across our city show up to support these efforts.” “Caring is the new couture,” Mangia continues, “One of my favorite quotes is ‘Don’t let your learning lead to knowledge, let your learning lead to action.’ When I read about the widespread job loss among women, I was compelled to do more than learn. I was compelled to act. To contribute. Together we rise.”

Since last year, women have faced disproportionate challenges, whether being forced out of the workforce or confronted with immense pressures, like balancing caregiving duties and #remotework 👉 https://t.co/ivesI64X3T— Karen Mangia (@karenmangia) September 22, 2021

The single evening event raised nearly $400,000, and other measures of success are also on the rise. In 2020, 84% of PWG members were employed at the end of the year, with 12% more seeking employment. “DFS helps women find the resources they need and to go out and win at whatever they say they want to win at,” Michelle Jones enthuses.  She’s a DFS client turned PWG mentor and 2021 model. “We create a safe place for women to come to step into who they were destined, created and deserve to be.” Dara Fletcher another amateur model and client success story, concludes with confidence: “When you are at DFS, you are at home.  You come in as you are and then leave in a different manner.”This article was co-authored by Karen Mangia, who is vice president, Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce. Her work focuses on strategies for personal and professional success, and she regularly works with executives, managers, and future leaders at companies of all sizes globally. She launched two new books in 2020: Listen Up! How to Tune In To Customers, And Turn Down the Noise and Working From Home:  Making the New Normal Work For You  – both from Wiley. She has been featured in Forbes and regularly writes for Thrive Global and ZDNet, and has been named as one of the Top 20 Thought Leaders in the world by Thinkers 360. Committed to diversity and inclusion, she serves on her company’s Racial Equality and Justice Task Force. She is a TEDx speaker and the author of Success With Less, a book that chronicles her own personal journey through a life-threatening health crisis. Her high-impact keynotes help organizations to access the future of work via innovative insights around the voice of the customer.

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VMware has used its virtual VMworld 2021 event to introduce VMware Edge, a portfolio that will cater specifically to help enterprises run, manage, and secure edge-native apps across multiple clouds. According to VMware Edge and Service Provider SVP Sanjay Uppal, the company wants to help address two main problems that organisations face when deploying software stacks. “There’s a challenge of real-time access and there’s a challenge in terms of scale in terms of the number of locations — and we will be addressing both of them,” he told media. He also took the opportunity to define what the “edge” means to VMware, acknowledging the definition in the industry can mean something different to everyone. “The edge is distributed digital infrastructure … for running workloads across a number of locations, and these locations are placed close to endpoints that are producing and consuming data,” Uppal said. Read also: What is edge computing? Here’s why the edge matters and where it’s headed Solutions to help make up the new portfolio will include VMware Edge Compute Stack. Uppal described it as a purpose-built, integrated VM and container-based stack that will enable organisations to run their workloads all the way into the customers’ premise, as well as near the edge. 

VMware Edge Compute Stack will be available in standard, advanced, and enterprise editions. The company added there are plans to develop a lightweight version of Edge Compute Stack to support more lightweight apps at the edge. The company’s VMware Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering will also be added. In addition to being the software service that combines SD-WAN with cloud-delivered security, VMware has expanded it to include cloud web security, zero trust network access, and firewalling, which will be delivered as-a-service at the edge.   “Secure access will mean all those endpoints that are coming in without the need for a hardware edge but are coming in and getting terminated at the points of presence, which increases agility and flexibility for the enterprise, but also allows the service provider to migrate away from legacy VPNs,” Uppal said. VMware Edge will also feature VMware Telco Cloud Platform, which has been delivering near edge solutions to telco providers from their 4G/5G core to the radio access network. As part of the latest update, Uppal said, its capabilities will also be extended into the network. “This is where it’s being used for RAN disaggregation, as an example, in 4G and 5G cases where this common software stack using telco cloud platform, is being used,” he said.

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It took about six hours, a new record for Facebook downtime, but Facebook is finally back up. What happened? Here’s what we know so far. The old network troubleshooting saying is, when anything goes wrong, “It’s DNS.” This time Domain Name Server (DNS) appears to be the symptom of the root cause of the Facebook global failure. The true cause is that there are no working Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes into Facebook’s sites. BGP is the standardized exterior gateway protocol used to exchange routing and reachability information between the internet top-level autonomous systems (AS). Most people, indeed most network administrators, never need to deal with BGP. 

Many people spotted that Facebook was no longer listed on DNS. Indeed, there were joke posts offering to sell you the Facebook.com domain.   Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht was the first to report the underlying BGP problem. This meant, as Kevin Beaumont, former Microsoft’s Head of Security Operations Centre, tweeted, “By not having BGP announcements for your DNS name servers, DNS falls apart = nobody can find you on the internet. Same with WhatsApp btw. Facebook have basically deplatformed themselves from their own platform.” Whoops. As annoying as this is to you, it may be even more annoying to Facebook employees. There are reports that Facebook employees can’t enter their buildings because their “smart” badges and doors were also disabled by this network failure. If true, Facebook’s people literally can’t enter the building to fix things.  

In the meantime, Reddit user u/ramenporn, who claimed to be a Facebook employee working on bringing the social network back from the dead, reported, before he deleted his account and his messages, that “DNS for FB services has been affected and this is likely a symptom of the actual issue, and that’s that BGP peering with Facebook peering routers has gone down, very likely due to a configuration change that went into effect shortly before the outages happened (started roughly 1540 UTC).” He continued, “There are people now trying to gain access to the peering routers to implement fixes, but the people with physical access is separate from the people with knowledge of how to actually authenticate to the systems and people who know what to actually do, so there is now a logistical challenge with getting all that knowledge unified. Part of this is also due to lower staffing in data centers due to pandemic measures.” Ramenporn also stated that it wasn’t an attack, but a mistaken configuration change made via a web interface. What really stinks — and why Facebook is still down hours later — is that since both BGP and DNS are down, the “connection to the outside world is down, remote access to those tools don’t exist anymore, so the emergency procedure is to gain physical access to the peering routers and do all the configuration locally.” Of course, the technicians on site don’t know how to do that and senior network administrators aren’t on site. This is, in short, one big mess. Facebook was not immediately forthcoming about what had gone wrong and how it was fixed. Hours after Facebook and all its related services went down, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer tweeted: “We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.” Afterward, as Facebook started to come up, he added, “Facebook services coming back online now – may take some time to get to 100%. To every small and large business, family, and individual who depends on us, I’m sorry.” As a former network admin who worked on the internet at this level, I anticipated Facebook would be down for hours. I was also right that it would prove to be Facebook’s longest and most severe failure to date. I do wonder about exactly what went wrong and how it was fixed. Stay tuned. We’ll report on that as soon as know more details. 
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Facebook blamed its six-hour outage on Monday on a faulty configuration change that affected its vast social media platforms and internal systems. Facebook, alongside WhatsApp and Instagram, suffered a global outage on Monday, October 4 that began at approximately 11:44 EDT and dragged on well into the afternoon.

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The social media giant’s services were back online as of 17:28 EDT. SEE: A cloud company asked security researchers to look over its systems. Here’s what they found In a subsequent blog post, Facebook’s VP of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said the outage had been caused by a technical issue affecting its Border Gateway Protocol (BCP) routing system, which had “a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.” Monday’s outage also affected internal tools at Facebook that made diagnosing and fixing the problem more difficult, said Janardhan. According to the New York Times, the outage rendered engineers’ access cards useless, meaning staff couldn’t get into the buildings where the affected servers were housed. “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” said Janardhan.

“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.” BGP was originally designed to interconnect internet service providers across the globe. It now forms the routing backbone of the internet. Facebook also uses BGP as a foundation for its data center routing design. In a blog post published in May 2021, Facebook researchers said the routing design was aimed to allow the company to “build our network quickly and provide high availability of our services, while keeping the design itself scalable.” SEE: Why Facebook is the AOL of 2021 However, the researchers also note that BGP “requires tight codesign with the data center topology, configuration, switch software, and data center–wide operational pipeline.” Ironically, Facebook’s data centre routing configuration was designed specifically to minimize the impact of failures. No user data was compromised in Monday’s outage, Facebook said. More

The old network troubleshooting saying is, when anything goes wrong, “It’s DNS.” This time Domain Name Server (DNS) appears to be the symptom of the root cause of the Facebook global failure. The true cause is that there are no working Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes into Facebook’s sites. BGP is the standardized exterior gateway protocol used to exchange routing and reachability information between the internet top-level autonomous systems (AS). Most people, indeed most network administrators, never need to deal with BGP. 

Many people spotted that Facebook was no longer listed on DNS. Indeed, there were joke posts offering to sell you the Facebook.com domain.   Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht was the first to report the underlying BGP problem. This meant, as Kevin Beaumont, former Microsoft’s Head of Security Operations Centre, tweeted, “By not having BGP announcements for your DNS name servers, DNS falls apart = nobody can find you on the internet. Same with WhatsApp btw. Facebook have basically deplatformed themselves from their own platform.” Whoops. As annoying as this is to you, it may be even more annoying to Facebook employees. There are reports that Facebook employees can’t enter their buildings because their “smart” badges and doors were also disabled by this network failure. If true, Facebook’s people literally can’t enter the building to fix things.   In the meantime, Reddit user u/ramenporn, who claimed to be a Facebook employee working on bringing the social network back from the dead, reported, before he deleted his account and his messages, that “DNS for FB services has been affected and this is likely a symptom of the actual issue, and that’s that BGP peering with Facebook peering routers has gone down, very likely due to a configuration change that went into effect shortly before the outages happened (started roughly 1540 UTC).”

He continued, “There are people now trying to gain access to the peering routers to implement fixes, but the people with physical access is separate from the people with knowledge of how to actually authenticate to the systems and people who know what to actually do, so there is now a logistical challenge with getting all that knowledge unified. Part of this is also due to lower staffing in data centers due to pandemic measures.” Ramenporn also stated that it wasn’t an attack, but a mistaken configuration change made via a web interface. What really stinks — and why Facebook is still down hours later — is that since both BGP and DNS are down, the “connection to the outside world is down, remote access to those tools don’t exist anymore, so the emergency procedure is to gain physical access to the peering routers and do all the configuration locally.” Of course, the technicians on site don’t know how to do that and senior network administrators aren’t on site. This is, in short, one big mess. As a former network admin who worked on the internet at this level, I anticipate Facebook will be down for hours more. I suspect it will end up being Facebook’s longest and most severe failure to date before it’s fixed. Related Stories: More

Image: Chris Duckett/ZDNet
The parent company of Optus, Singtel, has sold a 70% stake in its Australian tower business, Australia Tower Network (ATN), to AustralianSuper for AU$1.9 billion. The deal will cover 2,312 towers and rooftop sites, with Optus signing a long-term lease with ATN as well as being the anchor tenant for 565 sites to be built over the next three years as part of the telco’s 5G rollout. The initial lease term is 20 years with options thereafter.”The sale of these assets positions Optus well for the future as it provides capital to support core business growth while importantly allowing us to maintain the competitive advantage of our network’s active elements which continue to top independent reports on speed and quality of our network,” Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said. “There has been strong interest from a competitive field of high-quality prospective buyers, and we are pleased with the outcome of the sales process. We very much look forward to a bright future partnering with Aussie Super, an iconic Australian infrastructure investor.” The deal is expected to be completed by the end of October. Telstra recently sold a 49% stake in its InfraCo Towers business for AU$2.8 billion after being approached by a consortium including the Future Fund, Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation, and Sunsuper. That business, now dubbed Amplitel, owns 8,200 towers across Australia. In June, Aware Super along with Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets picked up Vocus for AU$3.5 billion.

Update at 11:50am AEST, October 1: Clarified that Singtel is selling the towers, not Optus as originally reported.Related Coverage More

The NSA and CISA have released a detailed guide on how people and organizations should choose virtual private networks (VPN) as both nation-states and cybercriminals ramp up their exploitation of the tools amid a global shift to remote work and schooling. The nine-page fact sheet also includes details on ways to deploy a VPN securely. The NSA said in a statement that the guide would also be helpful to leaders in the Department of Defense, National Security Systems and the Defense Industrial Base so that they can “better understand the risks associated with VPNs.”The NSA said multiple nation-state APT actors have weaponized common vulnerabilities and exposures to gain access to vulnerable VPN devices, allowing them to steal credentials, remotely execute code, weaken encrypted traffic’s cryptography, hijack encrypted traffic sessions and read sensitive data from a device. NSA director Rob Joyce told the Aspen Cybersecurity Summit this week that “multiple nation-state actors are leveraging CVEs to compromise vulnerable Virtual Private Networks devices.”He wrote on Twitter that VPN servers are entry points into protected networks, making them attractive targets. “APT actors have and will exploit VPNs — the latest guidance from NSA and @CISAgov can help shrink your attack surface. Invest in your own protection!” he added. CISA director Jen Easterly echoed Joyce’s remarks, sharing the same message about nation-state exploitation. 

The notice included a list of “tested and validated” VPN products on the National Information Assurance Partnership Product Compliant List, many of which use multi-factor authentication and promptly apply patches and updates. Experts lauded CISA and the NSA for creating the list. Chester Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at Sophos, told ZDNet that for too long, there has not been a trusted voice on VPNs without a vested interest in selling you something. “Combining the knowledge and experience of the NSA with CISA’s remit of helping protect the US private sector puts them in a good position to provide trusted advice on staying safe against criminal actors,” Wisniewski said. He noted that the advice is largely copied from suggestions provided to defense contractors and similar entities. “It is great advice, but incredibly complicated and burdensome for most commercial entities. None of what’s said is wrong, but it requires a lot of forethought and a lot of process to comply with,” Wisniewski added. “Most organizations are incapable of following much of the advice. Doing VPNs right is really hard, as demonstrated in this document, so I would urge organizations to pursue zero trust network access and SD-WAN as a more practical way of achieving similar goals. Rather than rebuild your entire VPN strategy to remain doing it the old way, you may as well spend the same time/resources to modernize your approach to remote access and reap the benefits rather than simply shore up the old way.”Untangle senior vice president Heather Paunet noted that cyberattacks on VPNs are very costly due to potential ransoms or data accessed, as seen with the Pulse Secure VPN exploit in April that compromised government agencies and companies in the US and Europe.While there has been a rise in vulnerabilities of VPNs due to more VPN usage over the last year and a half, newer VPN technologies with newer types of cryptography are evolving to ensure the protection of information transmitted across the internet, Paunet said, noting popular tools like WireGuard VPN that use cryptography. “What is missing from the guidelines are taking the human element into consideration. Along with following the strict guidelines, IT professionals are also challenged with getting employees to effectively use the technology. If the VPN is too difficult to use, or slows down systems, the employee is likely to turn it off,” Paunet said. “The challenge for IT professionals is to find a VPN solution that fits the guidelines, but is also fast and reliable so that employees turn it on once and forget about it.”Archie Agarwal, CEO at ThreatModeler, noted that a quick search on the Shodan search engine reveals over a million VPNs on the Internet in the US alone, providing a doorways to private sensitive internal networks that are sitting exposed to the world for anyone to try to break through. “These represent the old perimeter security paradigm and have failed to protect the inner castle over and again. If credentials are leaked or stolen, or new vulnerabilities discovered, the game is lost and the castle falls,” Agarwal said.  More