Cisco extends security controls to 'dark Web'

Cisco is tackling the so-called "dark Web" of online content that's not easily indexed or categorized by adding new usage controls to its IronPort S-Series Web Security Appliances. The IronPort Web Usage Controls software has an engine that reads a Web page on the fly and analyzes the content to decide if it's objectionable or off limits according to corporate policy, says Vivek Bhandari, a product marketing manager at Cisco. The new technology is packaged as a software blade that works with Cisco's URL filtering database to make decisions about user Web surfing to enforce acceptable-use policies.

Simply categorizing Web sites into lists - such as sports, shopping, hate sites or porn - is no longer sufficient because the Internet is now filled with highly transient and often dangerous sites that comprise the dark Web. "These sites are coming up and down so fast," Bhandari says, noting that the proliferation of blogs and social networking sites, with Web 2.0 technology underpinnings, are also contributing to an explosion in Web content. Cisco's S-Series appliances can perform malware detection and blocking. The dark Web may constitute 80% of objectionable content, outside the 20% of Web sites that can still be put neatly into list form, Cisco says. The new Web Usage Controls software adds the ability to monitor, block or warn users about Web traffic based on a method that combines URL filtering lists with contextual heuristics for analyzing content and checking hidden tags. With the configuration Cisco is advising customers to use, about 90% of objectionable dark Web content violating policy will be detected via IronPort Web Usage Controls without causing the false positive rate to spike, Bhandari says. Cisco's URL filtering database includes 65 URL categories and is updated every 5 minutes through Cisco's security intelligence operations.

IronPort S-Series appliances with Web Usage Controls, available now, start at $8,500.

For sale: Cisco data center rival Brocade

Brocade has reportedly put itself up for sale, a development that portends significant consolidation within the data center IT industry. Likely suitors are HP and Oracle, among others, the WSJ reports. According to the Wall Street Journal, Brocade has enlisted Qatalyst Group to shop the company around. HP, Oracle and Brocade all declined comment for the WSJ story.

HP would be interested in Brocade to fill out its data center switching and storage-area network (SAN) portfolio as it battles former ally Cisco for next-generation data center buildouts. Brocade, which told Network World it does not comment on "rumor or speculation," has a market cap of $3 billion. HP resold Cisco routers and switches for years before ramping R&D in its own ProCurve line.   Slideshow: 2009's hottest tech M&A deals   Cisco countered by developing a data center blade server system to compete with HP's and IBM's offerings. Acquiring Brocade would fill out both its LAN and SAN switching portfolios for the data center, observers note. IBM is also a reseller of Cisco switches and routers but recently agreed to OEM Brocade's equipment, which it obtained from its acquisition of Cisco rival Foundry Networks.   HP resells Brocade FibreChannel and FibreChannel-over-Ethernet (FCoE) SAN switches under an OEM arrangement but is challenged in offering a complete data center switching line via its internally developed ProCurve brand.

Similarly, software giant Oracle would become a more complete player in the data center with a Brocade acquisition. But some analysts say Brocade would be a stretch for Oracle, and perhaps too disruptive near term for HP. "Much has to do with Oracle's long-term growth plans," states Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Ittai Kidron in a bulletin on the Brocade speculation. "If the company truly plans to become a systems company (one-stop shop software/hardware), then Brocade would be a nice fit, especially including Sun Microsystems with no overlap. Oracle is in the process of acquiring Sun Microsystems for more than $7 billion, which gives it server hardware and software; Brocade would give Oracle LAN and SAN switching hardware and make the company a powerful provider of hardware as well as software. We're a bit in the dark on strategy here. That said, there would be massive overlap with HP's ProCurve networking unit, which we believe would be disruptive.

On HP, Kidron writes: "Brocade would add the missing data center switch architecture as well as a strong presence in the SAN switch market. Also, IBM and EMC are 10% customers for Brocade and could be lost as customers (along with HP's 10% business of Brocade)." If HP acquired Brocade, business from IBM and others could swing back to Cisco, according to UBS analysts Nikos Theodosopoulos. Speculation has it the company will flesh out its Project Stratus cloud computing strategy and/or announce a significant alliance or acquisition with a major IT player. A dark horse in the Brocade stakes would be Juniper, according to investment firm UBS. Juniper and IBM are tightly aligned in data center and cloud computing, and a Brocade acquisition would flesh out much of what's missing in the IBM/Juniper data center arsenal - specifically, an FCoE line of switches. "We believe Juniper may be another potential buyer of Brocade, although recent commentary from Juniper suggests it is not looking at large deals now," UBS analyst Theodosopoulos states in a bulletin on the prospects of a Brocade acquisition. "An acquisition of Brocade would make sense for Juniper, in our view, because it is the only other clear networking partner for IBM, while IBM is currently supporting Juniper's development of an FCoE switch, alleviating some of the R&D budgetary constraints on Juniper as it pursues both LTE & FCoE technologies." Juniper has a major announcement slated for Oct. 28 in New York. IBM may also be interested in Brocade but that would dash its Juniper partnership, kill HP and EMC as 10% revenue customers, and get IBM back in the network and SAN hardware business which may not appeal to the company, Kidron notes. Acquiring Brocade would give Dell, a maker of servers for the data center, more credibility in that market with minimal overlap, according to Kidron.

Another wild card is Dell. But Dell just acquired Perot Systems last month for $4 billion so the prospects of making another major acquisition so soon after is remote, Kidron states. No deal is imminent for Brocade and the company could still dash a potential deal, the WSJ reports. That doesn't necessarily rule them out though. "I think Dell could potentially make a play for them; I've heard through some of their channel that there is a big push for capturing some [data center] share," says Frost & Sullivan analyst Vanessa Alvarez. But proactively seeking out possible acquirers may give the company more control over the process and over its destiny, observers note.

New York Times tricked into serving scareware ad

Scammers tricked the New York Times' Digital Advertising department into placing a malicious ad for fake antivirus software on the NYTimes.com Web site over the weekend, the company confirmed Monday. According to the Times, the scammers initially claimed to be Internet phone provider Vonage, and had placed what appeared to be legitimate Vonage ads on the Web site. The newspaper had warned of the scam advertisement Sunday, after receiving about 100 e-mails from concerned readers.

However, sometime over the weekend, they switched these ads for aggressive pop-up advertisements that tried to trick victims into thinking that their computers were infected. When the complaints started pouring in, the Times first suspected that the ad had been unauthorized, and pulled third-party advertisements from the site. The point of the scam was to sell worried computer users a product called Personal Antivirus, a fake "scareware" product that bombards victims with popup ads until they either hand over their credit card information or somehow manage to remove the program. But on Monday spokeswoman Diane McNulty confirmed that the ad had been submitted directly to the company's online ad department. "The culprit masqueraded as a national advertiser and provided seemingly legitimate product advertising for a week," she said via email. "Over the weekend, the ad being served up was switched so that an intrusive message, claiming to be a virus warning from the reader's computer, appeared. " Technology executive Troy Davis was hit with the ad after he clicked on a Times story about Dubai on Saturday night. This gave the criminals a way to include embedded Web pages in their copy that could be hosted on a completely different server, outside of the control of the Times.

After his antivirus software warned him not to visit the article, he performed an analysis of the site and discovered that the Times was allowing advertisers to embed an HTML element known as an iframe into their advertisements. Apparently the scammers waited until the weekend, when it would be hardest for IT staff to respond, before switching the ad by inserting new JavaScript code into that iframe. It was, of course, all just a fake. That code redirected Davis's browser to the Web site that served a pop-up ad designed to look like a Windows system scan that had found security problems on his system.

Start-up unveils storage platform for large-scale Web applications

A storage company emerged from stealth mode this week with software designed to efficiently manage the file serving needs of Internet applications such as social networks, online ad serving and software-as-a-service.  Nine data storage companies to watch MaxiScale announced the Flex Software Platform, which is installed on commodity gear, such as a bank of Apache Web servers. Retrieving a small file with the MaxiScale system requires just one I/O operation, a feature that eliminates bottlenecks caused by systems that require multiple I/O operations for each small file retrieval, says IDC storage analyst Noemi Greyzdorf. "They built a very interesting file system that handles small files – files that are one megabyte or smaller – incredibly efficiently," Greyzdorf says Configurations start with as few as four nodes but can scale up to 50,000 servers, the company says. The goal is to improve performance and reduce cost, space and power requirements for Web companies that have to deal with large numbers of small files. "We think people deploying Web applications have been paying too much money and we're out to change that," says Gary Orenstein, vice president of marketing for MaxiScale.

Instead of using expensive storage boxes with interconnects like InfiniBand or Fibre Channel, MaxiScale recommends using Flex with 2TB SATA drives and says the Flex system relies on IP and Ethernet connections. "We're using standards-based, commodity hardware for everything," Orenstein says. Maxiscale's first publicly named customer is AdMob, a mobile advertising marketplace that has served more than 110 billion ad impressions in the last three years. Flex uses a patent-pending Peer Set architecture that replicates file data and metadata across SATA drives, allowing for load balancing and resiliency to multiple hardware failures. Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., and founded in 2007, MaxiScale has $17 million in venture financing from investors NEA, El Dorado Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. Flex software is available now and pricing starts at $6,000 for four nodes allowing up to 32TB of storage.

MaxiScale was co-founded by CEO Gianluca Rattazzi, who previously founded Meridian Data, Parallan, P-Com and BlueArc; and CTO Francesco Lacapra, who previously held executive roles at Olivetti, Quantum and BlueArc. Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter.

Why Microsoft kept Exchange 2007 SP2 off latest Windows Server

Microsoft, reacting to a slew of questions from end-users, says timing issues and technical considerations kept it from supporting Exchange 2007 SP2 on the new Windows Server 2008 R2. 5 things we love/hate about Win7/Windows Server 2008 R2Exchange 2010 beta sneak peek test On the Exchange team blog, Nino Bilic, a member of the Exchange product quality team at Microsoft, wrote that there are two primary technical considerations for not supporting the messaging server on the new server OS. Users have been peppering Microsoft with questions over the past few months and the vendor chose Monday to explain its decision as it prepares to put the final touches on Exchange 2010, which aligns with other new infrastructure, namely Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 and Office 2010.  "Two primary technical points drove our decision to not support Windows Server 2008 R2," Bilic wrote. "First, Windows Server 2008 R2, while an incremental OS upgrade, creates significant testing requirements for Exchange 2007. Because the Exchange 2007 SP2 engineering preceded the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, Exchange 2007 SP2 would have had to be delayed significantly to align testing schedules." Bilic said the second point involves not supporting the upgrade of a server OS underneath an existing Exchange server. "The primary need is to support Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controllers in an existing Exchange 2007 deployment, which we have done." Exchange 2007 SP2 can work against those domain controllers because no part of the Exchange infrastructure is running on the domain controller. Exchange 2010 is expected to ship in November. "We felt that thoroughly validating the combination of Exchange 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 allowed us to focus on delivering great solutions which would be fully tested and would support the features of Windows Server 2008 R2," Bilic wrote. "This is a hard trade-off to make, but we believe it is the right one and a good balance between serving existing customers and driving innovation." The new Exchange 2010 server includes a number of new features, including high-availability and cross-domain integration using techniques such as pairing the server with Windows Server 2008 clustering technology and directory federation features. What users are missing is the ability to run any Exchange 2007 R2 components on the new server, including administrative tools on Windows Server 2008 R2. Bilic said the level of testing that would have been required to ensure only a "minimum level" of compatibility would have been significant and still denied users many of the features of the new server OS. In addition, he said the work likely would have altered the delivery schedule for Exchange 2010. Bilic said that fact drove Microsoft to conclude the best decision was to release Exchange 2010 as close as possible to Windows Server 2008 R2, which is now available. The server also includes new archiving features. "We recognize that there are some downstream impacts to this decision related to administration-only installs," Bilic wrote. "The technical problem for us is that an administration install of Exchange is almost identical to a full Exchange server installation." An administration install is when only the administrative interface, used to manage server properties and other features, is loaded on the server OS. Lee Dumas, the director of architecture at managed Exchange service provider Azaleos and a former Microsoft employee on the Exchange team, noted that Exchange 2007 SP2 contains the schema updates that are part of Exchange 2010. "So deploying SP2 prepares you for Exchange 2010. The earlier they can release SP2 the more customers will be prepared for 2010 so that might have had something to do with this as well," he said.

Follow John on Twitter. Dumas noted that releasing planned schema updates with a previous version of Exchange is something new for Microsoft.

Oracle breaks silence on Sun plans in ad

Oracle Corp. ended it silence Thursday on its post-merger plans for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Unix systems in an advertisement aimed at Sun customers to keep them from leaving the Sparc and Solaris platforms. Ever since Oracle announced in April its plans to acquire Sun, its competitors - notably IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. - have been relentlessly pursuing Sun's core customer base, its Sparc and Solaris users. Oracle's ad to "Sun customers," makes a number of promises that includes spending more "than Sun does now," on developing Sparc and Solaris, as well as boosting service and support by having "more than twice as many hardware specialists than Sun does now." Analysts see Oracle's ad as a defensive move that doesn't answer some of the big questions ahead of the $7.4 billion merger with Sun . In fact, there may be a lot of room for skepticism and parsing of Oracle's claims, despite their apparent black and white assertions. Among the top hardware makers, Sun registered the biggest decline in server revenue in the second quarter, offering evidence that this protracted merger may be eroding Sun's value.

Europe is allowing until mid-January to sort this out, which keeps the merger in limbo for another quarter. Oracle wanted the acquisition completed by now but the European Commission this month said it would delay its antitrust review because of "serious concerns" about its impact on the database market. Analysts point out that Oracle's plans to spend more "than Sun does now," may be a little hallow because Sun's spending on developing Sparc and Solaris is probably at a low. "The ad sounds convincing - but perhaps being a word nitpicker, the Sun does now' might not mean much if Sun has drastically cut back due to plummeting sales," Rich Partridge, an analyst at Ideas International Ltd., said in an e-mail. "I think someone at Oracle suddenly realized that Sun was bleeding so badly that what would be left when Oracle finally got control would be worth a small fraction of what they paid and no one would buy the hardware unit," Rob Enderle, an independent analyst, said in an e-mail. But Enderle said the ad's claims do not preclude Oracle from selling its hardware division, and says the company "will have to support the unit for a short time after taking control; during that short time they can easily outspend Sun's nearly non-existent budgets." Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc., said if it was Oracle's plan to start on day one of the merger to shop the Sparc processor around, "would they have put this ad out? Taken at face value, the ad seems to indicate that Oracle will keep Sun's hardware and microprocessor capability and not spin it off, as some analysts believe possible.

Probably not," he said. "Does it preclude Oracle from changing their mind? Indeed, Oracle's major competitive concern was indicated in the ad in a quote by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: "IBM, we're looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business." No. Companies change their mind all the time." An erosion of Sun's customer also hurts Oracle, because a lot of Sun customers are also Oracle customers, and Oracle doesn't want its existing customer to go to IBM and move away from Oracle's platform, Haff said.

Week in Google: Wave makes splash, Gmail gets new threat

Here's a look back at a busy week in Google news stories:   IBM aims at Google, Microsoft with new Webmail  IBM introduced LotusLive iNotes, an on-demand e-mail, calendaring and contact management system meant to compete with the likes of Gmail and Microsoft Exchange. Similar to a bulletin board system, Google Wave, the brainchild of a pair of twins, lets users create shared, ongoing, real-time conversations called Waves. Pricing starts at $3 per user per month, undercutting Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 per user per year.   Google Wave invite-only preview sets off Google Wave mania Google on Wednesday sent out more than 100,000 invitations to developers to preview Google Wave, a new communications and collaboration tool that Google plans to release next year. The application makes it easy for users to share videos, photos and maps.

Google removed the site's home page from its search results in response to a complaint it received under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And big applications vendors like SAP and Salesforce.com are already rallying around it.   Google removes The Pirate Bay home page from search results File-sharing site The Pirate Bay was once again in the crosshairs of copyright owners. A search for "The Pirate Bay" Friday turned up a message at the bottom of the first search-results page that said: "In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 7 result(s) from this page. Textscape alleges Google is violating a patent that covers a method for managing a body of text on a computer that was granted to the company in 1998. Textscape says Google's Chrome's browser improperly uses the innovation.   Google celebrates 11th birthday PC World writes: "Google has come a long way in its eleven-year history, from its humble beginning as a Stanford University research project in 1998, to the global, multi-billion dollar online presence Google enjoys today."   Google eyeing Firefox with Chrome Frame plug-in? If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org."   Google, Adobe sued by Textscape over patents  Google and Adobe Systems have been sued by a New Jersey company for allegedly violating patents used for processing text, according to recent court filings.

Computerworld reports that Mozilla's chief engineer says Google might build a Chrome Frame plug-in for the Firefox browser. Features include an equations editor and a language translator. Separately, Computerworld reported that Mozilla officials said Chrome Frame for Microsoft IE could result in "browser soup."    Google Apps takes aim at students Google hired interns to help it figure out how to make Google Apps more appealing to young people, according to PC World. Google expands search control with new options Google is adding new functionality to a side panel that could provide quicker access to relevant search results. The side panel can be activated by clicking the "show options" button on the search results page.

The company is adding options to filter search results by blog and news items to the side panel accompanying search results. These options will provide users quick access to more relevant sources, said Nundu Janakiram, product manager for search at Google. IDG News Service, PC World and Computerworld contributed to this roundup For more on Google, visit Network World's Google Subnet, an independent Google community.