Do you want free software or do you want supported, enterprise grade software? Many people think that’s the question. It’s not.
Like all data geeks we wanted to understand the appetite by the networking industry for open source SDN and NFV, so the OpenDaylight Project commissioned a report from Gigaom Research that was made available today. It surveyed enterprises and service providers across North America to understand network pain points and where SDN and open source could help. What struck me was that 95 percent showed a strong bias for open source, and 76 percent said they want to consume open source from a commercial vendor. Does this seem at odds? Not at all. This isn’t wanting your cake and eating too. It is fully rational to want both. The report clearly illustrates an evolution that’s happened in the software industry where people want the best of both worlds: the flexibility, freedom and neutrality of an open source solution with the advantages of support and services that a commercial vendor can provide. Of course many will want to consume at the extremes (fully proprietary or fully open) and that’s fine too. I call the emerging dominant model Open Plus, and you can read more thoughts about that here.
Report: SDN, NFV, and Open Source: The Operator’s View, March 2014
Researchers have documented an ongoing criminal operation infecting more than 10,000 Unix and Linux servers with malware that sends spam and redirects end users to malicious Web pages.
Windigo, as the attack campaign has been dubbed, has been active since 2011 and has compromised systems belonging to the Linux Foundation’s kernel.org and the developers of the cPanel Web hosting control panel, according to a detailed report published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During its 36-month run, Windigo has compromised more than 25,000 servers with robust malware that sends more than 35 million spam messages a day and exposes Windows-based Web visitors to drive-by malware attacks. It also feeds people running any type of computer banner ads for porn services.
The Eset researchers, who have been instrumental in uncovering similar campaigns compromising large numbers of servers running the nginx, Lighttpd, and Apache Web servers, said the latest campaign has the potential to inflict significant harm on the Internet at large. They explained:
The number of systems affected by Operation Windigo might seem small when compared with recent malware outbreaks where millions of desktops are infected. It is important to keep in mind that, in this case, each infected system is a server. These usually offer services to numerous users and are equipped with far more resources in terms of bandwidth, storage and computation power than normal personal computers. A denial of service attack or a spam-sending operation using one thousand servers is going to be far more effective than the same operation performed with the same number of desktop computers.
