With so much networking and IT-related news making its way around the internet on a daily basis, we thought it would be a good idea to round up some of the most exciting news stories each month and bring them to you in one neatly-wrapped package. In our monthly news roundups you’ll find everything from the latest in Network Management Systems (NMS), to announcements about future tech that could change the way we use networks, to general news about major players in the networking world.

So without further ado, here are our networking news highlights for November 2015:

Security company, Damaballa, uncovers malware used in 2013’s Sony hack

Two years after the crippling hack that left much of Sony Corporation’s systems completely unusable and resulted in the theft of gigabytes’ worth of private data, security company, Damaballa, has found two utilities that may have been used in the attack. The first, setMFT, enables timestomping, which makes it possible to edit the timestamp of a file so that it ‘blends in’ to its surroundings: useful for concealing a file from network administrators and virus scans. The second tool, afset, can be used to clear log data on Windows systems and change the build-time and checksum for an executable, making it hackers’ ultimate tool for covering their tracks. Read more here.

LTE-broadcasting streetlights make an appearance in Los Angeles

In case you had forgotten that the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) is on our doorstep, here’s your weekly reminder: in an innovative project, the City of Los Angeles is planning to install ‘smart light poles’ that act as both state-of-the-art LED streetlights and 4G-LTE towers. The lights are also planned to help extend the range of upcoming 5G networks – portions of which are likely to use millimetre spectrum, meaning signals won’t travel as far as it does with today’s UHF networks. Read more here.

Google is ramping up its cloud efforts with innovative features and payment models

Though Google is technically third in the race for cloud dominance, there’s a substantial gap between Google Cloud and its competitors – Amazon AWS in first and Microsoft Azure in second. However, the search giant has been making inroads towards greater adoption through sizeable price reductions over the last 12 months, and aims to gain even more traction with the introduction of its Custom Machine Types feature. Custom Machine Types does exactly what it says on the box – essentially, it allows users to build their own compute instances to serve the needs of a project without wasting resources. Additionally, Google charges compute resources used per minute, meaning as soon as the workload stops running, the meter stops ticking. Read more here.

Secret Double Octopus to push past double encryption

Strange as its name may be, Secret Double Octopus (SDO) is an Israeli-based cybersecurity firm looking for ways to secure network traffic and lock down authentication beyond the current paradigms of SSL, PKI and VPN. SDO aims to circumvent encryption entirely through secret sharing. This effectively entails ‘shredding’ data packets and sending their constituent parts through many different routes, allowing only the intended recipient of the packet to recombine these disparate pieces into coherent data when it arrives. For anyone who has experience with the TOR network, this uses a similar principle, albeit on an entirely different scale. Read more here.

Intel announces an expansion to its Xeon D silicon

Intel’s latest expansion to their D-1500 product family comes in the form of eight new Systems-on-a-Chip (SOC) for lower-power networking and IoT applications, in addition to two new families of ethernet controllers – one for enterprise and data centre use, the other intended for applications on the network edge. The new additions to Intel’s line-up are intended to serve Intel’s vision of the future of networking as a marriage between industry-standard hardware and cutting-edge virtualisation software. Read more here.

Wireshark 2.0 has been released

Wireshark, one of the most popular open source network packet analysis tools the world over, has just released version 2.0 of their software, which features a completely redesigned User Interface, support for BTSNOOP and PCAP files, and a list of new and updated protocol supports that is too long to list in this blog. Read the official changelog here. Also, check out our blog on the benefits of open source Network Management System software.

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