We received quite a few interesting looks at last year’s OctoberTekfest, when we unveiled the KegBot and Hack for Beer challenge. A couple of hours into the challenge, we developed a crowd of folks gathered around the booth. Some people came to watch and cheer on their friends, while others took notes with hopes of decreasing the amount of time it took to “Pwn Beer.” The most interesting thing that happened, at least from my perspective, was that all of the folks that came to the booth experienced all of the excitement and frustration associated with executing a hack to a networked system. Many folks took note that some of the methods used to hack the KegBot, leveraged vulnerabilities and configuration issues that could have been easily mitigated. Several conversations started that examined the ideas of: What if the firewall placement changed? or What if the admin’s workstation had been patched, or not left on or unlocked? This is the true value in the whole demonstration. The process forces us to think about the issues that allowed the hack to happen in the first place. The beauty of the demonstration is that it was conducted in a controlled environment, no real data was ever at risk, and we all learned a lot.

Welcome to KegBot, Part 2! If you read my last blog, you know that we’ve set out to build the most awesome IoT device ever; an automated beer dispenser we call the KegBot! If you didn’t get a chance to read it, you can get up to speed on the first several hurdles we tackeled here.

The face of something very familiar is changing. Within a few years you may not recognize the “face” of your data center because many of the technologies you’ve relied on for the last 5-10 years are being disrupted.

For the last 5 years, IE’s invited customers to sample the latest technologies and some of the best local beer and food as part of our OktoberTekfest event. It’s a great opportunity to see the latest products and solutions offered by IE and our partners, to meet the IE staff and have some fun. As part of the planning team for IE, it falls on me to determine what Collaboration technology we’re going to present to give our customers a glimpse of the future and prepare their organizations for what’s to come. This is no easy task. There are so many technologies with so much potential. This year we thought we’d take a slightly different approach with one demo. We wanted to not only showcase our partner’s tech but also what creative things our technical team can do with them. We thought about what technology could we show at a German Oktoberfest-inspired event. An event with a fully functional beer garden, lots of beer flowing, and the smell of brats, pretzels and other great food. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could combine two of our favorite things, technology AND beer? And then it hit us, we’ll build a KegBot! What is a KegBot?

Update: Jaymes Krueger has recently posted an updated Cisco DNA Center blog: "Debunking the Top Cisco DNA Center Misconceptions." (March 2022). Read it here. ___ For years, we’ve heard about Software Defined Networking (SDN), and while the hype has been tremendous, we in the engineering community have joked that SDN stands for “Still Does Nothing”. Now that that SDN has been overhyped, marketers have moved on to terms like SD-Access (or SD-WAN) and Digitization. So, when Cisco recently announced their Digital Network Architecture, or DNA, the engineering community reacted with a collective yawn. Just another marketing term, right? Is this just an attempt to erase stale connotations of the first-generation SDN? Not exactly, as it turns out. Where SDN was the automation of network management, Cisco DNA is the automation of the network itself, or “digital networking”.

One of the most important goals of IT Security, perhaps the most important goal, is to reduce risk. Generally, when we think of IT Security and Cyber Risk, we think of hackers and/or a breach, however, a security breach is just one risk element. Cyber risk includes the risk of financial loss, disruption to business, or damage to the reputation of an organization due to some sort of failure of its information technology systems. It can also come from many different sources, such as environmental factors, under-staffing, under-funding, lack of processes and procedures, misaligned processes and policies, equipment failure, and breaches. Being able to fully understand what risk is present and determine the best way to mitigate that risk is a significant challenge to any organization. This often leads to a security solution compounding your risk, rather than mitigating it. Here are two common ways we’ve seen security solutions increase an organization’s risk.