OK 2017, Now What?

The Year of the (Fire) Rooster will soon be upon us and the talkative, outspoken, frank, open, honest, and loyal Rooster could influence events in 2017. Whether you were born under the symbol or not, Roosters strive on trust and responsibility, essential for any organization especially in these times.

2016 (Year of the Monkey) brought us a crazy year of high profile breaches, a 500% increase in ransomware, a 0-day per day and slick malware each looking to cause havoc on all parts of society including your mobile device. The monkey’s shenanigans exhausted many of us in 2016 and 2017 will require some quick thinking and practical solutions to battle the ongoing, ever-growing threats.

A year ago I noted, Mobility, both the state of being and the devices we use, will continue to grow and be an immense enabler and/or inhibitor for organizations. Today, we are the devices, controllers and data generators and we’re interacting, even socially, with a growing list of robots and objects. Security continues to flummox folks both from a development standpoint – talking to you IoT manufacturers – and from a purely personal realm. The more connected devices we have in and around our lives, homes and offices the more opportunities for the bad guys to take advantage.

This is sure to continue as our digital, software-defined lives connect and intersect with the things around us. We’ll likely see a number of significant IoT security discussions coming out of CES this week too with cars and robots the starring attraction this year.

And as our lives – personal and professional – continue to be chronicled on the internet, the various thieves, nation states, and activists will continue to be one step ahead, probing data and looking for that golden slab of info. Making money, causing disruptions, or orchestrating outright take-downs through online attacks are big motivations for those seeking notoriety or simply a big score. But it’s not always from the crook or spy half a globe away. Insider threats, malicious or not, have made traditional concepts of the perimeter almost useless.

Here at DevCentral, our community is ready to help you through many of your most challenging application delivery endeavors this year. Like the rooster, we aim to be open and honest about how to accomplish a task with BIG-IP...including when it cannot do something. In recent weeks we’ve posted mitigations for Mirai bots, the recent PHP 0-days, along with a bunch of iControlREST solutions and an excellent article from Kevin Stewart about TLS Fingerprinting. And we look forward to answering your most perplexing BIG-IP questions. Also our very own Jason Rahm passed his Exam 201 - TMOS Administration so make sure you hit him up for some of your harder questions. The rest of the team will be looking to take the F5 Certified 201 sometime this quarter.

While trends like cloud, mobility, IoT, DevOps and big data will consume your attention, securing those trends and how they map to business objectives will come to roost in 2017 and DevCentral is here to help. Let’s try to be smart, practical, open and honest about our challenges and guard against the vain, boastful and attention grabbing bad guys trying to get the best of us.

The 2017 Rooster arrives January 28, 2017 and we’ll need to be prepared and stay calm when the proverbial fan starts spinning.

Published Jan 04, 2017

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