Así se domina el Mundo

I like reading. I don’t have much time for reading but I like reading at least 10 minutes a day. I’ve needed more than two months for reading the last book, but I’ve finished it. Great!! Así se domina el mundo by Pedro Baños has been the last book I've read. Pedro is a Spanish military and Colonel of the Spanish Army who is specialized in geostrategy, defense, security, terrorism and intelligence. Actually, I didn’t know anything about this man till I’ve read this book. If you like these topics, you can also watch “La mesa del coronel (Cuatro)” where Pedro works as a presenter.

This is a book mainly about geopolitics and geostrategy. These are two concepts I didn’t know very well. Geopolitics is the study of the effects of Earth’s geography (human and physical) on politics and international relations. However, geostrategy, which is a subfield of geopolitics, is a type of foreign policy guided principally by geographical factors as they inform, constrain, or affect political and military planning. Therefore, geopolitics and geostrategy are very important because the world is defined by these two concepts.

If you want to know about geopolitics and geostrategy, you’ll have to study history. The world is like it is today thanks to history. For instance, Crimea was in Ottoman Empire, which recognised the independence of Crimea, but was then conquered by the Russian Empire. During Soviet Union, Crimea was autonomous in the Ukrainian Republic but the Russian Federation wants Crimea goes back to Russia. Today, Crimean people is divided between Russians, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Belarusians, Armenians and others. To sum up, it’s a mess. What’s more, there are lots of mess like this around the world.

We can read in this book some immutable geopolitical principles. These principles are very important to understand why the world and countries make decisions. For example, States are like living being which move mainly by the economy. We can see the trade war between China and US. Both countries are fighting to dominate the world. However, history and allies are also two immutable principles very important in geopolitics.

We can also read some interesting geostrategies in this book. Intimidation is one of the strategies most used by States. We can see how most countries show off military equipment. Russia, North Korea, China, US or even Spain show tanks, fighter aircraft and bombs to intimidate adversaries. However, there are many strategies such as the breaking point or support the division. I’m sure some of them will be well known for you.

In addition, we can read some errors made in geopolitic. Idiosyncrasy is something to take into account in geopolitics because each country and each town is different. There are lots of cultures which has to be taken into account. Religions are also important by lots of people. States can make errors in geopolitics which can be dangerous for the future of the country.

That’s all my friends. If you love geopolitics and geostrategic, you should read this book.

Ariadnex – Deep Network Intelligence

I work at ARIADNEX since 2009. I’ve learnt a lot about networking and security in these 10 years. I’ve had the chance of configuring dynamic routing protocols such as BGP, OSPF or RIP. I’ve installed and configured lots of switches and routers. I’ve deployed security tools such as SIEM, Antivirus, IDS/IPS, firewalls, etc. I’ve analysed lots of security alerts to know what’s happened in the network. I’ve even been a teacher in IT courses on network, security, hacking and forensics. I’ve been able to do many tasks in these 10 years.

I’ve realised when there are issues with the network, such as slowness or traffic is not going through the best route, companies and IT engineers get crazy. When there are complex issues, we need a DEEP knowledge for a DEEP analysis. We’ll need networking and security tools where we can analyse lots of metrics such as sessions, flows, traffic, etc. We should even be able to download the packet to know what’s going on. What’s more, if we want to know what happened in the past, one day or two days ago, we should also be able to download these packets for a better analysis.

DEEP

Most applications use the NETWORK to send and receive data. Today, the network is very important in most businesses. Therefore, networking monitoring is a must in most companies because if there are issues, we’ll need to check how the network is performing. Companies need a healthy and clean network, where data is going through, because the network is the highway of data. If you are an IT engineer and you are worried about your data, network monitoring is your friend.

NETWORK

 

Sadly, there are lots of companies which don’t know what’s going in their networks. They can’t perform a deep analysis either. However, there are companies which do have network monitor or even they can perform a deep analysis but they don’t have the third important concept. INTELLIGENCE. Intelligence is required to know exactly what the monitoring tools is recording. Intelligence is required to know exactly what events and logs are recording. We can add intelligence to the monitoring tools with books, study and expertise.

INTELLIGENCE

 

There are many adversarial simulation tools which help us to know if the network and security monitoring tool is working well. FlightSIM is my favourite one because we can easily generate malicious traffic such as C&C traffic, DGA traffic, spambot traffic, etc. However, there are many others useful adversarial simulation tools such as Caldera, BT3 or DumpsterFire. It’s up to you which one you want to use to know if your monitoring tools detect malicious traffic.

Adversarial Simulation Tool

 

We can perform Deep Network Intelligence from Ariadnex but we can improve this intelligence with a Network Packet Broker (NPB). Gigamon is a NPB which can be used to resend a copy of the traffic to the monitoring tools. For instance, we can send a copy of the traffic to SSL Intercept appliances, IDS/IPS appliances, etc. Therefore, A-DNI along with a NPB will be the next generation monitoring tool at Ariadnex.

SSL Inspection with Gigamon

 

Regards my friends. What do you think?