Last week in my lab, I had an issue arise with one of my older network testbeds. When I came into the lab in the morning, none of my access points were connected to my older Cisco 5508 controller. A little troubleshooting and I quickly discovered that there was a certificate issue on my access points and controllers. Here, I’ll share what the issue was, the fix, and what impact it will have on your business.

Twenty years of change in technology has created new types of businesses and disrupted entire industries. The current shift from Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)-based networks to Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is such a game changer as organizations rely more and more on mobile devices, IoT and media-rich applications to perform a wide range of activities in order to create gains in productivity, efficiency and cost reduction.

Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) has been commanding a lot of attention lately, and rightly so. Network traffic is increasing by 30% year-over-year, and by 2020, there’s projected to be 1.2 billion mobile-connected devices. The increase in traffic means that traditional wide-area networks (WANs) are being pushed to their limits, especially in organizations with multiple locations. To alleviate unprecedented demands from mobile users, security threats, and cloud applications, more organizations are turning to SD-WAN. SD-WAN offers a better approach to WAN connectivity by solving the digital transformation challenges of traditional WAN architectures.

In late October of 2016, a domain name service (DNS), host and Internet management company for 80+ major websites experienced several bouts of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by botnets (short for “robot network”). The end devices were being controlled by a Control Server (CNC Server) not unlike the Droid Control Ships controlling the Droid Armies in Star Wars. The FBI has stated that they do not have any confirmation of a specific group or groups claiming responsibility in the hacker community, but they believe the machines were infected with a variation of the Mirai malware.