Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) is a relatively new feature for Linux kernels that has many DevOps, SREs, and engineers excited. But is it a one-stop shop solution for all of your Linux kernel needs? Let’s take a look at what eBPF does well, and how it stacks up against standard Linux iptables.

The #LifeatTorq Team Spotlight is a Q&A series dedicated to the talented and generally kick-ass team that form the foundation of our growing company. Today we are spotlighting Kostya Ostrovsky , a Software Architect at Torq based in our Tel Aviv office. Kostya is one of the first employees at Torq.

As developers, we spend a lot of time in our IDEs writing new code, refactoring code, adding tests, fixing bugs and more. And in recent years, IDEs have become powerful tools, helping us developers with anything from interacting with HTTP requests to generally boosting our productivity. So you have to ask — what if we could also prevent security issues in our code before we ship it?

One of the most worrisome trends in cybersecurity today is the skyrocketing incidence of supply chain attacks, such as the ones that hit SolarWinds last year and Kaseya more recently. Because they focus on compromising software development and delivery, supply chain attacks have forced developers and DevOps teams to scramble for solutions. Unfortunately, supply chain attacks are particularly challenging to prevent, detect and remediate, and, because of their stealthy nature, are often devastating.

Almost all tasks within a Linux system, whether it’s an application, system daemon, or certain types of user activity, are executed by one or more processes . This means that monitoring processes is key to detecting potentially malicious activity in your systems, such as the creation of unexpected web shells or other utilities.

Kubernetes operations (kOps) is one of the official Kubernetes (K8s) projects. The kOps project allows for rapid deployment of production-grade K8s clusters in multiple cloud platforms. By leveraging yaml manifests, kOps delivers a familiar experience to users who have worked with kubectl. Similar to K8s clusters in popular cloud platforms, kOps helps set up self-managed clusters to easily deliver high availability.

Each year, SolarWinds® surveys IT professionals around the world to gauge what’s most pressing on their minds, but also to understand their organization’s challenges and how they intend to overcome them. In 2021, we wanted to know what organizations think of the increasing risks they face from both the reality of supporting the hybrid workplace and the expanding cyberthreat landscape—and how they’ve prepared to address them.

Directly embedding passwords and API keys into the code you write is a bad practice. Of course, everyone knows this, but I’ll be the first to admit that it still happens now and then. In the world of source control and shared codebases, leaking a password can be a huge problem that costs your team time and money. Of course, today many companies leverage a secrets management system to lower the probability of something like this happening.