Discover how mastering email communication can boost business efficiency, avoid common pitfalls, and ensure secure, respectful online interactions.
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Why Shielded Cables?
With high bandwidth applications emerging in and out of the data center, the need for shielded cable has increased. Many of these new installations are in harsh environments. Robotic equipment, motors, generators, air conditioners, fluorescent lights, printers, and they often generate a large amount of EMI (Electromagnetic Interference) and RFI (Radio Frequency Interference). You may need to install shielded cables in these harsh environments.
EMI and RFI can cause crosstalk between circuits and interfere with data transmission on a copper cable. The interference will cause increased errors resulting in mire network traffic due to packet retransmissions, and downtime.
Shielded cables reduce interfernece
EMI is an unwanted signal that is induced into the cable. EMI typically comes from a source that is external to the cable, such as an electrical cable or device. Cables can be both a source and receiver of EMI. As a source, the cable can either conduct noise to other equipment or act as an antenna radiating noise. As a receiver, the cable can pick up EMI radiated from other sources.
RFI is a disturbance that affects an electrical circuit due to either electromagnetic conduction or radiation emitted from an external source. Conducted RFI is unwanted high frequencies that ride on the AC waveform. Radiated RFI is emitted through the air.
Ethernet cables can be shielded to deal with EMI and RFI. The shield surrounds the inner signal carrying conductors. Shielded Ethernet cables can deal with interference in two ways. It can reflect the energy, or it can pick up the interference and conduct it to ground. Both methods use shielding to cut the EMI and RFI reaching the twisted pairs located under the shielding. Whether the EMI/RFI is reflected off the shield or “rides” the shield to ground, some energy can still pass through the shielding, but since it is so highly attenuated it will not cause interference.
Types of shielded cables
Two basic types of shielded cables are available. The first are cables with an overall shield known generically as STP. STP cable may be made either with a foil or a braid for the shield. STP cables with an overall foil are often known as FTP. In practice, FTP and STP cables may be interchanged with no apparent difference in performance according to BlackBox
The second type of shielded cable is S/STP. S/STP cables have a shield around each individual pair and an overall outer shield. BlackBox says the purpose of the inner shields is to cut the Alien Cross Talk parameter in CAT7 and CAT6a systems.On both STP and S/STP the primary task of the outer shield is to resist external RF noise such as electrical spikes. S/STP cables may also have an extra braid for strength and to simplify connection to the metal shields around the connectors.
To reduce EMI/RFI interference, shielded Ethernet cables must use shielded connectors to maintain the benefits of STP cabling. High-quality shielded cable includes a drain wire to provide grounding that cancels the effects of EMI and can ease termination of the cable shield for crimping or soldering.
Proper Ground connections
The shielded cable system must have proper ground connections for the shields. Incorrect grounding opens the possibility for ground loop currents and associated interference to the Ethernet signal. In the worst cases with no proper grounding, the shields can actually act as antenna broadcasting high-frequency signals out into the environment interfering with electronic equipment and allowing external detection of the Ethernet data.
Standards bodies have requirements for shielded Ethernet systems. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) specifics how shielded communications cables are properly grounded. Normal practice says the cable shields should be grounded in the telecommunications closet (TC). Typically, the cable shield is grounded through the connector to the patch panel. Then the panel is grounded to the rack, which is grounded to the telecommunications grounding busbar in the TC. Do not ground the cable shield at the work-area outlet. Fortunately, many of today’s shielded outlets automatically connect to the patch panel’s ground so there’s no need to set up ground paths for each cable.
ISO/IEC requires that shielding must be complete for an entire channel, shielded and shielded cables, connectors or network controllers should not be mixed.
Cable Types
Category cable types comparison.| Max Data Rate | Max TX Rate | Max Length | Sheilding | Year Introduced | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cat 3 | 10Mbps | 16MHz | 100m | No | 1983 | Obsolete |
| Cat 5 | 1,000Mbps | 100MHz | 100m | Optional | 1995 | Obsolete |
| Cat 5e | 1,000Mbps | 250MHz | 100m | Optional | 2001 | Obsolete |
| Cat 6 | 10,000Mbps | 500MHz | 100m | Optional | 2002 | |
| Cat 6a | 10,000Mbps | 500MHz | 100m | Optional | 2008 | |
| Cat 7 | 10,000Mbps | 600MHz | 100m | Required | 2002 | Not recognized by TIA |
| Cat 7a | 10,000Mbps | 1GHz | 100m | Required | 2010 | Not recognized by TIA |
| Cat 8.1 | 40,000Mbps | 2GHz | 30m | Required | 2016 | Backward compatible with Cat 6A |
| Cat 8.2 | 40,000Mbps | 2GHz | 30m | Required | 2016 | Not recognized by TIA |
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interference is not a new problem. It dates back to the earliest communication systems. In 1881 Alexander Graham described the interaction between many twisted pairs in US Patent 244,426.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Marriott Data Breach One Of Biggest Ever
Updated July 17, 2019 – The Brits slapped Marriott with a £99m ($124m) fine for “infringements of the GDPR.” The Information Commissioner’s Office said that Marriott failed to undertake sufficient due diligence when it bought Starwood, and should also have done more to secure its systems prior to the data breach.
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The internet is a dangerous place for data. Hotel chain Marriott (MAR) proved that once again. Marriott revealed that hackers stole personal information from 500 million Starwood Preferred Guest program participants. The data stolen in the data breach included sensitive personally identifiable information (PII).
Marriott said it got an alert on September 8, 2018, about an attempt to access the Starwood database and enlisted security experts to assess the situation. During the investigation, Marriott claims to have discovered that the unauthorized access to the Starwood network started in 2014.
Investigators found that an unauthorized party had copied and encrypted information from the database and had taken steps toward removing it. The company was able to decrypt the information on November 19, 2018, and found that the contents were from the Starwood guest reservation database. The hotel chain then waited until November 30, 2018, to tell its customers of the data theft.
What was lost on the data breach
For about 327 million Marriott customers, the compromised information includes some combination of name, address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest (‘SPG’) account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences. Marriott added that the data breach included payment card information. About 170 million impacted Marriott customers only had their names and basic information like address or email address stolen.
Marriott says that about 20.3 million encrypted passport numbers and approximately 8.6 million encrypted payment cards were compromised in the breach.
Several sources report that state-sponsored Chinese hackers working for the intelligence services and the military were behind the attack. The stolen data would be an espionage bonanza for government hackers. Sources point out that the Starwood attacks began in 2014, shortly after the attack on the U.S. government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) compromised sensitive data on tens of millions of employees, including application forms for security clearances.
Sadly, the 500 million records Marriott hack only ranks as the third-largest known data breach to date. This list of fails illustrates, no matter what you’re doing online every time you put your information on the internet, you risk it being stolen.
| Rank | Company | Accounts Hacked | Date of Hack |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yahoo | 3 Billion | August 2013 |
| 2 | River City Media | 1.3 Billion | May 2017 |
| 3 | Aadhaar | 1.1 Billion | January 2018 |
| 4 | Marriott | 500 Million | 2014 - 2018 |
| 5 | Yahoo | 500 Million | Late 2014 |
| 6 | Adult Friend Finder | 412 Milton | October 2016 |
| 7 | MySpace | 360 Million | May 2016 |
| 8 | Exactis | 340 Million | June 2018 |
| 9 | 330 Million | May 2018 | |
| 10 | Experian | 200 Million | March 2012 |
| 11 | Deep Root Analytics | 198 Million | June 2017 |
| 12 | Adobe | 152 Million | October 2013 |
| 13 | Under Armor | 150 Million | February 2018 |
| 14 | Equifax | 145.5 Million | July 2017 |
| 15 | Ebay | 145 Million | May 2014 |
| 16 | Heartland Payment Systems | 134 Million | May 2008` |
| 17 | Alteryx | 123 Million | December 2017 |
| 18 | Nametests | 120 Million | June 2018 |
| 19 | 117 Million | June 2012 | |
| 20 | Target | 110 Million | November 2013 |
| 21 | Quora | 100 million | November 2018 |
| 22 | VK | 100 Million | December 2018 |
| 23 | Firebase | 100 Million | June 2018 |
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There is something else fishy here. Reports claim that the data was encrypted using AES-128 but not all the stolen data. Attackers were able to steal nearly 20 million passport numbers, and 8.6 million encrypted payment cards.
Marriott says that the attackers were able to gain access to 5.25 million unencrypted passport numbers and 2,000 unencrypted payment card numbers.
I’m sure that regulators (GDPR) and lawyers will ask why unencrypted sensitive info like passports and credit card numbers lying around waiting to be stolen?
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2019, Advanced Encryption Standard, AES, China, Cyberwarfare, Data breach, Encryption, Equifax, GDPR, GPDR, Heartland, Marroitt, MySpace, OPM, PII, Security, Target, Verizon, Yahoo
Happy New Year 2019
Doomba
A fitting way to close out 2018 is to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the classic first-person shooter game “Doom.” Doom tells the story of a base operated by the Union Aerospace Corporation on the Martian moon Phobos. The base is overrun by demons from Hell after its top-secret teleportation experiments go awry. A detachment of space marines are sent to investigate and all but one are slaughtered. It’s up to the player to fight through the horde of demons on Phobos and, eventually Hell itself, to prevent a massive invasion of Earth.
Like the last space marine, Doom is a survivor. As Motherboard explained, Doom is compatible with many devices because id Software wanted it to be. id Software released Doom‘s source code to the public in 1997 for reuse. Doom has been modified to run in ASCII and on a number of platforms including ATMs and printers.
The latest hack of Doom comes from developer Rich Whitehouse. He exploited the fact that Roomba self-driving vacuum robots create maps of your house as they sweep up. iRobot CEO Colin Angle swears he will totally never sell maps of your home to advertisers. Despite the CEO’s assurances, Mr. Whitehouse demonstrates that these maps can be exported. He uses the Roomba maps to create Doomba a tool that converts Roomba maps for use in Doom. Mr. Whitehouse told Digital Trends.
There’s a lot going on under the hood, though. The Roomba is broadcasting a position and angle across the network in roughly one second intervals, as well as a bunch of other data. I write the relevant data out to a .noeroomba file as it comes in. When you go to load that .noeroomba file [into my own tool] Noesis, that’s when the magic happens.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Stories From A Christmas Story
The 1983 classic holiday movie A Christmas Story, has been with us for 35 years. If you have lived under a rock for the last 35 years, the movie is based on the Jean Shepherd story In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash which chronicles Ralphies quest for a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun Here are some little known facts about the holiday classic movie.
The 24-hour marathon began as a stunt. Thanks to Ted Turner holiday revelers can see Ralphie a.k.a. Peter Billingsley, as many times as they want on TBS. The 24-hour Christmas Day marathon of A Christmas Story is probably dreaded by as many people s those who enjoy it. TNT rolled out the first marathon in 1988 as a stunt and it became a recurring holiday tradition in 1997.
Ralphie really wants a Red Ryder BB Gun. Ralphie says he wants the a Red Ryder BB Gun 28 times throughout the course of the movie. Mental Floss calculates that’s about once every three minutes and 20 seconds.
You can still buy a Red Ryder BB Gun. The real Red Ryder BB Gun was first made in 1938 and was named after a popular newspaper comic strip. You can still buy Red Ryder BB Gun for the low price of $29.98. The original wasn’t quite the same as the one in the movie. The “official Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time” did not have Ralphie’s compass in the stock, or “this thing which tells time” that both the Jean Shepherd story and the movie call for.
Daisy introduced the Red Ryder BB gun, named after the comic strip cowboy Red Ryder., and it sold for $2.95. It did not have a compass or a sundial. That was the Buck Jones model, named for a popular Western movie star of the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. Special versions of the “official Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time” had to be made just for A Christmas Story.
The Daisy BB gun started in Michigan. The Plymouth Windmill Company of Plymouth Michigan began giving away BB guns as a gift for buying a windmill. Declining sales of windmills forced the business to convert to making only BB guns. In 1895 the company changed its name to Daisy Manufacturing Company, Inc. When World War II began, Daisy stopped making the air guns for several years. Production resumed in 1946 and a few years later the company was selling more than 1 million BB guns annually. Daisy relocated from Michigan to Arkansas in 1958.
Flick’s tongue wasn’t actually frozen to that flagpole. If you triple dog dare your best friend to stick his tongue stuck on a piece of cold metal it will stick. Mythbusters proved it was possible to get your tongue truly stuck on a piece of cold metal. But Flick’s tongue wasn’t actually stuck on the icy pole. The producers used a hidden suction tube to safely create the illusion.
Frageelee—it must be Italian. The author of the book saw an advertisement for Nehi orange soda featuring a woman’s leg and used it as an inspiration for creating the “major award.” The producers had three leg lamps created for the movie. All three copies of the leg lamp that the Old Man loves so much were broken during filming.
Just a kid. The boy in the goggles who’s waiting next to Ralphie to see Santa is not an actor. He was a real kid in the department store, and director Bob Clark decided to put him in the scene because he looked odd.
“I fought it all the way down the line … It was based on a story called ‘Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid’ and I could accept that was too long for a marquee. My original title was ‘Santa’s Revenge.’
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Happy Viewing and Merry Christmas
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.