Recent Articles
Salesforce.com outage has customers tweeting
Mar 13, 2010 Developement Leave a comment
Salesforce.com customers were abuzz on Twitter Thursday morning as the result of what they described as a North American outage.
NY To Replace IT Vendors With State Workers
Mar 13, 2010 IT Leave a comment
dcblogs writes “New York state plans to replace as many as 500 IT contract workers with a new type of temporary state worker. The state estimates it can save $25,000 annually for each contracting position that is in-sourced. This is the result of a new law creating ‘term appointments,’ which strip away some hiring and firing rules that apply to permanent state workers. These term appointment workers are employed ‘at will.’ Term appointments can be up to five years and workers get state benefits. Proponents of this change said a state IT worker might earn an average of $55 an hour, including benefits, while the state pays its contractors an average of $128 an hour for workers in similar jobs.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Security Industry Faces Attacks It Can’t Stop
Mar 13, 2010 IT Leave a comment
itwbennett writes “The takedown of the Mariposa botnet and so-called advanced persistent threat attacks, such as the one that compromised Google systems in early December, were hot topics at the RSA conference last week. What both Mariposa and the Google attacks illustrate, and what went largely unsaid at RSA, was that the security industry has failed to protect paying customers from some of today’s most pernicious threats, writes Robert McMillan. Traditional security products are simply not much help, said Alex Stamos, a partner with Isec Partners, one of the companies investigating the APT attacks. ‘All of the victims we’ve worked with had perfectly installed antivirus,’ he said. ‘They all had intrusion detection systems and several had Web proxies scan content.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hollow Spy Coins
Mar 13, 2010 IT Leave a comment
Bruce Schneier’s blog links to a few sources for hollow spy coins, one being BoingBoing’s Bazaar — where a nickel that can hold a microSD card costs $27. Another is Slashdot’s sister company ThinkGeek, where you can get hollow quarters and half-dollars in the low 20s. As if corporate and government security geeks didn’t have enough to worry about.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Zeus Botnet Down But Not Out
Mar 13, 2010 IT Leave a comment
harryjohnston writes “The Register points out that the takedown of a significant number of Zeus command-and-control servers, which we discussed earlier, was a short-lived victory, as about one-third of the affected servers were back on the net in less than 48 hours.” Adds itwbennet: “Just hours after network connectivity to Troyak was severed the ISP peered with a new upstream Internet service provider named Ya. The next step will be to ‘de-peer’ Troyak from its new service provider, either an ISP named Nassist or its upstream provider, Hurricane Electric, said a researcher familiar with the matter. ‘We have taken some of their territory, they are trying to out flank us,’ the researcher said via IM. ‘We are going to win this one — we have ‘em boxed in.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
IE 6 & 7 Unpatched Exploit Goes Wild
Mar 13, 2010 IT Leave a comment
Kolargol00 writes “Heise online reports the availability of an exploit (Google translation) for the yet-unpatched MSA-981374 affecting Internet Explorer 6 and 7. It has already been spotted in the wild by McAfee and integrated into the Metasploit Framework.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple Blocking iPhone Security Software
Mar 13, 2010 IT Leave a comment
Barence writes “Speaking exclusively to PC Pro, Eugene Kaspersky has claimed Apple has repeatedly refused to deliver the software development kit necessary to design security software for the phone. ‘We have been in contact for two years with Apple to develop our anti-theft software, [but] still we do not have permission,’ said Kaspersky. Although he admits the risk of viruses infecting the iPhone is ‘almost zero,’ he claims that securing the data on the handset is critical, especially as iPhones are increasingly being used for business purposes. ‘I don’t want to say Apple’s is the wrong way of behaving, or the right way,’ Kaspersky added. ‘It’s just a corporate culture — it wants to control everything.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Promising prospect: Quiet Read
Mar 13, 2010 Software Leave a comment
Back in early 2005, I covered URLwell, a clever menu-bar program that made it easy to store URLs you want to check out at a later time. Unfortunately, URLwell was last updated less than a month after I wrote that review, but I recently discovered a candidate for replacement: Quiet Read, which adds a few useful features of its own.
Image gallery: Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2
Mar 13, 2010 Software Leave a comment
Licensing issues aside, SCVMM R2 is a good tool for managing virtual machines — both Microsoft’s and VMware’s.
Hands-on: Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2
Mar 13, 2010 Software Leave a comment
Although the pricing and licensing situation is more confusing than it ought to be, this is an effective tool for managing both Microsoft and VMware virtual machines.