Dark Reading published an article titled ” Booming Underground Economy Makes Spam A Hot Commodity, Expert Says ” regarding the ease of using botnets for spam activity and how this makes spamming profitable. Some of the more startling statistics show that “For about $10, [a spammer] can send a million emails”. Even if 2 people order a product that they are selling for $10, that's a 100% profit over the cost of the use of the botnet.
A Conversation on "Health Information Technology"
On Sunday, the Boston Globe printed a portion of a letter to the editor I sent in regards to one of the paper's articles. The opinion discussed the mandating of electronic health records and the importance of security for such records. Below is the complete letter.
How to protect your network from cyber-attacks
There are three measures network administrators can take to avoid the types of network attacks that plagued US and South Korean websites including www.whitehouse.gov, NASDAQ, NYSE, Yahoo!'s financial page and the Washington Post. The three areas to focus on are network based mitigation, host based mitigation and proactive measures. Network based mitigation: Install IDS/IPS with the ability to track floods (such as SYN, ICMP etc.) Install a firewall that has the ability to drop packets rather than have them reach the internal server.
Astaro Receives VMware Ready Certifications
Astaro earned multiple VMware Ready™ certifications for its security products. Astaro Security Gateway, Astaro Mail Gateway and Astaro Web Gateway have all been certified as VMware Ready, and Astaro is the only Unified Threat Management provider to have submitted to and passed VMware Ready validation.
Choose the battlefield
PC World's Jaikumar Vijayan recently reported on the attacks against US government public information infrastructure. In the article, Karen Evans, a Bush administration Information Systems executive outlined what she thought should be fast-tracked. It includes using TICs (Trusted Internet Connections) for all public infrastructures.
Google Chrome OS and Some Words On Hype
THE HYPE With the announcement of the upcoming Google Chrome OS, Google is adding some hype to the mix. Google is boldly stating that they are “going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates.
Tips for securing your Wi-Fi Connection
Recently, NPR's “All Tech Considered” posted a very good and concise article on securing WiFi technology. I would just like to add a few key points for those that concern themselves with network security. First, when using a VPN on an un-trusted hotspot, make sure that it is a “full tunnel” VPN
Virtualization as a Disaster Recovery Strategy
There have actually been a few major disasters in the past 10 years that have shown the value of good disaster recovery plans. Though they're far from perfect they do make a difference and can always be improved with newer techniques and technology.
As Slowloris HTTP DoS Rises Astaro is Ready
Recently the Slowloris Denial of Service attack has jumped in popularity. This attack is similar to SYN flood, but uses HTTP instead, basically consuming sockets on the Web Server vs
Spam Is More Than Annoying
Not only is it annoying having to sift through all the garbage which clogs your inbox, but it costs you productivity as you attempt to separate the mails you need from the unwanted items. Spam rarely ends up in my own inbox due to the effectiveness of the blocking solution I use, (I use a solution from Astaro ) but many of the people I speak with daily communicate that in an inbox with 50 messages, 45 or more can easily be spam on a given day.