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13. January 2011 by Myke.
How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many, many more. If it’s stats you want, you’ve come to the right place.



Posted by: Myke Reinhold
Information provided by: Pingdom.com, http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/
Posted in Internet | No Comments »
15. June 2009 by Myke.
So you may be sitting in your office and had the IT/IS person come in fix your “printing issue” by turning on the printer…that is why we have the jobs we have…but have you ever wondered how to get a geek or nerd really going?!? Now this does not work on every geek or nerd but you can give it a try and find out. Simple say in passing or ask as a serious question.
I know you can think of more so please feel free to add to the list.
Posted in Funny, Nerdism, Internet | 1 Comment »
15. June 2009 by Myke.
Ever wondered how many addresses are possible using IPv6? I wanted to know and thought I would share with you. IPv6 can have 2^128 IP addresses. That is a lot and if you are wondering how many that is exactly…2^128 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. Now the question is, can you say that number out loud or even in your head?
Okay, take a deep breath and say after me - “340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456″
Okay all you network junkies…try filling that address range up.
Posted in Internet, Networking | 1 Comment »
29. March 2009 by Myke.
There is a ton of buzz all over the media world about this worm and what it will do and how to tell if you have. As complex as this worm is, it is also very simple to determine if you have it or not.
Step 1 - If you have Automatic Updates turned on, check to see if it is now turned off. These reason is that this worm actually turns off updates to protect itself.
Step 2 - Manually run Microsoft Updates. If you can run updates manually on your computer then you are okay. This worm will actually prevent you from connecting to the update sites.
Now that we know how to check for it, how do you prevent it. Very simple. Keep your computer updated and make sure your anti-virus software is running and current.
What do you do if you have this worm? You will want to contact your anti-virus software vendor and see if they can help you out. If not and they want to charge you an arm and a leg, give it a go yourself. There is a couple very easy to use and free tools you can use to remove it but it will take some patience.
Now that you have a couple of removal tools, start running them and cleaning. A great tip is to update both pieces of this software and then run them from Safe Mode with your computer not on the network/Internet.
Good luck and happy hunting, so to speak.
Posted in Networking, Internet, Registry, Scripting, Security, Technical Questions, Laptops, Desktops, Microsoft, General Hardware, Servers | 1 Comment »
8. March 2009 by Myke.
Thanks to the folks over at the Register for this information.
Researchers at Symantec have discovered what could be a significant development in the ongoing Conficker worm saga: a new module that is being pushed out to some infected systems.
In a couple of ways, the new component is designed to harden infected machines against an industry consortium that is actively trying to contain the prolific worm. For one, the update targets antivirus software and security analysis tools to prevent them from removing the malware. Not only does it try to disable anti-malware titles, it also goes after programs such as Wireshark and regmon.
And for another, it also greatly expands the number of domain names infected machines contact on a daily basis.
Up to now, a pseudo random domain name generator produced 250 addresses that infected machines reported to each day. The industry consortium, dubbed the Conficker cabal, responded by cracking the algorithm and snapping up those domains ahead of the malware authors to prevent the infected machines from sustaining further damage.
The new component ups the ante by increasing the number of domains to 50,000 per day.
“It’s clearly trying to work around the work of the cabal,” Vincent Weafer, vice president of Symantec Security Response, told The Register.
So far, Symantec has been able to confirm delivery of the new component to only a handful of machines. Symantec researchers are in the process of determining if the updates are just the beginning of what will eventually be pushed out to infected machines everywhere, but either way, this appears to be the first time the malware authors have actually pushed out an update. Up to now the machines have phoned home but never received a reply.
“That’s what makes this interesting, because this is what we believe is the first example of receiving an answer to that call,” Weafer said. “Today is the very first case of that being successful.”
Estimates of the number of machines infected by Conficker vary, from hundreds of thousands to more than 10 million. Weafer and other security researchers have said Conficker’s growth has slowed over the past few weeks. That suggests its authors may be more focused on protecting the machines they’ve already vanquished than claiming new ones.
posted by: Myke Reinhold
source: The Register
Posted in Internet, Security | No Comments »
1. March 2009 by Myke.
Source of story - The Register
Facebook has again been attacked by a Spamming Malware file, which tells us that the popularity of Facebook is growing very fast. The Facebook user receives a notification that their account is in violation of Facebook rules. Their is a link to the violation which then attacks the computer and then posts the same message to all of their friends on Facebook. The link is listed as “f a c e b o o k - - closing down!!!”. This is now the second attack in less than a week.
Folks, if you use Facebook you need to use some common sense. Remember, if you do not know the person ignore it. ![]()
Screenshots from Trendmicro
Video feed of another Facebook Malware attack
There is a lesson to be learned folks. Do not install anything from any site you do not know or recognize.
Posted in Internet, Security | No Comments »
30. January 2009 by Myke.
Sexual performance enhancers and pharmaceuticals were the most common subjects used by spam in 2008
GLENDALE, Calif., Jan. 28, 2009 ” PandaLabs, Panda Security’s malware analysis and detection today revealed the results from its analysis on 430 million email messages from 2008 and discovered that only 8.4 percent of messages that reached companies were legitimate. Some 89.88 percent of messages were spam, while 1.11 percent were infected with some type of malware. This data has been compiled after the analysis by TrustLayer Mail, the clean mail managed service from Panda Security.
Only January 2008 witnessed levels of spam below 80 percent. The amount of spam fluctuated throughout the year, peaking in the second quarter at 94.27 percent of all mail reaching companies.
With respect to infected messages in 2008, the Netsky.P worm was the most frequently detected malicious code. This type of malware activates automatically when users view the infected message through the Microsoft Office Outlook preview pane. It does this by exploiting a vulnerability in Internet Explorer that allows automatic execution of email attachments. The exploit of this vulnerability was detected by PandaLabs as Exploit/iFrame and was the third most frequently detected type of malware in emails by TrustLayer Mail.
“The fact that these two malicious codes often act in unison explains the high number of detections of both,” said Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs. “Cyber crooks often launch several strains of malware with each exploit to increase the chances of infection, so even if users whose systems are up-to-date are immune to the exploit, they could still fall victim to infection by the worm if they run the attachment.”
The Rukap.G backdoor Trojan, designed to allow attackers to take control of a computer, and the Dadobra.Bl Trojan were also among the most prevalent malicious code.
Top Malware in email Netsky.P.worm Bck/Rukap.G Exploit/iFrame Trj/Dadobra.BL Generic Malware Trj/Downloader.PSJ Trj/SpamtaLoad.DO Trj/Downloader.PWR Bck/Haxdoor.PL Trj/Spamtaload.DZ
“For companies, spam is more than just a nuisance. It consumes bandwidth, wastes employees’ time and can even cause system malfunctions. In the end, it all results in a loss of productivity,” adds Luis Corrons.
Much of this spam was circulated by the extensive network of zombie computers controlled by cyber-crooks. A zombie is a computer infected by a bot, a type of malware allowing cyber criminals to control infected systems. Frequently, these computers are used as a network to drive malicious actions such as the sending of spam. Just in the last three months of the year, 301,000 zombie computers were being put into action every day.
Spam subjects in 2008
With respect to the different types of spam in circulation, 32.25 percent of spam in 2008 was related to pharmaceutical products with sexual performance enhancers accounting for 20.5 percent.
Spam relating to the economic situation also grew significantly throughout 2008. False job offers and fraudulent diplomas accounted for 2.75 percent of all junk mail in the year, while messages promoting mortgages and fake loans were responsible for 4.75 percent.
Spam promoting fake brand products, such a swatches, was responsible for 16.75 percent of the total. This last category nevertheless, dropped from 21 percent in the first half of the year to 12.5 percent in the last six months. To view an entire breakdown of the variety of spam subjects that PandaLabs discovered, please access the data here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/panda_security/3234535186/
About PandaLabs Since 1990, its mission has been to detect and eliminate new threats as rapidly as possible to offer our clients maximum security. To do so, PandaLabs has an innovative automated system that analyzes and classifies thousands of new samples a day and returns automatic verdicts (malware or goodware). This system is the basis of collective intelligence, Panda Security’s new security model which can even detect malware that has evaded other security solutions. Currently, 94 percent of malware detected by PandaLabs is analyzed through this system of collective intelligence. This is complemented through the work of several teams, each specialized in a specific type of malware (viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware, phishing, spam, etc), working 24/7 to provide global coverage. This translates into more secure, simpler and more resource-friendly solutions for clients. More information is available in the PandaLabs blog: http://www.pandalabs.com and the Panda Security website: www.pandasecurity.com/usa.
Posted in Spam, Internet, Security, Exchange | No Comments »
27. January 2009 by Myke.
IPv4 is the fourth revision in the long development of IP and it is actually the first to be widely deployed. Combined with IPv6, it is the core of inter-networking methods of the Internet. IPv4 is to this day the most widely deployed Internet Layer protocol.
IPv4 uses 32-bit (four-byte) addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 (232) possible unique addresses. However, some are reserved for special purposes such as private networks (~18 million addresses) or multi-cast addresses (~16 million addresses). This reduces the number of addresses that can be allocated as public Internet addresses. As the number of addresses available are consumed, an IPv4 address shortage appears to be inevitable, however network address translation (NAT) has significantly delayed this inevitability.
This limitation has helped stimulate the push towards IPv6, which is currently in the early stages of deployment and is currently the only contender to replace IPv4.
IPv6 is the next generation Internet Layer protocol for inter-networks and the Internet. In December 2008, despite celebrating its 10-year anniversary as a Standards Track protocol, IPv6 was only in its infancy in terms of general world-wide deployment. A recent study by Google indicates that penetration is still less than one percent of Internet traffic in any country. The leaders are Russia (0.76%), France (0.65%), Ukraine (0.64%), Norway (0.49%), and the United States (0.45%). Although Asia leads in terms of absolute deployment numbers, the relative penetration is smaller (e.g., China: 0.24%). IPv6 is implemented on all major operating systems in use in commercial, business, and home consumer environments. According to the study, Mac OS leads in IPv6 penetration of 2.44%, followed by Linux (0.93%) and Windows Vista (0.32%).
The length of network addresses emphasize a most important change when moving from IPv4 to IPv6. IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long (as defined by RFC 4291), whereas IPv4 addresses are 32 bits; where the IPv4 address space contains roughly 4 billion addresses, IPv6 has enough room for 3.4×1038 unique addresses.
IPv6 addresses are typically composed of two logical parts: a 64-bit (sub-)network prefix, and a 64-bit host part, which is either automatically generated from the interface’s MAC address or assigned sequentially. Because the globally unique MAC addresses offer an opportunity to track user equipment, and so users, across time and IPv6 address changes, RFC 3041 was developed to reduce the prospect of user identity being permanently tied to an IPv6 address, thus restoring some of the possibilities of anonymity existing at IPv4. RFC 3041 specifies a mechanism by which time-varying random bit strings can be used as interface circuit identifiers, replacing unchanging and traceable MAC addresses.
So this brings us to the differences between IPv4 and IPv6:
posted by: Myke Reinhold
credit: Homerun-Networks, Google, Wikipedia
Posted in Internet, Networking, Security | No Comments »
22. January 2009 by Myke.
If that does not get your attention then maybe knowing that if you ate at a restaurant over the last few months of 2008 this could include you. Maybe you used a credit/debit card at places like pay-at-the-pump gas stations, parking lots, retail stores, school campuses or hospitality/community banks…you data may have been stolen. This story was first reported 2 days ago by Brian Krebs of the Washington Post.
A data breach last year at Princeton, N.J., payment processor Heartland Payment Systems may have compromised tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions, the company said today.
If accurate, such figures may make the Heartland incident one of the largest data breaches ever reported.
Robert Baldwin, Heartland’s president and chief financial officer, said the company, which processes payments for more than 250,000 businesses, began receiving fraudulent activity reports late last year from MasterCard and Visa on cards that had all been used at merchants which rely on Heartland to process payments.
Baldwin said 40 percent of transactions the company processes are from small to mid-sized restaurants across the country. He declined to name any well-known establishments or retail clients that may have been affected by the breach.
Baldwin said it would be unfair to mention any one of his company’s customers.
“No merchant of ours represents even [one-tenth of one percent] of our volume, and to put out any name associated with what is obviously an unfortunate incident is not fair,” he said. “Their customers might end up having their cards used fraudulently, but that fraud might turn out to have come from their store, or it might be from another Heartland store and no one will ever really know.”
Heartland called U.S. Secret Service and hired two breach forensics teams to investigate. But Baldwin said it wasn’t until last week that investigators uncovered the source of the breach: A piece of malicious software planted on the company’s payment processing network that recorded payment card data as it was being sent for processing to Heartland by thousands of the company’s retail clients.
Baldwin said Heartland does not know how long the malicious software was in place, how it got there or how many accounts may have been compromised. The stolen data includes names, credit and debit card numbers and expiration dates.
“The transactional data crossing our platform, in terms of magnitude… is about 100 million transactions a month,” Baldwin said. “At this point, though, we don’t know the magnitude of what was grabbed.”
The company stressed that no merchant data or cardholder Social Security numbers, unencrypted personal identification numbers (PIN), addresses or telephone numbers were jeopardized as a result of the breach.
The data stolen includes the digital information encoded onto the magnetic stripe built into the backs of credit and debit cards. Armed with this data, thieves can fashion counterfeit credit cards by imprinting the same stolen information onto fabricated cards.
“The nature of the [breach] is such that card-not-present transactions are actually quite difficult for the bad guys to do because one piece of information we know they did not get was an address,” Baldwin said. As a result, he said, the prospect of thieves using the stolen data to rack up massive amounts of fraud at online merchants “is not impossible, but much less likely.”
In many cases where a processor experiences a breach, the affected banks may simply re-issue new cards to some customers. In other cases, consumers may spot the first signs of fraudulent activity by reviewing their bank statements. It is unclear whether consumers who receive new account numbers from their bank will ever be able to definitively tie the re-issuance to the Heartland breach.
Baldwin said it was not appropriate for Heartland to offer affected consumers credit protection or other identity theft protection services.
“Identity theft protection is appropriate when there is enough personal information lost that identity theft is possible,” he said. “In this case, the amount of information we know they did not get is long enough that except in very circumscribed cases identity theft is just not possible. At the same time, we recognize and feel badly about the inconvenience this is going to cause consumers.”
Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst with Gartner Inc., questioned the timing of Heartland’s disclosure — a day in which many Americans and news outlets are glued to coverage of Barack Obama’s inauguration as the nation’s 44th president.
“This looks like the biggest breach ever disclosed, and they’re doing it on inauguration day?” Litan said. “I can’t believe they waited until today to disclose. That seems very deceptive.”
Officials from the U.S. Secret Service could not be immediately reached for comment.
Baldwin said Heartland worked to disclose the breach last week.
“Due to legal reviews, discussions with some of the players involved, we couldn’t get it together and signed off on until today,” Baldwin said. “We considered holding back another day, but felt in the interests of transparency we wanted to get this information out to cardholders as soon as possible, recognizing of course that this is not an ideal day from the perspective of visibility.”
The Heartland disclosure follows a year of similar breach disclosures at several major U.S. cards processors. On December 23, RBS Worldpay, a subsidiary of Citizens Financial Group Inc., said a breach of its payment systems may have affected more than 1.5 million people.
In March 2008, Hannaford Brothers Co. disclosed that a breach of its payment systems — also aided by malicious software — compromised at least 4.2 million credit and debit card accounts.
In early 2007, TJX Companies Inc., the parent of retailers Marshalls and TJ Maxxsaid a number of breaches over a three-year period exposed more than 45 million credit and debit card numbers.
In 2005, a breach at payment card processor CardSystems Solutions jeopardized roughly 40 million credit and debit card accounts.
Update, 5:07 p.m. ET:Changed “accounts” in first paragraph to “transactions.” Also added information from Heartland chief executive about the timing of the breach and the hiring of outside consultants.
If you are like me, I use LifeLock, where you can guarantee your good name today.
Posted in Internet, Security | No Comments »
16. January 2009 by Myke.
Strap in folks as this is a nasty little virus.
A new sleeper virus that could allow hackers to steal financial and personal information has now spread to more than eight million computers in what industry analysts say is one of the most serious infections they have ever seen.
The Downadup or Conficker worm exploits a bug in Microsoft Windows to infect mainly corporate networks, where — although it has yet to cause any harm — it potentially exposes infected PCs to hijack.
How serious is it?
It is the most serious large scale worm outbreak we have seen in recent years because of how widespread it is, but it is not very serious in terms of what it does. So far it doesn’t try to steal personal information or credit card details.
Who is affected?
We have large infections in Europe, the United States and in Asia. It is a Windows worm and almost all the cases are corporate networks. There are very few reports of independent home computers affected.
What does it do?
It is a complicated worm most likely engineered by a group of people who have spent time making it very complicated to analyze and remove. The real reason why they have created it is hard to say right now, but we do know how it replicates.
How does it spread?
The worm does not spread over email or the Web. However if an infected laptop is connected to your corporate network, it will immediately scan the network looking for machines to infect. These will be machines that have not installed a patch from Microsoft known as MS08-067. The worm will also scan company networks trying to guess your password, trying hundreds and hundreds of common words. If it gets in, even if you are not at your machine, it will infect and begin spreading to other servers. A third method of spreading is via USB data sticks.
How can I prevent it infecting my machine?
The best way is to get the patch and install it company-wide. The second way is password security. Use long, difficult passwords — particularly for administrators who cannot afford to be locked out of the machines they will have to fix.
What can I do if it has already infected?
Machines can be disinfected. The problem is for companies with thousands of infected machines, which can become re-infected from just one computer even as they are being cleared.
Fear not, it can be fixed very easily with a little patience. First you will need ot make sure you have the trusty old Malwarebytes and a solid (non-McAfee) virus software package. Sorry, those of us at Homerun actually dislike McAfee…too many holes and too slow of an update pattern. Now ensure that your virus software is current and that Malwarebytes is current and ensure that all Windows updates have been run on your PC/laptop/server. Close all programs and start running Malwarebytes and let it finish. Once it is finished, remove all infected areas and reboot if nessecary. Runt he program one last time or until everything is clear. Once Malwarebytes is complete go ahead and run your virus software and let it clear any left-overs if it finds any at all.
Sorry for the delay on getting this posted but we had a case of the flou run through our office…so we were fighting our own little virus actually.
posted by: Myke Reinhold
credit: CNN, Experts Exchange, Homerun-Networks
Posted in Internet, Security, Microsoft | 3 Comments »