The Christmas tunes on the radio remind me that Christmas is quickly approaching. Hurry, only 32 shopping days left!
If you’re wondering what to get your favorite IT security practitioner this holiday season then let me suggest the Bruce Schneier action figure. This guy is the GI Joe of the crypto and IT security world. I’m not sure if his action figure comes with a kung fu grip, though.
About Mailprotector
Mailprotector is the GI Joe of the email security world. Our services protect your Exchange server, or any mail server, from: spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email borne malware. Get Mailprotector’s “kung fu grip” to protect your inbox today! We’ll even gift wrap for free 
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The FAA computer systems had a major glitch on Thursday. It lasted about 5 hours and impacted all flyers causing cancellation and massive delays.
Multiple Failures
Christopher Hinton of MarketWatch.com reported, “The National Airspace Data Interchange Network failed at both its locations — Atlanta and Salt Lake City, just after 5:15 a.m. Eastern Time, according to the FAA and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.”
NATCA Statement
“A ‘ripple effect’ is expected to impact the region’s flights throughout the day, NATCA said. Airports in the Northeast were heavily impacted, with Washington Dulles, Ronald Reagan National, Newark International, and New York’s JFK, reporting significant delays. Atlanta International, the world’s busiest airport, was also impacted.”
Delta Statement
“As a result of this morning’s FAA flight plan system outage, Delta is continuing to experience some delays and cancellations,” the world’s largest airline and Atlanta-based carrier said in a statement. “Operations are slowly returning to normal and we are working with impacted passengers.”
The obvious question: how do both systems fail at the same time?
That question actually raises another question: could this failure be the result of cyberwarriors? There’s been lots of recent discussion about other nation states ability and willingness to wage cyberwar against the US infrastructure. It’s hard to believe that both systems would fail at the same time. These are critical systems to our National infrastructure. Mobility and business suffered greatly during this 5 hour disruption. Just think how badly a multi-day outage would impact the US.
About Mailprotector
At Mailprotector we have redundant data centers and systems in place. If something happens to a cluster of servers then another cluster picks up the traffic. If a data center fails then traffic will automatically roll to other data centers. Mailprotector’s services prevent spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email born malware from getting to your Exchange server, or any mail server. Your users won’t be flooded with needless junk mail delaying them from getting to important email communications. We’re all about keeping you and your users productive. Give us a try free for 30 days.
A couple of 20 year olds were arrested by the Metropolitan Police Service of Manchester for violating the 1990 Computer Misuse Act and the 2006 Fraud Act. They had configured the Zeus Trojan, a.k.a. Zbot, to steal victims bank account information, passwords, credit card numbers and other information.
Arrests “a breakthrough”
“The Zeus Trojan is a piece of malware used increasingly by criminals to obtain huge quantities of sensitive information from thousands of compromised computers around the world,” said Detective Inspector Colin Wetherill of the Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), in a statement. “The arrests represent a considerable breakthrough in our increasing efforts to combat online criminality.”
Zeus widely available
The Zeus crimeware toolkit is widely available in the cyber-underworld for free or for purchase. It’s delivered to unsuspecting users via spam. It’s been reported that it’s easy to use and a powerful tool for stealing personal data from remote systems. It was initially linked to a group of online criminals known as “Rock Phish” that targeted financial institutions all over the globe. It has been reported that Facebook and MySpace users have been targeted in a recent spam campaign.
About Mailprotector
Mailprotector’s services protect your personal information from these types of Trojans. Our systems protect your Exchange server, or any mail server, from spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks, and other email borne malware.
The Mega-D botnet was disabled last week by a team of white hat hackers. It may have had up to a quarter million infected machines under it’s control before it was disrupted. The botnet was estimated to be responsible for a third of the world’s spam output. It was knocked out of commission last week by employees of security firm FireEye.
How they did it
Dan Goodin reported: “After unplugging the Mega-D master control channels, the researchers set up a benign ’sinkhole’ channel for the bots to report to and waited to see what would happen.
Over five days, 487,340 unique IP addresses reported to the ad-hoc server. Using findings derived from last year’s take-down of the separate Srizbi botnet, FireEye estimates that the figure translates to 248,590 unique machines. Unlike Mega-D, Srizbi included an accounting mechanism that identified each infected machine. They then analyzed the number of IP addresses and noted that after five days, it was about double the number of individual Srizbi victims.”
Size hard to judge
FireEye’s Todd Rosenberry said “Any botnet size estimate should be taken with a grain of salt as they are notoriously hard to calculate and there is a lot of conflicting data out there.”
Effects felt worldwide
The researchers estimated that Brazil was the most infected country (11.5 percent of the victims), followed closely by India and Viet Nam. 214 countries were represented.
Still under watchful eye
Mega-D is still being monitored. There are plans to turn over maintenance of the sinkhole server to Shadowserver. These volunteers have established infrastructure and relationships with ISPs and Computer Emergency Response Teams, or CERTS, globally.
About Mailprotector
Mailprotector’s services are ideal for protecting your Exchange server, or any mail server, against spammers attempts to flood your inbox with their junk: spam, viruses, trojans, phishing attacks and other email borne malware and threats.
Today marks the 26th birthday of the computer virus. On November 10th 1983 Fred Cohen, a University of Southern California graduate student, provided a proof-of-concept during a security seminar at Lehigh University. 26 years later the computer virus is still going strong.
My first virus
I recall my first computer virus experience, “Melissa“, back in 1999. I was working for another company in London at the time and we started getting lots of email with the same subject line from multiple European and far eastern affiliates. Before long, many of our users were sending loads of email out that they never initiated. Our network admin “pulled the plug” on our local Exchange server until he could resolve the issue. I called our US headquarters to give them a heads-up but they still had numerous users opening and infecting their mail systems. That was a wake up call and dealing with email-borne malware provided an experience that I’ll never forget.
My how you’ve grown!
Email malware has gotten a lot nastier since then. It presents huge problems for users and admins. Computers can be hijacked and used for nefarious purposes. Information can be stolen and bank accounts drained. The FBI has released a warning about the threat to online cyber fraud. Some figures estimate cyber fraud losses to be upwards of $100 million year-to-date.
About Mailprotector
Mailprotector’s services have been squashing spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email-borne malware for nearly 10 years. It’s affordable, easy to set up and simple to use.
