The University of California recently has been hit with a proposed $3 Million fine by the U.S. Department of Energy for their alleged failures to protect classified information in a data breach back in October 2006. I am quite confident that the fine is only a portion of the financial responsibility as a result to this breach, quite likely not even the largest.

We tell our clients that protecting your grand moma’s apple pie recipe is only a single goal of Information & Data Security. Liability, reputation, and compliance are other good reasons to be concerned and pro-active with security. Pro-active Security is a time consuming and expensive task, but is yet considerably cheaper than the alternative; a security breach.

Author: Christopher

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Spammers are always using new tactics to get around spam protection; their latest tactic is using spam embedded into PDF documents. This makes it quite difficult for Anti-Spam products to detect these threats without increasing the false positive detections. Some Anti-Spam products just do not have the technology to detect these threats at all.

“Ultimately, filtering spam at the content level will become less and less effective. A better way to control spam is by considering the source of the message - the IP address of the mail server attempting to deliver the message” says David Salbego, Unix and operations manager of computing and information systems with Argonne National Laboratory, a division of the Department of Energy (DOE) operated out of the University of Chicago.

PDF spam currently accounts for 11% of all spam, and spam levels are on average at around 88% of all mail. Specialist expect the 90% barrier to be broken as soon as 30 days.

MX Police, our flagship email filtering Anti-Spam service utilizes advanced techniques such as sender reputation to maintain extremely high detection rates and amazingly low false positive rates. When we say “Bulletproof Your Email”; we mean it! Have a look at our datasheet for more information.

Author: Christopher

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Over the last eight months, the storm worm has been taking the Internet by storm, infecting over 20 million machines. Currently the authorities do not know the objectives of the worms author. A botnet of this size could cripple anything connected to the Internet.

According to Alexander Gostev, senior virus analyst at Kaspersky, international disputes are flooding the Internet and are seriously bordering on the possibility of a “cyberwar”. Currently NATO does not reconize Internet attacks are a form of military action.

128 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks were launched on Estonia’s police and government web sites back in April. This attack seems to be related to the decision to remove a monument dedicated to Soviet Soldiers. The Russian secret service was accused of launching this attack on the Estonians. The Estonian Minster of Defense, Yaak Aaviksoo has asked NATO to amend its agreeemnt on military protection to reconize the attack as a form of military action, or in other words “cyberwar”.

Author: Christopher

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As hard disks and anti-virus definition databases grow tremendously year to year, more and more people find it difficult to do full anti-virus system scans on their networks. It is fairly common for companies to do a full system scan once a week on an automated schedule.

One of the most effective ways to decrease the time to scan a machine for viruses as much as 61% is regularlly schedule defragmentation using a product such as Diskeeper. We have found regular defragmentation decreases anti-virus scan times considerably. We also have noticed considerable shorter backup windows using enterprise defragementation than without.

Author: Christopher

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When you make the most distributed Anti Virus product on the planet, you definately are concerned about protecting your assets. During a recent event Symantec presented a new product via a PowerPoint presentation. Near the end of the presentation when their Anti Virus protection displayed an update message. What was unique about this message is that it had Kaspersky’s logo on it, which makes you wonder why the largest AntiVirus vendor on the market uses Kaspersky to protect their machines.

According to ComputerWeekly, this happend during the wrap up of his presentation, and wasn’t noticed until the he turned to look at the screen in response to everyone laughing.

Certainly makes you wonder, are they on to something?

Author: Christopher

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August 12th, 2007 the United Nations website (www.un.org) was defaced in an attempt to CyberProtest “Ysrail” and “USA” citing “peace for ever”. This message appeared on pages generally reserved for quotes and speeches from the secretary general Ban Ki-moon as well as on other well know websites.

The hackers website states the CyberProtect’s objective, “that the powerful have no right to oppress the powerless”. The website also mentions other websites they allegedly hacked, including Harvard University, The UN Environment Program, Toyota, and Nestle.

Web applications are commonly a problem for most organization’s security strategy as they are not protected by the corporate firewall. It is said 75% of all cyber attacks are done at the web application level.

Monitoring patches and security notices for common out of the box web applications is very effective at minimizing your risk. Regular web vulnerability scanning and server hardening is the best way to ensure you are protected.

If you do e-commerce on your website, you also have to keep PCI Compliance in mind as non-compliance penalties are as high as $500,000. Web vulnerability scanning covers some of the PCI Compliance requirements.

Author: Christopher

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