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Posts Tagged ‘IT’

Spam now accounts for 90% of email traffic due to February surge

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

February was a bad month for email. Due to a surge in the month of February, spam now accounts for 90% of email traffic according to Symantec. Two botnets, named Grum and Rustock, helped this spam surge by pushing up spam levels 5.5 percent. The Grum botnet came back from a period of plateau to increase activity by 51%. The rise of both botnet systems were linked to activity related to Canadian pharmaceutical spam.

Country specific:
Spam levels reached 93.4% of all e-email in Italy last month
Denmark was at 92.8%
Russia at 91.8%
US was 90.2%

Tags: analysis, community, intelligence, IT, security, web, web hosting
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Client IP information To Be Included In DNS Requests–A New Commercial Project

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Google will be teaming up with Neustar UltraDNS to work on a proposed extension to DNS. The concept of the project would make it so that the first three quarters of a user’s IP address would be included in a DNS request. Each DNS request would then have a built-in geographic awareness, which would improve the responsiveness and accuracy of the Domain Name System.

Tags: development, IT, technology, web, web design
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Cyberattack Targets Chinese Human Rights Websites

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

The websites of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), Independent Chinese Pen (ICPC), New Century News, Canyu and Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch (CRLW) were attacked on January 23 and 24 by hackers of an unknown origin.

A distributed denial of service (DDOS) brought down the websites for approximately 16 hours. At the height of the incident, the frequency of the attack was at 2GB per second. It was the most intense attack that their Internet Service Provider has experienced in the history of their business.

Prior to this DDOS attack, malware was installed on the server of the websites for CHRD and New Century News. Some of the attacks have coordinated with “sensitive” dates for the country of China.

Tags: analysis, IT, security, web hosting
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Third Major Attack On Twitter This Year

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

Another major attack was directed against the online social network website, Twitter. This was the third major attack this year. The attack was one of the simplest methods possible. An attacker acquired the password to the master account for Twitter’s domain registry. The attacker redirected Twitter’s domain names to an alternate website that advertised the origin of the attack coming from the “Iranian Cyber Army” with a corresponding gmail address to supposedly direct inquiries.

The attacks disabled the Twitter services for approximately two hours.

Tags: IT, security
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Mobile Outage Causes Concern Over Microsoft New Strategy

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

CNET’s article “Sidekick outage casts cloud over Microsoft” describes a concern over Microsoft’s reliability to host and store data as a service. The article reacted to a massive service outage that has lasted a week, which prevented users from accessing their calendar, address book, and valuable data. Worst yet, Microsoft announced on Saturday that some data may be lost permanently.

This outage comes one month before Microsoft launches a cloud-based operating system–Windows Azure.

Tags: IT, mobile, software
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FCC Chairman Warns Of Over Extending The Spectrum

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

“I believe that that the biggest threat to the future of mobile in America is the looming spectrum crisis,” stated FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. His message of warning was delivered at CTIA Wireless.

The Chairman explained that there will be a 30-fold increase in wireless traffic by 2013.

When the DTV transition was freed, the 700 MHz block increased the wireless spectrum by a multiple of three. That growth rate is too slow for projected levels of consumption.

Tags: IT, web
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Department of Homeland Security Seeking To Hire 1000 Security Experts

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

DHS and its sub agencies such as the Secret Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are seeking to hire 1000 computer and web security experts (analysts, developers and engineers) over the next three years. These new positions will fulfill critical security roles that include cyber risk and strategic analysis, internet incident response, vulnerability detection and vulnerability assessment, intelligence and investigation, and network and systems engineering.

Janet Napolitano US Secretary of Homeland Security stated that she wants to make the DHS into a “world-class cyberorganization.” Critics of this new initiative says that the DHS will be hard-pressed to find that number of quality security experts.

Tags: IT, jobs, security
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Gmail Goes Down Temporarily For Millions

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Millions of Gmail users experienced an outage of service when the company made a capacity miscalculation on Tuesday Sept. 1st.

The problem began when Google took several of its Gmail servers offline for maintenance and made a miscalculation of load when attempting to redirect traffic. Google temporarily alleviated the situation when it moved traffic away from its overloaded request routers and released it across the whole capacity of its glorious network.

Tags: IT, web
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Green Dam Software Now Voluntary

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

The Chinese Government has canceled its plans of forcing computer manufacturers to install internet filtering technology into computers sold in China.

The Chinese Government paid 5.85 Million dollars for a vendor to develop software that will monitor computer activities. The Chinese Government claimed that the software was solely to be used to filter out internet pornography and not for spying on citizens.

Li Yizhong, China’s industry and information technology minister, said that it was a miscommunication that installation of the Green Dam software was intended to be mandatory.

There had been a fury of criticism and outrage directed at the Green Dam software. From privacy and spying concerns to a legal issue of copyright infringement against an American company, the Green Dam software suffered a problematic beginning which delayed its launch.

Tags: IT, law, security, software
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