It's not pleasant to be on the receiving end of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Malicious hackers can commandeer thousands of computers around the world, and order them to deluge a website with traffic - effectively clogging it up, preventing others from reaching the site, and bringing the website to its knees.
As I've described before, DDoS attacks are the equivalent of "15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time" - nothing can move.
In recent days a number of websites have been struck by DDoS attacks, seemingly co-ordinated by supporters of WikiLeaks against firms and websites who they feel have turned their back on the controversial whistle-blowing website.
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2009/08/06/fat-men-revolving-doors/
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Are DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks against the law? | Naked Security
WikiLeaks – the REAL lessons behind the drama | Naked Security
Everyone out there - consider yourselves on notice about privacy, secrecy, security, encryption, data leakage prevention, and the rest of it.
It's not the data which WikiLeaks leaked, it's the leak of the WikiLeaks data.
Sean Richmond and I explain why, and what that means for you and your business in this podcast:
10 dirty little secrets you should know about working in IT | Tech Sanity Check | TechRepublic.com
Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2007. It has now been updated and we’ve added a slideshow for those who prefer the visuals.
If you are preparing for a career in IT or are new to IT, many of the “dirty little secrets” listed below may surprise you because we don’t usually talk about them out loud. If you are an IT veteran, you’ve probably encountered most of these issues and have a few of your own to add — and please, by all means, take a moment to add them to the discussion. Most of these secrets are aimed at network administrators, IT managers, and desktop support professionals. This list is not aimed at developers and programmers — they have their own set of dirty little secrets — but some of these will apply to them as well.
You can also view this list as a slideshow.
http://content.techrepublic.com.com/2346-13416_11-490857.html
Monday, December 13, 2010
The Cost of Insecurity | CTO Edge
When times were good, malware attacks were pretty much the cost of doing business. They happened from time to time, but nobody ever really considered their real impact on the business.
Now that times are tough and the number of zero-day malware attacks have increased, the operational costs of security are becoming a much bigger factor.
That’s the primary finding of a survey of 564 IT security managers conducted by The Ponemon Institute on behalf of Lumension, which finds that security issues are becoming a bigger drain on limited IT resources.
The survey also finds that far too many IT organizations don’t have much in the way of control over security policies. Many report either not having any or simply lack the wherewithal to enforce them.
According to Ed Brice, senior vice president for worldwide marketing at Lumension, the study not only highlights the need for more effective policy enforcement, but it also shows that anti-malware software isn’t enough to make the overall IT environment secure. And without additional security measures, IT organizations are incurring significant additional operating expense cleaning up after malware infects their systems.
A comprehensive approach to security should not only include anti-malware software; IT organizations should be deploying application controls, policy-based management systems based on whitelisting techniques and data loss prevention (DLP) systems.
Unfortunately, the majority of the IT organizations surveyed by Lumension have yet to deploy any of these security technologies, even as their operational security costs continue to rise. Worse yet, with the rise of mobile computing in the enterprise, Brice contends that the security will become even more complicated to manage.
Of course, in these tough times, it’s sometimes hard to make a case for additional security investments. But when you start to factor in how much time and expense is being wasted in the aftermath of a malware infestation, suddenly the cost of security doesn’t look nearly as prohibitive.
References:
http://www.ponemon.org/index.php
http://www.lumension.com/
Sunday, December 12, 2010
How do I use a RAM disk to help speed up disk-intensive applications? | Microsoft Windows | TechRepublic.com
here are certain applications that do an unusual amount of reading and writing data. Under normal operating circumstances, these applications work fine. But what happens when those disk-intensive applications start competing with other applications? When this happens, a serious slowdown can occur. You can prevent those slowdowns with the help of RAM disks.
A RAM disk is basically a special partition of your PC’s memory that has been formatted and configured (via a special application) to be used as a high-speed target for data reading and writing. These RAM drives are significantly faster than traditional storage, so those applications will see a noticeable boost. Let’s take a look at the process of creating a RAM drive in Windows for this purpose.
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/window-on-windows/
This blog post is also available in PDF format in a TechRepublic download.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Ten Online Project Management Mistakes to Avoid | ITBusinessEdge.com
A major transformation is taking place in how organizations use project management software.
Instead of being the sole province of the project managers, the rise of online project management applications heralds a new era of collaboration across the enterprise.
The challenge, of course, is getting the organization to embrace online project management in the first place, so here are some tips to get you started.
Shadow DNS is in the works: Do we need a second Internet? | IT Security | TechRepublic.com
When the Internet was first created under the auspices of academic and military institutions in the United States, part of the design goal was decentralization so that it could survive damage to arbitrary sections of the complete network. A big concern at the time was the ability of the nascent Internet to continue functioning as a whole even after key sites had been destroyed by nuclear attack.
Years later, in a 1993 TIME interview, EFF co-founder John Gilmore said “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” This has, to some extent, proven true over the years. When small, regional organizations try to impose censorship controls on segments of the Internet, technology seems to almost magically find ways to bypass those controls.
Gilmore’s quote makes things sound a lot more one-sided than they have appeared to be in recent years, however. China gets a lot of press for its “Great Firewall of China”, by which a lot of Internet traffic available around the world is filtered out of availability for residents of China. Some savvy Internet users find ways to get around the filtering, but many do not — and those who do run the risk of getting in trouble with a government widely recognized to treat peaceful protest as a crime. China has reinforced its international reputation with high profile activities like cracking Google security to gain access to information about dissidents.
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=2996
Friday, December 10, 2010
Do You Need An Antivirus On An Android Phone? [Geeks Weigh In]
Of the two smartphone platforms (iPhone and Android) which one is yours? We talk about Android here because its open-ended nature is great for tech-heads who want to muck about with their phones. But you may also be wondering if the open-ended nature of Android puts it at risk for a virus.