Archive for November, 2009

29
Nov
09

Google Chrome OS

By azilliax Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized

After building and playing with Chrome OS for the last little while and looking through a lot of the reviews that have been posted there’s little left to say. But the one thing that that they are doing that I really like is that they are segmenting out the users information from the operating system. In Chrome OS they are doing this by putting the users data into the cloud and making the file system holding the OS as read only. In practice I’ve been doing something similar for over ten years for a number of different reasons.

On my computer there are always two disks installed, one that holds the OS and one that holds my user data. I like the segmentation because it lets me pave my OS without having to worry about loosing my data beforehand in the event that something goes sideways with my computer. Now while the data can be moved around getting a Windows based OS to behave like it’s on a read only file system is a difficult task. Thankfully there’s Deep Freeze to protect the operating system once it’s installed and configured to my liking.

It will be interesting to see what Google actually releases as a final product in a year when the devices start to show up with the OS installed, and it’s also going to be interesting to see what the adoption rate for people living full time in the cloud will be.

17
Nov
09

My Scareware Night!

By bparmar63 Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized

Here’s an interesting article from Larry Dignan, one of the editors at ZDNet.

Apparently his computer was overtaken by Antivirus Pro 2009 – a vicious piece of malware. It takes over your computer, hijacks Internet Explorer and inundates you with porn popups forcing you to register the software. Larry had McAfee AV installed on his computer but repeated scans during the attack failed to detect the malware because there was no AV Signature available from McAfee at the time. Although Antivirus Pro is not new it had morphed and changed its signature. Larry finally got a copy of Kaspersky – which had an updated signature and got rid of the problem.

Had Larry been running Faronics Anti-Executable at the time, nothing would have happened as Antivirus Pro 2009 would not have been allowed to run. In time McAfee would have pushed an updated signature file, detected Antivirus Pro 2009 and removed it. Larry would have been saved the stress, anguish and particulary the time it took him to solve his problems.

http://bit.ly/2pMnhT

 

16
Nov
09

Security Incidents Cost $17.2 billion per Year

By bparmar63 Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized

Last year midsized companies spent a total of $17.2 billion fixing IT security incidents according to new research out this week from McAfee.

McAfee recently had MSI International surveyed 900 companies with between 51 and 1,000 employees to find that in the past year a single midsized organization lost $43,000 on average due to security incidents and that 56 percent of these companies suffered an increasing number of security incidents.

Nearly 30 percent of small businesses suffered a breach in the last year and McAfee reports that there has been a 322 percent increase in cyber attacks waged on midsized organizations in the past year.

Most midsized organizations are aware that security breaches can have dire consequences—71 percent of IT management at these companies believe there is some chance a serious breach could put their company out of business. However, many of these organizations are under the mistaken perception that hackers like to target larger companies. Approximately 43 percent think that organizations with more than 500 employees are at greater risk for an attack.

Read the full article here:

http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Security/Midsized-Companies-Lose-Average-of-43K-Per-Year-From-Security-Incidents-614511/

12
Nov
09

Wake on LAN

By azilliax Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized

We have had some people asking questions about Wake On LAN in our products lately, and I thought that a quick post regarding what we are doing in the different products might be helpful to clear up some of the mystery surrounding Wake on LAN in our software. A lot of people see it as some black art but it’s really not that bad.

In our products we use two types of packets that we send out to wake a machine up, a directed packet, and a subnet directed broadcast. Now most environments don’t support broadcast between subnets, in fact according to a RFC document from August 1999 routers ship with the ability for broadcasts to pass through them disabled. Our Core Console product is able to work around this by using what we term a Wake on LAN relay, in essence we find a computer on the same subnet that the system you are trying to wake up and we use that computer to broadcast the WOL packet. While this will require that a system running our Core Agent is up and running on that subnet it allows the Core Console to wake up computers across subnets without turning on broadcasting on the network.

Our Deep Freeze product however does not have the ability to use a Wake on LAN Relay, and because of this behavior we can get into a situation where the behavior of Wake on LAN looks completely random. In effect if you are testing Wake on LAN by shutting a computer down and then attempting to wake it up right away it will work, but if you shut the computer down and come back the next morning and try to wake the computer up it won’t respond. What is happening is that the broadcast packets are being blocked but the directed packet is getting through when the testing is done right away, however once the ARP Cache that tells the directed packet where to go expires neither option can wake the computer up.

Now it is possible to turn on Broadcasting in your network if you have the appropriate gear in place, but it’s probably a really good idea to have a talk to the folks that manage your network before doing so. If you are the person managing the network, and you don’t know why broadcasting is turned off in the first place it’s probably better to leave it be, or give the support team here a call and we can talk to you about why you may or may not want to turn this option on.