Microsoft’s advice: Hang up on tech support scammers

Microsoft's best advice to combat tech support scams? Hang up the phone."You get a call from someone that's unsolicited, talking about technical support, hang up," said David Finn, the executive director of Microsoft's Digital Crime Unit, during a hearing held by the U.S. Senate last week. "That's the first thing. That is not a legitimate effort to sell something to you."Finn was one of several people who testified last Wednesday before the Senate's Special Committee on Aging, which held a hearing on technical support scams, which disproportionately target the elderly.Such scams, Finn said during his prepared testimony, are the "single largest consumer fraud perpetrated in America today." They victimize an estimated 3.3 million people and rake in $1.5 billion annually. "This translates to a victim nearly every 10 seconds, with an average loss of $454 per consumer," Finn said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How hackers compromised chipped credit cards, and how the authorities discovered it

Chipped cards have been hacked in the past, despite the security rhetoric from banks and merchants.Until recently, it was done through a Man-in-the-Middle attack.'Man-in-the-Middle' is where an attacker changes the communication between parties who think they're talking with each other directly.Security measures are now in place to stop this kind of chip scam, but it was not until scientists studied the forensics that the police could even figure it out.Second chip It turns out that the fraud worked through a second chip embedded in the card, installed there by the crook.The glued-on dummy chip answered affirmatively when polled. It let a transaction go through when the terminal asked the card's original chip if the entered PIN was correct, Catalin Cimpanu explained in a Softpedia article.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

South Korean manufacturing industry targeted with new backdoor program

South Korean organizations are being targeted in attacks with a new stealthy backdoor program that gives attackers full access to infected computers.The malware has been dubbed Duuzer and while it's not exclusively used against targets in South Korea, it does seem that the hacker group behind it have a preference for that country's manufacturing industry, according to security firm Symantec.Duuzer was designed to work on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows versions and opens a back door through which attackers can gather system information; create, list and kill processes; access, modify and delete files; execute commands and more."It’s clearly the work of skilled attackers looking to obtain valuable information," researchers from Symantec's security response team said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybersecurity careers: Where are the women?

There is a serious and growing gap between men and women when it comes to choosing a cybersecurity career – then again there’s also a serious disinterest in the field altogether from millennials.+More on Network World: What’s hot in driverless cars?+Those were the chief findings of a global study issued by Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) this week that noted: In the U.S., 74% of young women and 57% of young men said schools did not offer the skills that are needed to pursue a degree in computer sciences.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sponsored Post: Digit, iStreamPlanet, Instrumental, Redis Labs, Jut.io, SignalFx, InMemory.Net, VividCortex, MemSQL, Scalyr, AiScaler, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

  • Digit Game Studios, Irish’s largest game development studio, is looking for game server engineers to work on existing and new mobile 3D MMO games. Our most recent project in development is based on an iconic AAA-IP and therefore we expect very high DAU & CCU numbers. If you are passionate about games and if you are experienced in creating low-latency architectures and/or highly scalable but consistent solutions then talk to us and apply here.

  • As a Networking & Systems Software Engineer at iStreamPlanet you’ll be driving the design and implementation of a high-throughput video distribution system. Our cloud-based approach to video streaming requires terabytes of high-definition video routed throughout the world. You will work in a highly-collaborative, agile environment that thrives on success and eats big challenges for lunch. Please apply here.

  • As a Scalable Storage Software Engineer at iStreamPlanet you’ll be driving the design and implementation of numerous storage systems including software services, analytics and video archival. Our cloud-based approach to world-wide video streaming requires performant, scalable, and reliable storage and processing of data. You will work on small, collaborative teams to solve big problems, where you can see the impact of your work on the business. Continue reading

Join the Packet Pushers – Live SD-WAN Podcast with Viptela Nov. 4 in NYC

Next week, the Packet Pushers will be recording a podcast live in front of a crowd in NYC. We'll be talking SD-WAN deployment with Viptela customers who have been actively rolling out the solution. With this show, we want to move from "what is SD-WAN?" to "how is SD-WAN working for you?" Sign up to attend this event here:
http://viptela.com/sd-wan-evening-with-packet-pushers-part-2/

The post Join the Packet Pushers – Live SD-WAN Podcast with Viptela Nov. 4 in NYC appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Who Wants To Save Forever?

Save-icon

At the recent SpectraLogic summit in Boulder, much of the discussion centered around the idea of storing data and media in perpetuity. Technology has arrived at the point where it is actually cheaper to keep something tucked away rather than trying to figure out whether or not it should be kept. This is leading to a huge influx of media resources being available everywhere. The question now shifts away from storage and to retrieval. Can you really save something forever?

Another One Bites The Dust

Look around your desk. See if you can put your hands on each of the following:

* A USB Flash drive
* A DVD-RW
* A CD-ROM
* A Floppy Disk (bonus points for 5.25")

Odds are good that you can find at least three of those four items. Each of those items represents a common way of saving files in a removal format. I’m not even trying to cover all of the formats that have been used (I’m looking at you, ZIP drives). Each of these formats has been tucked away in a backpack or given to a colleague at some point to pass files back and forth.

Yet, each of these formats Continue reading

OpenStack Summit – Tokyo – 2015 – Tuesday 27th – Show Notes

It’s Tuesday morning, it’s 9am and the keynote started off in a blaze of glory.

Over 5000 attendees are present, from 56 countries. The opening presenter with a huge amount of energy stated:

OpenStack is the greatest open source project!

Can we argue with that? The obvious one being Linux, but a second place isn’t to be argued with.

Egle Sigler, Principal Architect, RackSpace, OpenStack Foundation Board Member: Use devstack, which provides visibility against usability for defcore. The more it’s used, the better the visibility. All goes to the common good.

DefCore sets base requirements by defining 1) capabilities, 2) code and 3) must-pass tests for all OpenStack products. This definition uses community resources and involvement to drive interoperability by creating the minimum standards for products labeled "OpenStack."

Lachlan Evenson: Lithium Technologies: Highly energetic Aussie, spoke about rapid development and deployment. Via the presentation, Lachlan showcased a realtime app built on Google tech; containers in OpenStack using Kubernetes and a five "minute deployment". Also demonstrated a home grown dashboard with honeycomb visualisation for each type of OpenStack project. Also via Slack, he showed the use of Kubot (A Kubernetes Slack ‘bot’) to talk to Kubernetes and scale up Continue reading

Judge suggests DOJ wants Apple to work for government by unlocking encrypted iPhone

When Apple and the DOJ were back in court Monday, arguing over Apple’s refusal to unlock an iPhone seized by law enforcement during an investigation, Magistrate Judge James Orenstein told government attorneys, “What you're asking them [Apple] to do is do work for you.”But Justice Department attorney Saritha Komatireddy argued that it has compelled Apple to unlock at least 70 devices since 2008. The government believes it has the power to force Apple to comply under the All Writs Act. Just Security explained, “Under the government’s interpretation of the All Writs Act, anyone who makes software could be dragooned into assisting the government in investigating users of the software. If the court adopts this view, it would give investigators immense power.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco buying Lancope for $450M

Cisco this week said it would acquire security vendor Lancope for $452.5 million to bolster its threat visibility portfolio for enterprise networks.Lancope specializes in network behavior analytics, threat visibility and security intelligence. Its StealthWatch product is designed to continuously monitor the enterprise network and identify suspicious traffic patterns to detect attacks.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Cisco plans to embed security everywhere+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Webmasters have only hours to deploy patches, Joomla incident shows

Four hours -- that's the time Joomla website owners had to apply a patch recently before attackers started to exploit the flaw it fixed. Those who still haven't updated their websites are likely to find them compromised. On Thursday, the developers of Joomla released version 3.4.5 of the popular content management system in order to fix an SQL injection vulnerability that allows attackers to gain administrative privileges by hijacking an active administrator session. Less than four hours after the update's release and the publishing of a technical overview by security researchers at Trustwave, attackers were already exploiting the flaw. Web security firm Sucuri said it saw attacks against two of its customers who operate very popular Joomla-based websites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Plexxi Named New Hampshire High Tech Council Product of the Year Finalist

We’re proud to announce that the Plexxi Switch 2 was named one of the top five finalists for “product of the year” by the New Hampshire High Tech Council. The Product of the Year award celebrates innovative products developed in the past year by New Hampshire-based technology companies and provides a platform for entrepreneurs and inventors to receive advice, promotion, and podium time in front of hundreds of tech leaders at the finalist event.

The winner will be announced at the High Tech Council’s awards event on November 12 at the Manchester Country Club in Bedford. We’ll be there presenting the Switch 2 live to the audience.

The launch of Plexxi Switch 2 Series was an incredible milestone for us and it’s with this groundbreaking technology that we’re poised to lead the next era of IT. In his article on the Switch 2 for Network World, Jim Duffy explains the technology well. Jim writes, “Plexxi’s Switch 2 Series consolidates the network fabric into a single tier for optimized east/west application traffic. It also eliminates the need for multiple switch types typically found in leaf/spine architectures.”

We are proud to be a technology company based in New Hampshire and Continue reading

From start to finish, inside a PayPal Phishing scam

One of the world's most targeted brands...Image by PayPalPayPal is one of the most commonly targeted brands for Phishing, nearly equal to banks when it comes to potential financial gain for criminals.Today, we're revisiting the concept of how to spot a Phishing email by focusing on a recent Phishing campaign that's targeting PayPal customers. We'll start by pointing out visual cues that will help you avoid becoming a victim, but we'll also go thorough the scam completely so you can see what it looks like.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Getting Started with VMware NSX Distributed Firewall – Part 2

In Part 1, I covered traditional segmentation options. Here, I introduce VMware NSX Distributed Firewall for micro-segmentation, showing step-by-step how it can be deployed in an existing vSphere environment.

Now, I have always wanted a distributed firewall. Never understood why I had to allow any more access to my servers than was absolutely necessary. Why have we accepted just network segmentation for so long? I want to narrow down allowed ports and protocols as close to the source/destination as I can.

Which brings me to my new favorite tool – VMware NSX Distributed Firewall. Continue reading

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