Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Is it time for an upgrade to my web host?

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I’m truly amazed at how fast the time flies. I’ve been blogging for 2 1/2 years now and it’s been a very exciting adventure. It all started back in October 2007 when I created an account on Blogger. In July 2008 I decided to branch out by purchasing my own domain name. At the same time I converted from Blogger to WordPress, hosting it on a Go Daddy shared web hosting account.  At the time Go Daddy was a convenient one stop shopping purchase, for both domains and web hosting.

I’m now coming up on the renewal for Go Daddy and I’m considering upgrading to a virtual private server (VPS).

Why? In my role with my current employer I work with hundreds (almost thousands) of servers, both virtual and physical. It’s always been a little depressing to know what’s possible from a real server and then settling for what I can personally afford with this being a hobby. In addition to my wanting more control over the environment I’ve seen a significant growth in traffic to both my blog and the discussion forums which are hosted on the account.

Over the past 6 months the traffic to my blog is peaking daily at around 1,000 page loads which is pretty decent in my opinion for the amount of material I have posted and the narrow focus of that material. The traffic to the discussion forums have really started to ramp up over the past seven months.

As both of those endeavors have grown I’ve noticed the response time of the site go up. I’m the first to recognize that while some of the reason is the traffic a large portion is also the number of features I’ve added to the site over the past 2 years.  Thankfully the little bit of advertising I’ve been running has helped defray the current hosting costs (thanks for the support!). With that in mind I’m considering stepping up to a VPS solution in order to provide a significant performance boost and provide a platform for future projects.

Anyone have any recommendations on VPS web hosting? I’m probably looking at a budget of  $30-$50/monthly, let’s not forget it’s just a hobby and I have no intention of giving up my day job! (I’m told my grammar is terrible and I need to spend more time proof reading).

I was considering RimuHosting based on a blog post from Colin McNamara, not directly related but anyone with that name must be smart ;).

Cheers!

Internet Security Threats

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Over the past 5 weeks there have been a lot of Internet security related events in the news. You may have read about Google’s recent announcement that it and 30 other organizations where the victims of Chinese supported hackers. There have also been numerous stories how everyday people have had their banking user names and passwords stolen by hackers along with large sums of money from their banking accounts.

Let me focus the attention on the three recent vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash and Adobe AIR;

Microsoft Internet Explorer Vulnerability MS10-002 (Cyber Security Alert SA10-021A)

Adobe Reader and Acrobat Vulnerability APSB10-02 (Cyber Security Alert SA10-013A)

Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR APSB09-19 (Cyber Security Alert SA09-343A)

Any of these vulnerabilities can be remotely exploited when the user visits a poisoned web site/page or by opening a poisoned Adobe PDF document. Once the vulnerability is exploited additional software is usually installed on the personal computer which can disable antivirus solutions and begin harvesting user names and passwords including banking information.

What should I do?

You need to make sure that you have the latest and greatest software and security patches applied to your personal computer. You should make sure that you have turned on Microsoft Windows Update; this will update Internet Explorer automatically. You can also confirm that Internet Explorer is up-to-date by manually visiting the Microsoft Windows Update website. You should also update/install the latest and greatest versions of Adobe AIR 1.5.3, Adobe Reader 9.3 and Adobe Flash 10.0.42.34.

If you haven’t already updated your home (or work) computers recently you might want to invest some time in the task. It might save you from a lot of problems and headaches later down the road.

Cheers!

References;

SANS Top Cyber Security Risks
Symantec Internet Security Threat Report 2008
What To Expect In Security In 2010

Smithsonian Channel: System Crash

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The Smithsonian Channel has put together a very insightful show entitled System Crash chronicling the dangers of our growing digital world.

Unbelievable…and unstable. Unlimited…and unreliable. See how our growing dependence on modern technology, now running everything from transportation to energy to finance to communications, has made life a whole lot easier…and infinitely, sometimes tragically, more complicated.

Take a disturbing trip to the dark side of the Internet, where cyber crooks pose a constant threat to our finances, privacy, even our national security. Discover how hackers can attack major corporations and bring entire countries to a standstill, and what, if anything, we can do to stop them.

It’s intend audience is the every day casual Internet user, not the security or network engineer. I thought it did a very good job of articulating the dangers that are growing and the peril that many Internet users are completely unaware of today.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the show;

Cheers!

Kaspersky Antivirus – Google Adsense – Trojan

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It was like deja vu, only a few months ago I wrote about an issue with Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 and Google Adsense. So you can imagine my surprise this morning when our Blue Coat ProxyAV appliances started sending out hundreds of alarms that URLs associated with Google Adsense were infected with a Trojan. After looking at the Javascript it was pretty clear that this was a false positive result.

2010-01-25 12:04:25-05:00EST
Hardware serial number: 3806111111
ProxyAV (Version 3.2.4.1(43261)) – http://www.BlueCoat.com/ Antivirus
Vendor: Kaspersky Labs Scan Engine Version: 8.0.1.23
Pattern File Version: 100125.095500.3363319 (Timestamp: 2010.01.25 09:55:00)

Machine name: ProxyAV-gosford
Machine IP address: 10.1.1.45
Server: 64.233.169.165
Client: 10.1.1.100

Protocol: ICAP
Virus/PUS: “Trojan.JS.Redirector.ar” found!
URL: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js

There was quite a thread over on the support forums at Kaspersky on the subject.

Cheers!

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