Keep Your PC Safe - Internet Security For the Home User

As the number of cable modems and Wi-Fi networks increases, internet security is becoming more of an issue. You may think that your Internet connection is safe from unwelcome and unwanted intrusion by hackers, but there are some things you can do to improve your security levels to stop hackers gaining access to your personal details, bank account numbers and passwords.

The reason that Internet security is becoming more of an issue now is that people are spending longer connected to the Internet. And unless that pathway is protected by high level security, the hackers will have more opportunities to find a way in. Hijacked machines (often known as zombies and forming part of botnets) are valuable to fraudsters and spammers. The trick is to beat the hackers at their own game.

There are three aspects of home Internet protection, sometimes referred to as the 'holy trinity'.

Personal firewall/intrusion detection

These are the firewalls that often come with your operating system. In older operating systems such as Windows 95 and 98, these systems have virtually no inbuilt security. Because these systems have now been superseded by more up to date software, it is advisable that if you are still operating Win95 or 98 to upgrade to a system that is supported by a Microsoft inbuilt firewall.

All versions of Vista, XP and 2000 are still supported by Microsoft and have inclusive firewall protection. For an additional layer of security, external firewall programs can be incorporated into your operating system as simply as downloading any other piece of software. It is advisable to talk to an expert, however, as some firewalls may not be compatible with your operating system and you may encounter run conflicts that could affect other aspects of your system.

The most popular free downloadable firewall is Zone Alarm, although for comprehensive coverage, Zone Alarm Pro is probably a better option. You can also set your Internet security levels to 'high' on your operating system if you are going to be on the Internet for prolonged periods.

Anti-spyware software

Spyware is software that covertly gathers user information through the user's Internet connection without his or her knowledge. That information is then passed to a third party (the hacker or fraudster) and suddenly your secure system isn't quite as secure as you thought it was. There are countless pieces of embedded software (often also known as 'malware') that piggyback onto downloads and install themselves into your operating system. These include BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) which hijack your browser and take it to their 'chosen' site whether you want to go there or not. Although annoying, these don't do any real damage. However, other spyware can count keystrokes and relay these back to hackers who, from this data, can uncover passwords and other information such as account numbers. Anti-spyware software stops this malware from infiltrating your computer and leaving your important information exposed.

Anti-virus software

A virus can devastate a computer. Designed to cause maximum damage to your data, viruses are created to cause mayhem and have no other purpose other than that. Anti-virus software is essential, particularly if you are using the Internet for long periods of time, and the best option is to include a package such as McAfee VirusScan in your operating system. Ensure that you update this program regularly (you will receive prompts from your computer on start-up).

No piece of anti-virus or spyware software can cover all threats, so it's a good idea to keep an eye out for updates and to combine several systems to cover your bases. There are also some things you can do for yourself when online to keep your PC and your personal details safe:

• Never open email attachments if you do not know who the email has come from, or even from friends. This is the easiest way to allow a virus to access your system.
• Avoid downloading files from sites you are not familiar with.
• Ensure that your security protocol is set to 'high' if you are going to be online for any length of time
• No bank will ever ask for your details via email. Any that do are scams and should be immediately deleted without responding and your bank notified of the scam attempt.
• If something looks suspicious (poor spelling, bad graphics), then trust your instincts - it probably is a bogus email or phishing attempt to get access to your personal details
• If you have a wireless network in your home, ensure that it is password protected.
• Never have the same password for all your sites.

With a little thought and preparation, you can keep your home PC safe from outside attacks and your details out of the hands of fraudsters.

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DDoS Attack Hits Amazon Cloud Customer Hard

UPDATE: updated to clarify that the downtime was isolated to the single customer, and to include comments from Amazon Web Services.

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- As has been reported in several sources this week, including this report from The Register, a customer of Amazon’s cloud computing service - Bitbucket (www.bitbucket.org), a web-based code hosting service that uses both EC2 and the Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage - reported 19 hours of downtime as a result of a DDoS attack.

The disruption, as most of the reports have mentioned, is certain to raise questions about both the resiliance and stability of cloud hosting solutions, as well as invite scrutiny into the quality of Amazon’s response to customer situations like this one.

In an email, Amazon Web Services public relations manager Kay Kinton writes "The customer’s Amazon EC2 instance was receiving a very large amount of network traffic. This large flood of traffic exceeded the networking of the customer’s single Amazon EC2 instance and caused performance to degrade on all network operations for that instance (including access to the EBS volume). Once we properly diagnosed the problem, we worked with the customer to put measures in place to help mitigate the unwanted traffic they were receiving. We have continued to work with the customer to apply network filtering techniques which have kept their site functioning properly."

Bitbucket operator Jesper Nøhr spent a great deal of energy venting his frustrations about the situation via Twitter over the weekend and on Monday. He also published a detailed account of the outage timeline on the company’s blog.

He says in the post that, while he was advised not to reveal the source of the outage (according to The Register, because Amazon felt revealing the attack might give future attackers fuel for designing new means of attacking the service), he believed he owed it to customers to explain what went wrong.

“We were attacked. Bigtime,” he wrote. “We had a massive flood of UDP packets coming in to our IP, basically eating away all bandwidth to the box. This explains why we couldn’t read with any sort of acceptable speed from our EBS, as that is done over the network. So, basically a massive-scale DDOS. That’s nice.”

Nøhr’s blog post, and much of the discussion that has flowed from the incident, is more a look at Amazon’s response, and a debate about the nature of customer service than an investigation into the technical issues at play. His post concludes by saying Bitbucket is taking measures to ensure an outage of this kind won’t happen again, and that those measures might include moving to a new hosting provider.

In the final analysis, he doesn’t come down too hard on Amazon, demonstrating that the company devoted a lot of support attention to his cause after a frustrating (and exceedingly long) preliminary period – about 10 hours.

After the service was originally restored, Bitbucket reportedly suffered two further attacks, Sunday morning and early Monday.

The technical question seems to be how an attack using external traffic was able to disrupt the connection between Bitbucket’s EC2 and EBS resources, which one might reasonably consider an “internal” network connection, and why Amazon didn’t have the means in place to more quickly identify the outage as the result of a DDoS attack.

Kinton points out that AWS may have to do more work to help educate customers on the availability of measures to mitigate the impact of unexpected spikes in traffic.

"We are working to make sure we learn from this and continue to improve the speed with which we and our customers can diagnose issues like this," she says. "We will also provide additional guidance to our customers on how they can better detect this sort of problem and use existing features of EC2 to run a highly scalable and available website. These features include taking advantage of EC2’s scale-out ability to run multiple instances in multiple availability zones and regions, the Elastic Load Balancing feature which helps users filter and balance traffic among their instances and the Auto-Scaling feature which allows users to scale in response to changes in customer traffic."

In the comment section of the Bitbucket blog post, Nøhr wrote that he wouldn’t answer many of the technical questions posted in the comments, but that the company’s system admins “are writing a follow-up post outlining some more meaty details with numbers and graphs.”

Source: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/100609_Outage_Hits_Amazon_Cloud_Customer_Hard

The Assclown Offensive: How to Enrage the Church of Scientology

In the evening of January 15, 2008, a 31-year-old tech consultant named Gregg Housh sat down at the computer and paid a visit to one of his favorite Web sites, the message board known as 4chan. Like most of the 5.9 million people who visit the site every month, Housh was looking for a few cheap laughs. Filled with hundreds of thousands of brief, anonymous messages and crude graphics uploaded by the site's mostly male, mostly twentysomething users, 4chan is a fountainhead of twisted, scatological, absurd, and sometimes brilliant low-brow humor. It was the source of the lolcat craze (affixing captions like "I Can Has Cheezburger?" to photos of felines), the rickrolling phenomenon (tricking people into clicking on links to Rick Astley's ghastly "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video), and other classic time-wasting Internet memes. In short, while there are many online places where you can educate yourself, seek the truth, and contemplate the world's injustices and strive to right them, 4chan is not one of them.

Yet today, Housh found 4chan grappling with an injustice no Internet-humor fan could ignore. Days earlier, a nine-minute video excerpt of an interview with Tom Cruise had appeared unauthorized on YouTube and other Web sites. Produced by the Church of Scientology, the clip showed Cruise declaring himself and his co-religionists to be, among other remarkable things, the "only ones who can help" at an accident site. For the online wiseasses of the world, the clip was a heaven-sent extra helping of the weirdness Tom Cruise famously showed on Oprah. But then, suddenly, it was gone: Scientologists had sent takedown notices to sites hosting the video, effectively wiping it from the Web.

Housh and other channers knew that Scientology had a long history of using copyright law to silence Internet-based critics. But this time, maybe because the church was stifling not just unflattering content but potential comedy gold, the tactic seemed to inflame the chortling masses. That evening, Housh logged in to an IRC channel frequented by like-minded chuckleheads and started talking with five others about the Cruise video. There was a sense that something must be done, but what? One of them logged out and posted a call to action on 4chan and some similar sites. By the middle of the night, 30 people had joined the chat. Within a couple of days, a consensus emerged: They would take down the main Scientology Web site with a massive distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS.

By the time the attacks started on January 18, Housh and many of the now 200 others on the chat channel were devoting every spare moment to the cause: "We were like, OK, we have 24 hours today. None of us need to sleep. Get your caffeine. What's the next step?"

Someone suggested they create a press release. Housh and four others broke off into a side channel to work on it while the DDoS attacks unfolded. They figured they should explain the goals of their spontaneous uprising, but what exactly were those goals? "We had no fricking clue what we were doing," Housh says. "We didn't mean to do it in the first place." They were still more of a riot than a movement—a faceless, leaderless mob growing daily as new adherents flocked in. None of them knew one another, even by pseudonyms, since as a rule there was only one username throughout the community. In fact, it was a standing in-joke on 4chan and related sites that their collective output was the product of a single hive-mind entity, known by that same username: Anonymous.

Instead of a press release, Housh and the others made a video introduction in the name and voice of the hive mind itself. Thrown together in a few days of furious collaboration, it appeared on YouTube on January 21, titled "Message to Scientology."

"Hello, leaders of Scientology. We are Anonymous," the clip began in a robotic, software-generated voice-over accompanied by stock footage of clouds rolling over desolate cityscapes. "Your campaigns of misinformation, your suppression of dissent, your litigious nature: All of these things have caught our eye," the voice explained. "For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind—and for our own enjoyment—we shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form." The message ended, as it had begun, on a pitch-perfect note of sci-fi comic book menace: "We are Legion," the robot voice intoned. "We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."

Source: http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-10/mf_chanology

Website Security - Be Hacker Proof!

At first glance, online shopping seems easy as 123 because of how easy it is to choose, compare and purchase different products with the help of search engines. According to a survey of American online shoppers, 41% abandon their carts once they face difficulty in the transaction process. This only indicates that the story doesn't always have a happy ending. Some online shoppers do encounter difficulties, confusion and misleading tactics that make them discontinue the shopping or subscription process. Can all this be blamed to a weak website security?

If you are online merchant, you want to avoid your potential sale from turning into thin air. Surprisingly, it is not other e-commerce businesses that you should feel threatened about- even more if you know for yourself that you sell top notch products or services. It is those attackers trying to find a vulnerable spot in your website security that you should be careful of. 95% of cyber attacks are targeted to banks and businesses processing credit cards. And if you have no protection, then you have higher chances of being hacked.

Cyber crime is rising rapidly and it has become a weapon of destruction because in the year 2008 alone, the loss due to cyber crimes has reached $1 trillion. What's even more alarming is the fact that tracing these cyber criminals is almost close to impossible. Even government institutions have fallen prey to hackers, and sad to say, due lack of evidence and difficulty in tracing, they haven't had prosecuted almost any of the guilty party.

Computers were invented out of necessity and we store everything in it! This is followed by the creation of internet -a real world where we buy, sell, exchange goods and services. Are you a 100% sure that information is securely saved on your computer network and website?

Take note that hackers are privacy invaders and will try incessantly to steal your that identity and hard earned income. Cyber attackers are masters when it comes to sophisticated technology. They can insert viruses and malicious files into your system without you even knowing it. The truth is having only anti- virus software can be a false sense of security. If you really want to prevent your business from becoming a statistic in cyber crime damages, then be educated about website security. You'll have higher chances of beating the bad guys if you are aware of how they play the game of fraud.

You can only be prepared if you know what you are dealing with. Here are some cyber attacks you may not have heard of:

1. Phishing- method to steal credit card information, passwords and other important information in forms of suspicious links, and emails of spoofed websites.

2. Clickjacking - this is one of the new and most dangerous threats because there isn't any effective solution for this problem yet. So what hackers and spammers do is that they hide a malicious content under the cover of legitimate buttons or clickable items in the website. For example, you clicked 'enter' into a website but instead the hacker directed the click you made into downloading viruses. They can also create spoofs of legitimate websites, where they steal credit card information entered by shoppers.

Online shoppers face more risk of fraud than those who do physical shopping. They might thought that they have purchased real goods from a legitimate merchant, but it can be possible they were actually misled. Online merchants also face the possibility of being hacked of names, addresses and credit card information. It is no surprise that for this reason, e-commerce businesses come and go. Having no website security is like having no burglar alarm on your property. You may wake up one day and everything has been taken away.

Hackers don't only target only large businesses. In fact, they easily find unprotected systems which are mostly small to medium businesses. According to hacker safe, 75% of e-commerce is not secure. Isn't it a disgrace to be a part of that statistic? There are many ways to get started with website security. So go ahead and get started.

1. Get covered with the basics. So install at the same time: a firewall system, anti-virus program and anti spy-ware program.

2. Get trust seals. This works both ways- it increases consumer confidence thus increasing sales and secures your website from vulnerabilities that hackers can take advantage of.

3. Get a consultant. If you have a budget and you can't handle it on your own, get a consultant to take care of your system and network. They too can make professional recommendations on ways how to secure your network.

Katrina loves to write and is dedicated to doing her best in all that she does.

Adware Spam Blocker Review

Do you want to download a piece of high quality adware spam blocker to get rid of all the malware that may be in your computer right now? Most people have heard of the term adware but are not aware of the dangers that it poses to them. Adware are irritating programs that run advertisement scripts once they are successfully installed into the system. For example, you may sometimes find advertisement banners popping up whether or not you are online. This is usually the most obvious sign of adware.

1. What Are the Harmful Effects of Getting Your Computer Infected by Malware Such as Spyware and Adware?

The first harmful effect is that it will start clogging up your system with more and more advertisement pop ups and slowing down the overall processing speed. The more harmful effect is that it may be stealing sensitive information such as credit card numbers or username and passwords from the user and use them for unauthorized and illegal purposes.

The most common industrial use of adware is their use in free software. Programmers usually write malware codes into their free software to try to recoup their costs of developing the software and earning some profits in the process. By displaying such advertisements, they are able to make some money when the user either clicks on the ads or actually purchases the products referred by the advertisements.

2. Download Spyware and Adware Spam Blocker Software

It is important to first research and read reviews about the capabilities and functions of any software you are planning to download and use. Even though there are many product vendors claiming to have the most effective spyware and adware solution available, be sure to check out other user reviews for a more unbiased review first. To find out which are the best antispyware tools to use, you should check out forums or read websites with reviews provided by real life users of these protection software.

Are you looking to download Adware Spam Blocker? Don't do it yet, because the author has found many bad spyware and adware cleaning software on the web. Read the author's review of the Top 5 Spyware & Adware Removal Software on the market now at http://www.review-best.com/spyware-adware-removal-software.htm first!

Learn to completely get rid of all the spyware and adware on your computer in less than 5 minutes with a FREE PC Scan!

Perform a Confiker Virus Removal

What is the confiker virus? How can it harm me? How can I fix it for once and for all so that it does not bother me in the future? There are many different things that you can do to get rid of the confiker virus, you just want to make sure that you are taking the correct steps to get rid of it today!

There are many different aliases and variants that can potentially harm your computer. The most popular one seems to come up somewhere around april fool's day and can definitely harm your computer dramatically.

What is it, what does it do? This virus does all kinds of terrible things such as not allowing you to access specific security websites, it will erase all of your documents, and will even mess with the back-up service. It is a malicious virus that aims to delete everything in its site, it was built purely for harmful purposes and has brought down whole organizations.

The worst thing is that it can lie dormant for months at a time something like a human virus. The great thing is that there is top notch software to get rid of it before it gets to this point, as technology is increasing to battle this as well. There are other viruses that could be on your computer and currently slowing it down.

It is recommended that you get an antispyware software package that's up to date and a registry cleaner that can help you get rid of all that clutter and unnecessary junk that may be on your computer - you'll be able to speed up your computer and get rid of all that stuff for once and for all!

Are you experiencing Repair DLL Error Messages, EXE error messages, general slow downs of your computer, Sychost, System 32, Fix General Protection Fault, General Shutdown, Javascript, Activex, Adware, Spyware, Viruses, or a huge variety of errors for your computer? You can fix this with a very easy to use registry fix tool that is available for a free trial. For More Information, Visit: http://registrycleanpro.blogspot.com/

President Obama's Cyber Security Plan and What You Can Do to Support It!

A flurry of articles concerning Cyber Security and the threat it poses to our National Security have been written over the past several weeks and with great cause. The number one National Security threat to the United States has been the theft of our industrial and defense proprietary information. What many of you do not realize, is the fact that China, Russia and a few others have been stealing us blind and infecting our IT Infrastructure for many years. The have taken advantage of corporate America's extremely lax computer security protocols, hacking into their databases, planting malicious code to be activated at a later date, stealing secrets such as nuclear power development, weapon design and construction, pharmaceutical formulas, marketing plans, financial data of not only major companies, but yours as well. This is a problem that has existed for years, but has grown to such proportions that our government has finally decided that the best defense is educating our population so we ALL can do something about it.

I have written several articles related to Internet security, all of them focused on what YOU can do about it. Over the past several years, we have seen how inept the government, financial and retail industries are, when it comes to protecting critical information such as your banking records, social security and credit card numbers and other information, that, if placed in the wrong hands can ruin you. Couple this with the convenience of wireless Internet access and you have a recipe for disaster, unless you become more aware of how hackers can access your private information, and have easy to use tools to protect that critical information. Wireless Internet access is here to stay. It's convenient, cheap and easy to use, for both you and the bad guy.

Recently a major telephone service provider admitted that their wireless routers did not provide adequate protection. Last month, I commented on a recent vulnerability scan of various financial districts around the world and the miserable failing of over half of the 3,600 wireless access points tested. If your bank or your Internet service provider is not going to provide you with the means to protect yourself, who will? The answer is you! The threat is so large, that even our own government is years behind the curve in being able to provide the level of protection needed for everyone in the United States.

But, it must start somewhere and it might as well be you. You do not have to be an IT security genius. There are several applications available that are easy to use, affordable and effective. You want something that you can just turn on and know it is protecting your Internet connection. You want something that protects you from marketers and hackers collecting personal information about you. You want something that easily password protects your personal information and stores it safely wherever you place it. You want to do all of this without having to make any configuration adjustments yourself.

This application exists. The application is called Covert Surfer. Covert Surfer is an easy to use, affordable and very effective Internet Privacy and Security program that encrypts your Internet connection, no matter where you are, and prevents your neighbor, the sandwich shop owner's son and the guy sitting across the coffee shop, from stealing you blind, ruining your relationship with your girlfriend or even worse. Using industry approved, state of the art encryption, Covert Surfer protects you from identity theft, as well as your right to privacy. Covert Surfer automatically erases your cookies and encrypts your personal files for safe keeping. Covert Surfer is another great tool in the fight for Internet Identity and Privacy Protection. As an added bonus, Covert Surfer can be downloaded directly onto your computer or onto a USB Flash Drive, making it portable and a perfect travel companion.

Michael Dunleavy, President, Diginonymous, LLC
For more information on data protection visit us at http://www.covertsurfer.com