Joe Hackman

AI, Industry 4.0, Tesla, maker, and more...

You are here: Home / Archives for Joe Hackman

3 Critical Updates for Microsoft Products

by Leave a Comment

There are some critical patches available today to address bugs in Internet Explorer (nearly all versions), Outlook (numerous versions) and Excel (numerous version). We recommend you take these precautions for the coming few days even if you are able to install the update.

  • Exercise caution with your web access habits.
  • Do not open any attachments in Outlook that you are not expecting.
  • Delete any suspicious emails you receive.

These updates will be available immediately from microsoft, to download them manually:

Microsoft Windows Update

We will also push these updates out to customers machines that have requested in advanced that we do so. If you would like to see to it that this is done for your systems please contact us. Otherwise advise your users that when prompted by windows update to install critical updates to do so. These issues are significant and could cause extensive problems if they were to be exploited on one or more of your systems.

It is likely that you will not actually be prompted to install these updates until Wednesday January 9th as most windows update servers synchronize early in the morning. Running a manually synchronization is not adding the updates as of the authoring of this notice.

If you’d like to read more about this:

Microsoft’s Security Bulletin

Or:

Advisories for Week of January 8th @ Cert

Antivirus That Works

by 1 Comment

Managed Solutions has a long history working with security products. Very early on in our business cycle it became apparent that the Internet and Email were going to really push the envelope as far as security for personal computers was concerned. Over the years we have worked with a number of specialized vendors providing Antivirus, Anti Malware and Anti Spyware solutions. Up until the summer of 2006 we viewed the products as a cumbersome necessary evil. That changed when we starting looking at ESET’s NOD32 product line. ESET has done a number of very positive things to vastly improve the ease of use, management and performance of their product and in the process made it cheaper for us to own and operate as businesses and individuals. Most security products these days are slow and inefficient, not NOD32. NOD32 is truly a wonder in that it achieves the following:

  • Provides a very high level of performance
  • Is easy to install and maintain
  • Is effective at detecting known and unknown viruses
  • Is easy to upgrade
  • Is competitively priced
  • Uses very little system resources
  • Is very easy to manage
  • Offers very flexible configurations

At Managed Solutions we pride ourselves in being a business that is prepared to change and make moves swiftly when it makes sense. ESET has made it quite easy for us to migrate our internal security mechanisms and customers to their NOD32 product. Our customers that have made the switch have had nothing but good things to say about NOD32. A recent response we received was “My computer is faster” and of course this is achieved while upgrading the quality of the solution. A typical problem in the past we encountered was re-licensing and upgrading the products was difficult and cumbersome. This is a huge burden that is lifted with NOD32 being a breeze to upgrade and acquire licenses.

Speakeasy Partner

by Leave a Comment

speakeasynetworkManaged Solutions partnered with Speakeasy to provide very competitive pricing and excellent service on VOIP, DSL and T1+ data products to our customers. We’ve worked with a number of communications companies over the years but were most impressed with Speakeasy. They have been responsive to our needs and provide technically sound solutions. It is no surprise that Speakeasy is rapidly expanding into a number of markets around the United States. There is a demand everywhere for good service, Speakeasy and Managed Solutions both recognize this.

“Big Yellow” Worm Circulating

by Leave a Comment

There is a new worm circulating tonight that is infecting machines that have vulnerable versions of Symantec Client Security (Ver 3) and Symantec Anti-virus Corporate edition (Ver 10). Once a machine is infected it downloads a package from an FTP server then begins to seek more vulnerable machines to infect. If you have a vulnerable version of these products you can protect yourself from this worm by downloading the patches available from Symantec.

It is not likely that this worm would infect smal networks behind a firewall or other NAT device but it is still advisable to patch any systems running these products anyway. Like with anything else of this nature, you should contact your IT department for more information or if you think your machine may be infected. If you’d like to learn more about the worm or this vulnerability the best resource right now that we are aware of is eEye.

Now for the technical types some additional information. I connected to the ftp server mentioned in the eEye article and discovered the following:

[21:38:45] 220-This Server is running since 2 days and 7:31 hours,
[21:38:45] 220-and has been accessed 91607 times, 325 in the last 24 hours.
[21:38:45] 220-There are now 1 users logged in, Max allowed : Unlimited.

It is possible that this worm has been downloaded by over 91,000 infected machines as of 9:38PM PST Friday December 15th, 2006. It does appear that the spread mysteriously slowed in the past 24 hours. It is possible that the .exe was modified to access a new FTP server and that variants already exist.

Is OS-X more secure than Windows?

by 1 Comment

If you asked me this question 2-3 years ago I would have said yes. It appears that the success of Apple’s OS-X equipped machines has also led to another new phenomenon – exploits. Today as I was reading the latest cert advisories looking for windows, internet explorer or other related issues I noticed several “High” vulnerabilities for Apple Mac OS X. I figured I’d read on to see the typical Microsoft Internet Explorer or related items but there weren’t any. Is this a sign of a change in the tide of OS security? I don’t believe so, I have what I believe is a much more logical explanation. All software of any sort has issues. These issues create opportunities for those out there that would like to undermine our security.
The bigger we as an audience represent the more likely we are to be a target of these efforts. Quite simply, the Mac was not a huge target because it had very little market share and mainstream appeal. That has changed and so has the efforts that are made to exploit it. This is not a universal answer, there are of course other factors involved but I believe above all this is the biggest issue. When you compare things that have like features and marketability you’ll likely find items that have similar exploitability and interest of those mysterious would be exploiters.