Internet Virus Storm Center

A student keyed me in on this great site offering real-time information on virus traffic on the Internet. http://isc.sans.org/ SANS, ironically, is a technical book publisher, and offers this site as a way to build traffic to their commerce portal – very interesting. Anyway, nice place to bookmark.

R
www.micklerandassociates.com
(C) 2005. All rights reserved.

Comcast 4.13 Outage

Comcast suffered a significant outage affecting a majority of the North American broadband customers on Wednesday April 13. My own broadband was included and I was unable to normally access the Internet.

This issue was related to how the Internet researches a looks-up names – the Domain Name System (DNS) allows friendly names of URL’s to be converted into an IP address. The DNS system exists as a convenience; your computer can actually translate the friendly name to an IP address if it’s preloaded in the right spot. To work around the issue, one can do a little advanced preparation to avoid this kind of problem so that one may be able to access sites regardless of DNS-service outages.

Here’s what you’d do:

1. From Windows, perform a START, RUN, and type in the word, CMD. Hit ENTER.

2. A DOS window will open. At the prompt, type in: ping hostname. Hostname is the name of the resource you wish to always access – say, www.fidelity.com, or www.cnn.com.

3. The machine should respond with, for example:

Pinging www.retail.fidelity.com [155.199.64.238] with 32 bytes of data:

4. See the IP address? 155.199.64.238? Remember that number.

5. Close the DOS window by typing EXIT.

6. Perform a START, FIND, Find File or Folder.

7. You’re looking for a file called hosts – search your hard drive. You should find it under a similar path c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc.

8. If you double-click on the file, you’ll be prompted to supply a program to open up the file with. Select Notepad.

9. Notepad will open.

10. At the end of the file, type in something that looks similar to this:

[ip address] [tab] [hostname]

Example:

155.199.64.238 www.fidelity.com

11. Save the file.

12. Close Notepad.

13. Exit the Search.

This will create a permanent cross-reference to the desired location. I do this for nearly everywhere that I teach online so that I can get on-board if there’s ever a problem like this. Or, if you’re really sophisticated, just go into the IP stack and change the DNS configuration to a new primary (grin).

Either way, you’ll get where you’re going – with or without Comcast.

R
www.micklerandassociates.com
(C) 2005. All Rights Reserved.

Holy HIPAA Batman!

MSNBC recently reported on a San Jose firm that likely exposed 185,000 patient records. Apparently from the phsycial theft of microcomputers, the security compromise should be an interesting case to watch in the context of HIPAA: to what extent will the practice be held accountable for the theft under the Privacy and Security Ruling.

If anything, it would be interesting to watch the volume of litigation over the case if consumers were to use HIPAA as a baseline for handling private and confidential patient records. If it could be proven that the medical group was negligent in its HIPAA responsibilities, would it open the door for prosecuting liability for identity theft?

Interesting to see how this one pans out and what the affect will be in the context of HIPAA.

R
www.micklerandassociates.com
(C) 2005. All Rights Reserved.

Spyware as a Business Model

From the US-CERT Update this week:

Hackers Write Spyware For Cash, Not Fame: More than 70 percent of virus writers are now writing spyware under contract, one more piece of evidence that hacking has evolved from mischievous hobby to money-making criminal venture, a security firm reported Monday, April 4. Aladdin Knowledge Systems said its analysis showed that spyware is the favorite among malware writers, since it lets them re-wrap their own “technology” and sell it, or even introduce their own money-making ventures.

Source: http://www.techweb.com/wire/security/160403632.

The Debate on Patriot Act Renewal

I found the ACLU offers an extremely valuable understanding of how Patriot compromises American civil liberties. This is an interactive guide that walks through Constitutional protections that are violated or ignored by Patriot.

The Patriot Act represents a dangerous incursion of the federal government’s authority. It authorizes law enforcement to bypasses traditional wiretap, electronic eavesdropping, and search and seizure laws.

(C) 2005. All Rights Reserved.
www.micklerandassociates.com

Symantec Products Security Announcement

US-Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) released a bulletin last week on a number of Symantec’s security products that are exposed to hacker attacks. These products (Norton Anti-Virus, Internet Security, and System Works) need to be updated with a LiveUpdate event to permanently patch the problem.

They also released the 10-highest virus and trojan threats for the week: no surprise that Netsky ranks the number one problem. Users should remain vigilant to email worms like Netsky that attempt to distribute email through impersonation. Infections could lead to your email address being blacklisted and rejected from major mail servers.

R