IP 200.63.42.136 in massive blog spam run

By Brian Turner

IP 200.63.42.136 has been really hammering out the blog spam over the past week.
The reach is quite surprising - it’s taking it’s toll out on popular blogs but also little used blogs we monitor.
According to a WHOIS check, it appears 200.63.42.136 is assigned to Uruguay:

OrgName: Latin American and Caribbean IP address Regional [...]

Passwords are not enough

By prpr

John Stewart of Signify – The Secure Authentication Service – explains why two-factor authentication is better than one
Passwords are getting a bit embarrassing. Organisations are increasingly reluctant to admit that they only use weak static password protection to prevent access to their networks and resources.
A major problem is that people are forgetful. So [...]

Clustered Storage vs. Storage Virtualisation

By Storage Expo

By Philip Crocker, Director of EMEA Marketing, Isilon Systems.
Many organisations are facing a tremendous increase in the amounts of data needed to conduct everyday business.
The growth of unstructured data such as video, audio, image, research data, and other large digital files is pushing the bounds of traditional storage systems.
Into the breach come Clustered [...]

How to choose an encryption solution

By prpr

Frank Schlottke from Applied Security looks at different approaches to data encryption and discusses the pros and cons that must be examined to ensure a best fit solution.
With stories of data going missing almost daily, it’s difficult to understand why more of it is not encrypted. After all, the most effective countermeasure against the theft [...]

The pitfalls of FTP Servers

By Cyber - Ark

I’ve heard recently that there is a new craze for thrill seekers known as Russian Roulette parachuting – a one in six chance that the parachute might not open – but apparently this is just not close enough to the edge for some IT folks out there.
It seems the latest stunt is using FTP [...]

The problem is information insecurity

By Bruce Schneier

Information insecurity is costing us billions. We pay for it in theft: information theft, financial theft. We pay for it in productivity loss, both when networks stop working and in the dozens of minor security inconveniences we all have to endure. We pay for it when we have to buy security products and services to [...]

The Threat Within: Data Breaches from Unauthorized Access and Improper Use

By Tier-3

(Written by Geoff Sweeney, CTO, Tier-3)
Identity management systems (IDM) control user access to specific company information based on their identity, duty and responsibilities. Increasingly today’s enterprises are turning also to the next level of security with the use of network access control systems (NAC) to verify the integrity of devices as they access the corporate [...]

Which is more Important – Compliance, Security or Operability?

By InfosecurityAdvisor

The task of managing risk within a given organisation has changed dramatically.
There was a time when compliance was unheard of (so to speak), security meant switching off modems, and ensuring systems remained operable involved via a big lorry in the car park for a week to verify backups worked.
This tranquil world has now been shattered, [...]

Reduce Spam: Block Asia

By Brian Turner

As post spam continues to increase on UGC sites, blocking Asia could prove one of the simplest anti-spam options
Post spam is a time consuming annoyance for any webmaster running User Generate Content (UGC) sites.
The more popular and the larger the number of UGC sites you run, the more it becomes a very real management [...]

How to block spam IPs with htaccess

By Brian Turner

There are a number of reasons why you may want to block certain IP’s from blocking your site.
Firstly, certain IPs are commonly used for spam (blogs or forums). Others may be used by bots which are trying to run functions of your site in such a way as to crash it.
Either way, there is a [...]

my-investment.com on spam run

By Brian Turner

A lot of forum spam promoting my-investment.com at present.
The user signs up, then simply copy/pastes the same reply into a string of threads, ie:

Hi everyone,
Thank you very much! Very helpful interestingly to know.

They then post an advert for my-investment.com.
Spammer details:
email address: joe.ncls@gmail.com
IP: 99.135.8.33
One to add to your spam filters. :)

Free iPod/Nokia spam IPs

By Brian Turner

I’ve just visited a mobile phone forum I’ve had on the backburner and yet to properly develop, only to find over 100 threads posted over the past 2 months - by Nigerian spammers posing as fake companies to scam readers out of their cash.
My anti-spam plugins prevented them from being published, and it also gave [...]

1 in 5 ratio of applications pose security risk?

By Janine de Blois

Internet security firm Securnia has announced on its “Security Watchdog” blog that “More than 20% of all applications installed on users PC’s have known security flaws but the user have yet to install the patch provided by the vendor of product.”
They base this information on scans done of 14,500,000 end-user applications with Securia [...]

Simplifying SAM

By Brian Turner

This is a guest editorial, by Matt Fisher, VP Marketing, Centennial Software
It is an irony of modern business that, despite investing huge amounts of financial and human capital into IT, organisations often have less interest in effectively tracking and managing those assets than they do in maintaining the company car.
Although most IT directors would claim [...]