Keep I.T. Simple
Leave I.T.
to the Professionals
I.T & Telecommunications News
16.08.2011
The deal is back on!
Eset have announced a fantastic offer on their Anti-Virus, Firewall and Anti-Spyware products. They are now offering a 3 years for the price of 2 licence through l dealers like JK Solutions. If you were thinking about swapping over to Eset, even if you have time remaining on your current AV Solution - NOW is the time! Only available until Sept!
01.04.2011
No its not an April Fools prank, its true! Eset are giving away 6 months free on any of their Anti-Virus Software if you are a new customer and you buy a 1 year licence. 18 months cover for the price of 12, Bargain!!
Click HERE if you need more details..
14.03.2011
Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) has now been released. Adopting the "if it aint broke dont fix it" approach, We have listed some of the benefits and fixes of the Service Pack. If you are not affected by any of these we suggest not bothering to installing SP1 at all.
If you are having problems with the following SP1 may help :-
Windows 7 (Desktops & Clients)
- HD Audio devices failing until a restart
- Printing XPS documents without errors
- "Restore previous folders" specific errors when logging in
Server 2008 (& SBS 2008)
- Virtual PC's running out of memory (Dynamic memory update)
- Microsoft Remote FX
- Direct Access
- Clusters
- MSA (Managed Service Accounts)
Click HERE for more information about SP1 on Microsoft's Web-page (leave this website).
01.03.2011
Eset have announced a fantastic offer on their Anti-Virus, Firewall and Anti-Spyware products. They are now offering a 3 years for the price of 2 licence through l dealers like JK Solutions. If you were thinking about swapping over to Eset, even if you have time remaining on your current AV Solution - NOW is the time!
Please click the banner below for prices for your company.
09.02.2011
It seems like all bad news at the moment, but we are issuing another security WARNING to our customers and readers :-
If your company has its own Switchboard (PABX/PBX) you could be under major risk of being attacked. Over the past few months I have been monitoring a few cases of Phone System Hacking and it seems the problem is becoming more and more common.
War-Dialling is making a comeback it! (this used to be an old trick when everyone used modems to connect to the internet).
Hackers use this method and many more to gain access to your telephone system to facilitate them into calling costly (usually International) numbers that YOU the end user will end up paying for (check your small print with your provider, you are more than likely ultimately responsible for any non-recoverable call charges).
Usually, the hacker wants one of 5 things from you :
- Your money, or technically the money you will pay for the premium calls they are making on your behalf/system. It is difficult to prove the end users were connected to the fraud (or who indeed is the end user in many cases).
- Your information by either listening in to your calls or by gaining access to the PBX.
- To change some data (perhaps to someone's benefit) or to modify settings to allow options access that are not usually open by default.
- To analyse your traffic, call times, areas dialled, time of day etc.
- To DOS attack your PBX - meaning 'Denial of Services' in order just to prevent your company from using your telephones to cause general havoc. Perhaps a disgruntled ex employee gave information to someone? quite possible that it was just for revenge or "fun".
However, If you would like to decrease your risk of PBX attack, here are some useful tips to start with :-
1) Ensure that any PBX equipment you have uses non-default passwords (especially for DISA).
2) Implement a password policy (as you would on your server) so that there are complexity requirements and regular password changes which are monitored and enforced.
3) Limit the access to maintenance ports if possible.
4) Block the access of unused mailboxes (and change passwords).
5) Ensure the phone system itself has limited physical access.
6) Speak to you Call Provider - they may have some monitoring and alert systems in place. You could also add some countries to a Ban List.
7) If your PBX has this feature, limit call types to certain extensions. For example ONLY the Directors have International calls allowed.
8) Add the phone system to your DRP and include it as part of your security checks when next assessing your Network.
9) Manually check through your call lists, although mostly hackers like to do "one big hit" over a weekend, you may have calls trickling through the system over a long period undetected. Any calls outside of standard business hours should be checked.
......and OUR FAVOURITE....
10) : Employ a qualified telecoms Engineer to advise best methods of practise and write you some company security protocol, and check over your system to disable any un-required features that you do not use while they are there.
If you want to read on more, please go to part of the source for this news HERE.
01.02.2011
WARNING !! : There are some new really nasty viruses/malware/trojan in town called RAMNIT.A and RAMNIT.H.
Technically they are WIN32 Worm Viruses and in some forms also a trojan (a virus hiding within another file) but they are usually picked up through spyware. Worm viruses replicate themselves and infect thousands of files over a period of time. This particular one can attach itself to System Restore, Hyperfile.sys (the hibernation temp file) and the pagefile.sys (the temp RAM file) files amongst others and therefore is almost impossible to remove without compromising the Operating system itself. There has also been reports that it will copy itself to the recycler on a USB flash drive! Usually many files are destroyed in the removal process.
The main worry if you get infected is detection. If you are using AVG (free edition) In my experience it detected NOTHING as far as the Ramnit was concerned. Although NOD32 could locate the worms it could not remove them all successfully, even in safe mode or through reading the drive externally through a separate stand alone system.
Once the virus has a deep hold of the system, it can use proxy servers to redirect your internet traffic to phishing sites, particularly for Banking. One customer had this compromised and subsequently had a large sum of money taken from their account.
The good news : If you are using NOD32, although it cannot remove the worm once "installed" it seems to successfully prevent the virus from getting there in the first place, whereas other systems with other AV Software did not.
You can also try using ComboFix to repair/remove but I have not had 100% success as yet... You can download it HERE.
There doesn't seem to be any information on the source of this virus, but we suspect it is infecting via peer to peer software/website and not through email. Our advice : make sure you have your browser updated to the latest version, anti-malware switched ON and Anti-Virus Updated and ON. Windows Defender does NOT seem to prevent this so try something like a fully registered version of Malware Bytes available HERE.
Eset's NOD32 is still leading the field it seems, if you want to see how it compares to other AV Software, please click HERE.
18.01.2011
The world's first retail 3 tb hard drives are now available (to the public, I am sure the military have had them for years).
Yes that's 3,000 GIGABYTES! If you would like to order one please contact us. Prices start from ONLY £135!
04.01.2011
Back to work early it seems! Server Backups do fail, especially when power supplies die.
Do you Servers tell you when something goes wrong?
Last Years News
*CLICK HERE*
