Today Microsoft released 14 new security updates.
• 7 updates for Microsoft Windows
• 2 updates for Microsoft Office
• 1 update for Windows Media Player
• 1 update for Windows Server
• 1 update for Microsoft XML
• 1 update for Internet Explorer
• 1 update for .NET Framework
You can download the updates via Windows Update or click here to visit the bulletin page.
If a deal for software seems too good to be true, then it probably is. The software could be pirated, which means that it’s been copied and sold illegally.
One of the dangers of using pirated software is that you might not get security updates, which means that your computer and your personal information could be at risk.
One way you can usually identify genuine Microsoft software is by ensuring it has the Certificate of Authenticity (COA) label.
A typical COA looks like this:
We offer free, confidential audits and advice to businesses who are concerned over software licensing. Contact us for details.
There are several common ways that spammers can get your email address:
It pays to keep your email address as private as possible, but sometimes it seems like there’s nothing you can do to keep it out of the hands of spammers. For this reason you have to combine smart privacy practices with strong email filters.
You may or may not have heard about the ongoing problems with BT vs UCE Protect Spam House in Germany?
Essentially, the problem is that BT and UCE protect are locked into an ongoing feud over spam – UCE protect are blocking ALL MAIL FROM BT IP ADDRESSES from sending to anyone utilising the UCE protect system (many of which are not even aware that UCE protect are running the background processes of their spam checks).
UCE protect say that this is because they are not happy about the way that BT deal with spammers on their networks, as they allegedly don’t have adequate blocks to stop anyone that is spamming on their network. Hence the reason they have taken the step to block all IP addresses that are associated with BT accounts.
In contrast, BT say that they have no problems with spammers, and there protection is more than adequate! Hence the ongoing feud….
So, how does this affect me?
Well – it seems today that the whole affair has ‘come to a head’. So far today, we have had an influx of support calls from customers with BT services unable to send emails to high priority customers? So what do BT offer as a fix? As yet, they don’t!
So, what can we do about it?
Barton Technology have a fix for you! Our domain hosting packages AND our adsl packages BOTH include an outbound mail server through our datacentre hosted servers! Problem solved! – as long as the mail passes through Barton’s servers the BT/UCE protect business is bypassed and mail flow may continue!
If your experiencing these problems – give us a call as soon as possible and we will help to get your Business emails back up and running!
ISPs are blocking millions of legitimate emails a day as collateral damage in their war against spam, according to an email delivery company.
The worst hit are social networks. Friends Reunited, for example, had as many as 27% of its emails bulk blocked by ISPs in May, according to Return Path, which advises companies how to get messages through to end users.
We’re not talking about spam, these are emails that people have asked to receive
“About one in five commercial permission-based emails are being blocked globally, and 15% in Europe are blocked because ISPs are treating them as spam,” Margaret Farmakis, senior director of response consulting for Return Path, told PC Pro. "I wouldn’t be able to say if it was millions or billions, but it is countless.
“We’re not talking about spam, these are emails that people have asked to receive, but that are being treated like spam,” she said. “It doesn’t effect one-to-one emails, but a lot of marketing emails and communications from social networks, for example, are never delivered to the end user.”
According to Return Path, email is often caught in the spam trap because some end users flag emails as unsolicited when actually they have just got bored of receiving emails from a company. If a company receives too many spam reports – around 1% of mails from any one company – then all emails from that company are tarred with the same brush.
Social networks are increasingly falling into ISPs’ spam filters because of the way subscribers sign up to the services, with networks often suggesting that users import email address books.
Return Path said emails from social networks were twice as likely to be caught up in the ISP bulking traps than mails from other industries.
“The practice of importing loads of addresses can have an impact,” said Farmakis. “Effectively you are sending a lot of emails to people who haven’t asked for them, and some of those email addresses could be really old, which might be out of use or being used as spam traps. It can be risky.”
Despite the high number of false positives, Farmakis refused to blame ISPs for the wrongly blocked missives, saying that some legitimate emails were inevitably going to be caught in the crossfire.
“Between 97% and 98% of all email is spam,” she said. “ISPs have to weed through it and try and discover what they should deliver and when they should protect their end users from spam. It’s like they’re fishing and if a company’s email looks too much like spam they get caught up in the net.”
source: pcpro.co.uk
It may be in the midst of a fibre rollout, but BT is also continuing to upgrade exchanges for the slower ADSL2+ services.
The telco has added another 199 exchanges to its upgrade list, which will benefit from up to 20Mbits/sec broadband by the spring of 2011.
Click here for the full list of the 199 new ADSL2+ exchanges
The list spans the entire country, from St Ives in Cornwall to St Andrews in Scotland.
By the time this latest rollout is completed, three quarters of the UK will be connected to ADSL2+ or fibre broadband lines, according to BT. The company claims that 1.5 million premises have access to fibre already.
BT has also announced that it’s trialling a "priority class of service" for ADSL2+ business customers. "The service will allow communications providers to better manage their customer networks based on key SLA (Service Level Agreement) measures of latency, packet loss and jitter, resulting in enhanced levels of reliability for business VoIP," BT claims.
The trial will begin this autumn, with BT hoping to offer the service commercially by next year.
source: pcpro.co.uk
The turbulent British summer leads to a surge in data loss incidents, according to industry experts.
Kroll Ontrack claims that it traditionally deals with around 12% more data recovery requests in the summer months than it does in the spring, with the weather largely to blame for the surge.
"We see peaks [in demand] soon after peaks in the ambient temperature," Kroll Ontrack’s chief engineer, Robert Winter, told PC Pro.
If you have devices that are going to fail, the failure may be induced by the elevated temperature
"The stress on electrical devices increases if you elevate the temperature," Winter added. "If you have devices that are going to fail, the failure may be induced by the elevated temperature."
Winter claims failure rates tend to be higher among personal and small business users, rather than large companies, which tend to have air conditioning and humidity control. Laptops and disk drives being left in direct sunlight or in the back of cars is another common cause of failure, the Ontrack engineer added.
Electrical storm
Hot weather isn’t the only meteorological threat to IT equipment over the summer months. "You tend to get extreme weather, such as electrical storms," explained the rather ironically named Winter. "Quite a few drives get damaged by electrical surges."
Winter claims the damage caused by electrical surges isn’t usually terminal, with the diodes used to protect the rest of the drive’s electronics bearing the brunt, leaving the disk platters largely unharmed. "The normal [data recovery] process is to get the electronics working again, by replacing the electronics with an identical set," he explained.
Holiday cover
The summer can also trigger an indirect increase in data loss rates, with more IT staff naturally taking a break in July and August. "Often companies decide to do maintenance in the summer months," said Winter. "If the maintenance goes wrong, there are limited reserves available because staff go on holiday."
Read more: Data disasters more likely to strike in summer | Enterprise | News | PC Pro http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/enterprise/360211/data-disasters-more-likely-to-strike-in-summer#ixzz0wHlce9iO
source: pcpro.co.uk
Researchers at Ohio State University have claimed a “spintronics” breakthrough that could revolutionise storage by packing more data into less space.
Using spintronics – which measures the spin of electrons – the scientists have created a plastic memory device that can write and then read data in an entirely new way.
We could solve many of the problems facing computers today by using spintronics
“Spintronics is often just seen as a way to get more information out of an electron, but really it’s about moving to the next generation of electronics,” said Arthur Epstein, professor of physics and chemistry and director of the Institute for Magnetic and Electronic Polymers at Ohio State.
“We could solve many of the problems facing computers today by using spintronics,” he added.
Conventional electronics encode data in a binary code of ones and zeros depending on the presence or otherwise of an electron, but researchers have for years been trying to harness the fact that an electron’s orientation can be altered, like a bar magnet.
Electrons are either “spin up” or “spin down”. Scientists say electronics that can differentiate between the two states would let computers store and transfer twice as much data per electron.
According to Epstein, the current research device is little more than a thin strip of dark blue organic-based magnet layered with a metallic ferromagnet and connected to two electrical leads.
But the researchers still successfully recorded data on it, retrieving it by controlling the spins of the electrons with a magnetic field.
“The material is a hybrid of a semiconductor that is made from organic materials and a special magnetic polymer semiconductor,” Epstein explained. “As such, it is a bridge between today’s computers and the all-polymer, spintronic computers that we hope to enable in the future.”
According to Epstein, the technology should transfer easily to industry, because “any place that makes computer chips could do this and we made the device at room temperature”.
Not just data storage
Although data storage has been touted as the most likely deployment area for spintronics, higher data density is only part of the story, the researchers said.
Spintronics creates far less heat than conventional circuitry so can be arranged more densely and run on smaller batteries, said Epstein.
“We would love to take portable electronics to a spin platform,” he said. “Think about soldiers in the field who have to carry heavy battery packs, or even civilian ‘road warriors’ commuting to meetings."
"If we had a lighter weight spintronic device which operates itself at a lower energy cost, and if we could make it on a flexible polymer display, soldiers and other users could just roll it up and carry it,” he added.
source: pcpro.co.uk news
TalkTalk has raised its line rental charges by more than 50p a month – just months after warning that a similarly priced landline tax would force 100,000 low-income homes to give up their broadband.
The company’s line rental charges will increase from £11.49 to £12.04 per month, as part of a series of price rises on call charges and other TalkTalk services that will come into effect from 1 October.
We estimate that the (50p) increase in price will mean that over 100,000 mostly low-income homes will be forced to give up their broadband lines – TalkTalk CEO Charles Dunstone, November 2009
That’s the exact same month the Government’s landline levy was due to be introduced, which would have seen 50p added to monthly telephone bills to help pay for next-generation broadband. A move that was vociferously opposed by TalkTalk.
"As well as being unfair we estimate that the increase in price will mean that over 100,000 mostly low-income homes will be forced to give up their broadband lines," said TalkTalk CEO Charles Dunstone in the press release issued last November. The estimate was based on TalkTalk’s own pricing models.
The new Government decided to scrap the broadband tax, with Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt citing TalkTalk’s research into the impact on low-income families as one of the reasons why the levy was cancelled.
"Price rise, not a tax"
TalkTalk denies it’s being hypocritical. "The difference is the Government wasn’t implementing a price rise, it was implementing a tax," a company spokesman told PC Pro. "It wouldn’t have stopped providers increasing prices to maintain their business."
The spokesman accepted that it was "entirely possible" that the price rise would force some low-income families to cancel their broadband connection, but claimed that the 100,000 "was an industry-wide figure" and that TalkTalk "was very much at the value end of the market".
TalkTalk is following in the wake of BT, which announced it was putting up line rental prices from October earlier this summer.
source: pcpro.co.uk security news
A new version of the Zeus trojan has robbed £675,000 from a UK bank.
During July, more than 3,000 customer accounts were compromised using the trojan at one unnamed bank, according to a report from M86 Security, which uncovered the scale of the theft after cracking into the criminals’ command and control server.
The third version of the Zeus trojan isn’t only harvesting data, but actually performing illegal banking transactions. M86′s chief security architect, Mark Kaplan, said the attack was unique because "it actively steals money and not only gathers username or passwords".
It actively steals money and not only gathers username or passwords
M86 said the trojan watches as banking customers login to their accounts, and checks to see if they have sufficient funds. If their account holds more than £800, the trojan transfers money to a mule account. The mules are valid accounts held by real banking customers, but compromised by the criminals to transfer money and cover their tracks.
The attackers used the Eleonore exploit kit – which can be bought online for a few hundred dollars – to take advantage of flaws in software such as Adobe and Internet Explorer to install the trojan after users visit a malicious web page. M86 said the command server for the scheme appeared to be based in Eastern Europe.
Kaplan said his firm had passed the details of the case to the police, saying the attacks are likely still happening. "As far as we know, it is still going on," he said. "However, the bank and law enforcement agencies are managing the situation now." M86 would not name the bank involved.
To avoid being hit by the attack, Kaplan advised online banking customers to set up text or email alerts to keep an eye on transactions, and to ask their bank to disable the ability to transfer money to third parties.
As the attackers are taking advantage of flaws in Adobe software, he advised using a different PDF reader. "I am not saying that those won’t have any vulnerabilities, but at least they are less exposed," he said.