Inland Pacific Consulting
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Monthly Archives: March 2009
Conficker Worm Targets Microsoft Windows Systems
Original release date: March 29, 2009
Source: US-CERT
Systems Affected
- Microsoft Windows
Overview
US-CERT is aware of public reports indicating a widespread infection of the Conficker worm, which can infect a Microsoft Windows system from a thumb drive, a network share, or directly across a network if the host is not patched with MS08-067.
I. Description
The presence of a Conficker infection may be detected if a user is unable to surf to the following web sites:
- http://www.symantec.com/norton/theme.jsp?themeid=conficker_worm&inid=us_ghp_link_conficker_worm
- http://www.microsoft.com/protect/computer/viruses/worms/conficker.mspx
- http://www.mcafee.com
If a user is unable to reach either of these web sites, a Conficker infection may be indicated (the most current variant of Conficker interferes with queries for these sites, preventing a user from visiting them). If a Conficker infection is suspected, the infected system should be removed from the network. Major anti-virus vendors and Microsoft have released several free tools that can verify the presence of a Conficker infection and remove the worm. Instructions for manually removing a Conficker infection from a system have been published by Microsoft in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962007.
II. Impact
A remote, unauthenticated attacker could execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system.
III. Solution
DotNetNuke 5.0.0 Upgrade Warning
We have been supporters of DotNetNuke (DNN) for the past several years and offer it as a hosting option to our clients. For those not familiar with DNN, it is the Open Source ASP.NET answer to Joomla!–both being content management systems. A content management system is software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site, much like your local public library keeps track of books and stores them. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. Since the CMS manages all your content, you don’t have to.
Recently, DotNetNuke released to market (TRM) their newest version 5.0.0, and we upgraded immediately and were met with a multitude of problems–from images not showing up, users not being able to logon to their portals, and a whole host of other little issues. After visiting the DNN site forums, it turns out that we were not the only users experiencing these problems. There were some ‘fixes’ for some, but further reading found some of the developers suggesting restoring the previous version as there were a lot of problems that somehow escaped detection in the preliminary testing before the release. Additionally, they promised that there would be a version 5.0.1 that would ‘fix’ all of these issues coming out in short order. We restored our previous version of DNN and anxiously awaited the 5.0.1 version to be releases.
Bigger Is Not Always Better
Huge Web Hosting Company Begs Users To Adopt Gmail
This was a recent headline that caught my eye recently and started me thinking about web hosting and size and value and the appropriate web hosting service based on your business needs.
To my mind, this article emphasizes that one-size-fits all and cheap and bigger is really not better and again reminds me of that old saying “You get what you pay for”.
Does anyone that is in business for themselves that takes their business seriously really want the cheapest of anything they can buy?
Is your web site an after-thought–something that you think you ‘must’ have because everyone else has one, but you don’t really realize the importance of it so you try to do it on the cheap?
After seeing this article I went right to the company web site and the first thing I saw was the advertised rate of $5.95 per month with Gigabytes of data storage Terabytes of bandwidth and a whopping 90 day money back guarantee–seems you can’t go wrong with all they are giving you–and a money back warranty to boot.
And then you read the blog article, written by the owner of the company, requesting their clients switch to Google for their email service, one of the most important services to a small business, and you start to realize what they are all about.
First, their support is terrible because they have too many clients and not enough trained support staff. Second, they don’t have to support web sites because most people naive enough to opt for a five dollar a month hosting service don’t really know if their web site is up or down and do not treat their web presence an an integral part of their business. Consequently, they may be better off having no web site than a web site that is not available when a potential client tries to visit the site and receives an error message.