Nathan Hall

Austrailia.

Id just like to tell everyone who comes onto my site i ave just moved to the land of austrailia and am currently looking for a good service provider which isnt gonna banckrupt me haha so im having to use the library. I’d just like to say that even thoug internet is a fortune here it is a wondderful place wioth great senery and is really worth coming to visit the place on holiday or even applying for a permanent visa how i luckily did and got one so now im proud to be known as a britisha austrailian :_) and am seriously enjoying it here c ya

New alliance aims to unite malware fight

A new alliance has been created to formalize information sharing on security protection and develop industry standards.

The Industry Connections Security Group (ICSG) is parked under the IEEE Standards Association and includes mostly security heavyweights and antivirus players. The founding members are AVG Technologies, McAfee, Microsoft, Sophos, Symantec, and Trend Micro.

Announcing the group in a blog post on Monday, Mark Harris, vice president of SophosLabs, said security researchers have had a tradition of sharing virus samples but that the sharing arrangements "are still based on individual relationships rather than formal agreements."

The formation of the group makes for a "more organized" security industry, he added, in the current landscape where attacks are increasingly structured and malware samples grow at "astonishing rates."

The ICSG currently has a malware working group, but intends to add other working groups over time.

According to a July 20 presentation document (PDF), the group aims to improve the efficiency of the collection and processing of the millions of malware file samples handled by security vendors each month by focusing on an XML-based metadata sharing standard. The standard is expected to undergo ratification by the end of this month.

Graham Titterington, principal analyst at Ovum, said the announcement of the group was both interesting and confusing. The rationale for the new alliance was the need for a more comprehensive approach to countering malware writers, he said, but the focus of the group appears to be limited.

The group addresses "all aspects of malware and its membership includes most of the main antimalware vendors–Kaspersky being the most notable absentee–and so the ICSG represents progress on countering the so-called ‘blended threats,’" he told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail. "However, it does not seem to be taking the battle to the criminals or probing the criminals’ business networks. The focus is on setting up the infrastructure and protocols to allow rapid information sharing on threats and making the day-to-day operation of the members more efficient.

Titterington added: "I would have expected a body affiliated with the IEEE to be putting more emphasis on the development of improved methods for disrupting criminal activity and on new ways of protecting users."

Hacker Arrested By The Department Of Justice

The Feds have arrested a 28 year old Miami, FL. man for hacking into systems and trying to steal some 130 million credit card numbers. The arrest and charges against Albert Gonzalez also includes fraud and conspiracy charges as well.

In a press release from The Department of Justice it further states:

The indictment, which details the largest alleged credit and debit card data breach ever charged in the United States, alleges that beginning in October 2006, Gonzalez and his co-conspirators researched the credit and debit card systems used by their victims; devised a sophisticated attack to penetrate their networks and steal credit and debit card data; and then sent that data to computer servers they operated in California, Illinois, Latvia, the Netherlands and Ukraine. The indictment also alleges Gonzalez and his co-conspirators also used sophisticated hacker techniques to cover their tracks and to avoid detection by anti-virus software used by their victims.

If convicted, Gonzalez faces up to 20 years in prison on the wire fraud conspiracy charge and an additional five years in prison on the conspiracy charge, as well as a fine of $250,000 for each charge.

Gonzalez is currently in federal custody. In May 2008, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York charged Gonzalez for his alleged role in the hacking of a computer network run by a national restaurant chain. Trial on those charges is scheduled to begin in Long Island, N.Y., in September 2009.

In August of 2008, the Justice Department announced an additional series of indictments against Gonzalez and others for a number of retail hacks affecting eight major retailers and involving the theft of data related to 40 million credit cards. Those charges were filed in the District of Massachusetts. Gonzalez is scheduled for trial on those charges in 2010.

The charges announced today relate to a different pattern of hacking activity that targeted different corporate victims and involved different co-conspirators.

Get the rope! 20 years isn’t enough time as far as I am concerned.

How to make strong, easy-to-remember passwords

One of the best ways to protect your online security is to have strong passwords that you change periodically. But that’s easier said than done. Coming up with hard-to-guess passwords is hard enough, but it’s even harder to have separate passwords for different sites and to remember new ones after you change them.

One way to create a password that’s hard to guess but easy to remember is to make up a phrase. You could type in the entire phrase (some sites let you use spaces, others don’t) or you can use the initials of each word in the phrase, for instance, "IgfLESi85" for "I graduated from Lincoln Elementary School in ‘85." An even better one would be "MbfihswE&S" for "My best friends in high school were Eric and Steve." You get the idea–upper case numbers, letters, and symbols that are seemingly meaningless to everyone but you. Microsoft has an excellent primer on passwords and a password strength checker.

But even if you do come up with a clever and hard-to-remember password, don’t use it for every site. Since lots of people do that, there’s the risk that a sleazy site operator–or a sleazy person who works for a legitimate site–could use it to break into your accounts on other sites.

Password managers
One solution is to use a password manager. There are several available programs and Web storage services, but the ones I’m most familiar with are RoboForm and Lastpass. These programs can generate passwords for you and remember them so you don’t have to. Both programs are, themselves, password protected, though you have the option of running RoboForm without a password or having Lastpass remember its own password on your PC. That’s OK as long as no one else has access to your machine. I recommend that you manually enter your master password on a laptop that could more easily fall into the wrong hands.

RoboForm has a free trial version that’s limited to 10 passwords after the trial ends. Lastpass is free.

Joe Siegrist, Lastpass CEO

(Credit: Lastpass)

RoboForm has been around for a long time, but Lastpass is a relatively new offering. Company CEO Joe Siegrist describes the program as a hybrid because it stores your passwords and usernames both on your machine and on the Web. You can download the browser plug-in to a PC or a Mac to work directly with Firefox on either platform or Internet Explorer on Windows, but there are also ways to use it with Safari and Chrome. Because it has a Web interface, it can work with any Web-enabled device, but the plug-ins for IE and Firefox make it easier to use.

On Firefox and IE, Lastpass records your usernames and passwords when you first enter password-protected sites and then enters them for you automatically for subsequent visits. Passwords are stored in a "vault," which is actually a Web page stored on your PC, as well as the company’s servers, so you can access it from any device, including a borrowed machine. The password vault on your machine is automatically synchronized with the server, so you don’t have to worry about synchronizing or backing up your data.

Password data, according to Siegrist, is encrypted on the PC and on the servers. He said that no one–himself included–can decrypt them without the master password that only you know. Assuming the encryption is as good as he says it is, this should protect your security even if their servers are compromised. The company provides a lot of security information on its FAQ.

There are also versions for Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Android as well as a Web site for phones and browsers that aren’t supported directly.

For a lot more on this password management, see CNET News reporter Elinor Mills’ post, "Facing the pain of passwords."

Researchers prove kernel is secure

Australian researchers have demonstrated a way to prove core software for mission-critical systems is safe.

The researchers this week said they can prove mathematically that code they have developed, designed to govern the safety and security of systems in aircraft and motor vehicles, is free of many classes of error.

Australia’s Information and Communications Technology Centre of Excellence (Nicta), a private-sector research organization, this week announced the completion of the first formal machine-checked proof of a general-purpose operating-system kernel. The kernel is called the secure embedded L4 (seL4) microkernel.

Lawrence Paulson, professor of computational logic at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory, who developed the Isabelle generic proof assistant Nicta modified to check its kernel, told ZDNet UK that the microkernel breakthrough would have a trickle-down effect for businesses.

"I regard the software industry as a real mess," Paulson said on Thursday. "If you’ve ever used a computer you know how unreliable they are. This is an important way of making it better."

While rigorously testing high-quality code is expensive, said Paulson, developing such tests and operating systems for specialized purposes would have the secondary effect of improving software in general.

Paulson added that teams in Europe had also made breakthroughs in the formal verification of computer systems, giving the German Verisoft project as an example.

Nicta principal researcher Gerwin Klein, who leads the formal verification research team, said in a statement that previous research had concentrated on giving proofs for specific system properties.

"Formal proofs for specific properties have been conducted for smaller kernels, but what we have done is a general, functional correctness proof which has never before been achieved for real-world, high-performance software of this complexity," said Klein.

Nicta claimed that many kinds of attack, such as those exploiting buffer-overflow vulnerabilities, would not be successful against the seL4 microkernel.

The intellectual property generated by the Nicta research will be handed over to Open Kernel Labs, a Nicta spinoff firm, for further development. The research took four years, and was conducted by 12 Nicta researchers, in conjunction with the University of New South Wales.

Bit Defender 2009

I have recently installed  Bit Defender Total Security 2009 on my newly installed Windows 7 Ultimate OS. I find its a little sluggish to be honest it slows my boot up time right down, the odd website takes a bit longer and apps take a little longer to load up but its not too bad its worth the slower performance for the great well known protection. You wont get the Bit Defender Firewall yet due to driver incompatibility issues and Windows blocks it from loading but Windows Firewall is good anyway. So there I don’t have any hard feelings from installing it. I used to use AVAST Pro but that expired and i decided to use Bit Defender to me its a brilliant antivirus one thing i like is the network and file scanned.

I like this window which you get on you’re desktop when you get when you use the “Advanced View” its quite useful by the way the higher the bars are the slower you’re pc is going to get and it doesn’t get high unless you’re using windows explorer to go through you’re files. At the moment the Net Zone scanner isn’t working because i did something and i cant remember what but it resets and works every time you reboot so it isn’t hard to fix anything you change. The layout of Bit Defender is easy to use as well its got a “Basic View” for people who are happy with there security with the defaults or an “Advanced View” for the people like me who likes to mess with software to get it how they like it !!

So there is a brief description of Bit Defender Total Security 2009 and it is brilliant affordable protection and i recommend it post replies on you’re thoughts i want to know if I’m an odd one out on this

Windows 7 RTM Build 7600.

Yesterday I did a clean install of the latest version of Windows. This version has only just been released to the MSDN  and TechNet subscribers on the Microsoft developers Site. This version of windows called “Windows Seven” will arrive in stores on the 22nd of October. I highly recommend any vista users to upgrade to this finished operating system it to me feels like a much more finished version of windows. Personally i think it should be a free upgrade from Windows Vista, but it isn’t most probably so Microsoft make more money. The Windows 7 OEM key leaked but is now blacklisted by Microsoft. Windows 7 is most probably going to be a very hard OS to crack and i wouldn’t bother with any emulators on it. Just buy it it is totally worth it !! I have been running Windows 7 since it was in the beta version and have watched it get better on every update. I don’t think that Build 7600 which has been released is going to be the final version either but I’m not 100% sure about that so don’t  get you’re hopes up and if i am correct then the upgrade will be free to owners of a Genuine Copy. BTW Get this OS Genuine because it is REALLY REALLY REALLY……. Annoying when it isnt activated. just to warn you.

Windows 7 RTM Release YYYYAAAAYYYYY!!!!

Finally Microsoft has released Windows 7 to developers on the MSDN and business’s Its about time coz now because of my MSDN subscription I can be one of the first to download and install Windows 7 on my pc. If build 7600 is anywhere near like build 7100 which I’ve been reviewing it will be AMAZING!!!! I highly recommend it for anyone and while stocks lasts at pc world there is a discount, YES A DISCOUNT!!!! So what are you waiting for. my advice is to get the Professional edition because its almost the same without the bit locker program which you can get some third party solution for it so why pay more !!!!

What are you downloading

“Whether or not you’re a fan of Java, it’s something we use every day – often without even thinking about it. If your Java version isn’t updated to the most recent, you’re going to run into troubles. Thankfully, Sun has been busy releasing updates… and upgrades.

Now that Motorola is going to be moving to Android, it will be interesting to see how many others will follow. Some people aren’t cracked up about a few of the updates Motorola has in store. What do you think?

Who would have ever thought that the iPhone would be providing a boon to the flash memory market? I rely on my iPhone to survive, pretty much. I use it nearly as often as I use my actual Mac Pro! The more I use it, the more memory and storage I need. Being able to use flash memory on a mobile device is sending the demand for such things through the roof.

Have you checked out our download site yet? Our developers have been working night and day to bring you a clean interface, coupled with downloads you really need. You’ll find tabs full of downloads for your Mac, Windows machine, mobile device and even console games. There are programs and utilities available for everything from balancing your budget to backing up your system. Make sure you see what you might need today!

You don’t necessarily have to be a technology enthusiast to be a Geek. A Geek is someone who is filled with passion for something. You can be a Gardening Geek, a Motorcycle Geek, or even a Wine Geek. Our Geeks social network is a place where Geeks of all types, ages and affinities can come together to discuss whatever it is that is on their minds. Join us today!

GoToAssist lets you provide support to your friends or customers even when they aren’t at home. By using the unattended support feature, you can fix their software issues, install their updates, or nearly anything else you would normally do on-site. “

Referance: Chris Pirillo@ http://chris.pirillo.com/

Want Cool Wallpapers??

Have you ever wanted that cool wallpaper than you could never find? I have!!

I have been looking on the internet for a couple of days now for a certain wallpaper that catches my eye and I was just about to give up when I came across this site http://technology.desktopnexus.com/ Which is full of wallpapers that catch my eye. So what are you waiting for click on the link and check them out!!!!! I guarantee there will be a couple you like