Network Velocity

Securing your company data on an iPhone

2010-02-03 UPDATE: Google Apps can now remote wipe an iPhone and enforce security policies. Read more here. Apple has two three* ways to secure company data on an iPhone in the event an iPhone is lost or stolen. If you have a subscription to Apple's MobileMe you can now find a lost iPhone and/or wipe all of it's data from the MobileMe website. More info on the MobileMe capabilities are available on the Apple website. Many corporate users do not use the MobileMe service (which costs $99/...

Social Networking Security

CRN.com has listed Social Networking as a top 10 Information Technology Security threat. CRN writes the following about Social Networking Threats. For the full article head over to State Of Technology Security: Top 10 Biggest Security Threats Social Networking Threats made the Top 10 list for the first time, coming in third place with 34.4 percent of the partner vote. But partners have acknowledged that social networking attacks pose a very real and serious threat. End users have been ex...

Social Media in the Workplace

According to a survey of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100 or more employees, 54% said they now block employees from accessing social networking sites at work. Mashable cited this information from the study: Only 10% of those surveyed let employees use social networks however they please, while the remainder all impose at least some restrictions on usage, like limiting it to business purposes only. The survey, which was developed by Robert Half Technology, is consistent with other recent...

Fortinet wins SC Magazine award for Best Integrated Security Solution

Congratulations to Fortinet for taking home the SC Magazine award for "Best Integrated Security Solution" for the Fortigate 310B. In their review, SC Magazine stated: The FortiGate-310B appliance integrates firewall, AV, IPS, VPN, content filtering, anti-spam and traffic-shaping functions, or any combination thereof on a single, integrated security appliance. The multi-threat integrated security approach protects against threats both at the network and the application layer – eliminating t...

Conficker Virus Update

We blogged about the Conficker Virus back in October of 2008 and then again in March of 2009. It was feared that Conficker was programmed to become active on April 1st, potentially causing problems across millions of PC's. While this date passed with no noticeable impact, many sites across the web are reporting that Conficker is still a threat and in many cases causing problems. Yahoo reports that Conficker is being used to install additional software, hijacking PC's to send out SPAM email....

April Fool’s Day poses Virus risk

Virus programmers have written a new virus that is scheduled to become active on April 1st, 2009. It is estimated that 9 to 15 million machines are currently infected. On April 1st, these machines will execute the malicious code, potentially causing havoc across homes and businesses. We wrote about this vulnerability back in October of 2008. We rolled out proactive patches to all clients at that time. Viruses tend to mutate quickly. Even with current virus protection, it's advisable to...

Perfect Passwords

Source: Perfect Passwords, Mark Burnett 2005 and reprinted from: WhatsMyPass From the moment people started using passwords, it didn’t take long to realize how many people picked the very same passwords over and over. Even the way people misspell words is consistent. In fact, people are so predictable that most hackers make use of lists of common passwords just like these. To give you some insight into how predictable humans are, the following is a list of the 500 most common passwords. If y...

Microsoft releases critical IE security patch

On December 17, 2008 Microsoft released a patch for a recently disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The patches fixes a problem where a specially crafted website could result in a hacker gaining remote control of your comptuer. Due to the risk involved, Microsoft's recommendation is that this patch is applied immediately. We will begin rolling out this patch tonight and plan to have all machines updated by the weekend. As always, feel free to contact us with any questions.

Twitter users give away their passwords

On 11-12-2008 stories started to circulate about a third party website that is duping users into entering the credentials they use for Twitter. Twitter is a social networking site where users write messages up to 140 characters in length to each other via SMS, web and email. While web scams are nothing new, this latest story underscores the importance of adhering to strong password policies and using common sense on the web. Twitter users who entered their credentials on this bogus site h...

Wireless security – not so secure

According to this article on Engadget, another wireless protocol has been cracked. Wireless security has gone through several changes and protocols in efforts to remain secure, but as computers have become faster hackers have been able to decode encrypted wireless traffic at faster and faster speeds. The WPA protocol used to secure wireless traffic, once thought to be uncrackable, can now be decoded and wireless traffic reviewed (or even worse altered) in flight in 15 minutes. WPA2, a n...