Connecticut's IT Managed Services Blog

Summer is here, thunderstorms are coming, here are a couple simple tips to protect your business from a serious problem:

A rogue hacking organization, LulzSec, has been terrorizing different internet sites as a way of protesting certain corporations and governments that they find to be corrupt, and then adding in their own random hijinks into the mix taking down legitimate sites also which they state that they do it for the Lulz. LulzSec has “hacked” the various sites to different degrees, sometimes with the intent to hurt the company by stealing customer data and forcing them to update and fix their security flaws, other sites they do it to prove that there are security holes with no malicious intentions, and finally some sites are hit with DDoS attacks, (Distributed Denial of Service) which is overloading the server with requests so it becomes unavailable for its intended users.

Some of the high profile attacks the group LulzSec has attacked have been:

• PBS (Stole user data and posted a fake news story)
• Sony (Stole user data of up to 1 million users causing Sony to take down the Playstation network for over a month
• Nintendo (Stole a Config file and apologized to Nintendo, stating they love the N64 too much to hurt them)
• Black & Berg Cybersecurity Consulting (Who had posted a hacking challenge that was completed by LulzSec)
• Pron.com (A pornographic website in which 26,000 of its user’s emails and passwords were posted online with encouragement from LulzSec to try them on Facebook and other sites)
• Bethesda Game Studios (Posted information taken from their site, but did not post the 200,000 account information that they had stolen from the site also)
• Minecraft (DDoS attack from their “Titanic Take-down Tuesday”)
• League of Legends (DDoS attack from their “Titanic Take-down Tuesday”)
• The Escapist (DDoS attack from their “Titanic Take-down Tuesday”)
• FinFisher (An IT security company that was also hit with a DDoS attack from their “Titanic Take-down Tuesday”)
• EVE Online (DDoS attack from their “Titanic Take-down Tuesday”)
• Writerspace.com (62,000 User emails and passwords were posted, later it was revealed it was from Writerspace.com)
• InfraGard (a Company that works the FBI for botnet detection, they hacked and leaked some user accounts from their data base)
• British National Health Service (They emailed the administratiors letting them know they found a security hole, and did not intend on exploiting it)
• Senate.gov (Released emails and passwords of users of senate.gov)
• Cia.gov ( Used a DDoS attack to take down the site after the Pentagon said that cyberattacks could be considered an act of war)

RescueCom has released their quarterly report outlining the top 5 Laptop brands based on quality. Lenovo laptops ranked highest with a score of 254, followed by Asus with 242. Toshiba took third with 164, followed by Apple with 149 and HP with 122.

RescueCom is a computer repair center and has been recording their data since 2006. They determine each brand’s reliability rating by looking at 3 different factors:

• Looking at each brands market share in that given time period compare to the percentage of repair calls for that specific brand
• Component Quality used within the laptops; the better the quality of the components the less likely they are going to fail
• Likelihood the customer will need a third party support on their PC; a lack of manufacturer support sends more customers to third party vendors for support

A power user is someone who uses the advanced features of the OS that a "normal" user wouldn't need access to. For many power users, getting to the right menu's and utilities as quickly as possible is a must have. Below is a list of 15 Run Commands that every power user should be acquainted with.