A client called me the other morning, panicked. He opened a virus infected email from someone that was disguised as a legitimate message from UPS. The message said something to the effect that there was a problem with the shipping address of his recent shipment and the details are in the attached file.

Coincidentally, he had just ordered something online earlier that very morning. He was in a hurry to get to a meeting when he saw the message came in so without hardly giving it a thought, he opened the message and infected his system.

While virus scanning and spyware prevention programs prevent many types of malicious code from running on your computer, when the user deliberately clicks and executes something it’s almost like a temporary override occurs. In an instant, your system is infected. One of the first things this particular bug did was disable his Antivirus program’s resident shield.

It’s the resident shield’s job to monitor system activity and quarantine infected files and stop bad code from running. With the resident shield down, the virus “invited in all it’s friends” and proceeded to make a mess of the system in a short time before he even realized he’d been had.

I’m pleased to report we were able to act quickly to clean out the virus, plus we took extra steps to help protect the computer even further. Techniques such as seperate Malware protection such as from Malwarebytes.org, and AVG Internet Security which provides a local firewall in addition to virus scanning are a couple of the strategies we use in higher-risk applications.

If you’re concerned about virus protection, spyware or security in general, contact Bill Bowman (Senior Technology Advisor) or I for a free System Vulnerability and Risk assessment of your computing environment.

-Paul
***
Paul LaFlamme
President & CEO
Centrend, Inc.

508-347-9550 x115

I was recently asked the question “Is Tape Backup Obsolete now?” by a client when we were discussing what kind of backup system to implement in their new file server. As a manager with a great deal of technology experience and having always used tape for backup, he was very surprised that I was not recommending tape as part of their server upgrade.

In larger enterprises, tape is still an effective technology for backing up large volumes of data where multiple versions of the same data need to be stored in different locations. Even this application however, is somewhat obsoleted by NAS (Network Area Storage Systems) implementations that replicate volumes of data to different locations in real time or near real time. Still, it’s good to have this data offline and in generations of copies. Consider for example, how a virus could infect ALL copies of the data if all the data is online at once. The NAS protects from site failures but not from malicious code.

The other concern with tape is that it wears out. Most larger enterprises know this and cycle the tapes frequently enough that they replace them before failure. SMBs (Small/Medium businesses) have less time and resources to pay attention to these types of things [if they aren’t already Centrend customers that is ] Unfortunately sometimes when they need to restore data, the tape ends up looking like the one pictured at the right.

As an alternative to tape backup we are typically recommending online backup for offsite/disaster recovery purposes, while maintaining a local disk based backup for rapid recovery in the event of a total loss of disk. The benefits of this strategy are:

• Fully Automated - no tape rotation
• The cost of a tape backup system is a much larger investment. Tape drives are expensive and the media are expensive
• No risk of data corruption by virus (online encrypted backup is locked down)
• Disk restores are MUCH faster than even the fastest tape drives
• A hard drive based backup system lasts much longer than tape
• The server O/S can monitor the quality of the backup drive and notify when replacement is needed
Please contact me for a free assessment of your backup strategy and let us help you reduce costs and increase your piece of mind.

-Paul
***
Paul LaFlamme
President & CEO
Centrend, Inc.
508-347-9550 x115

Those of you with Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) systems can now once again use your system. As I had reported in my blog post Monday morning, the Sony PS3 was bricked(when technology is rendered completely inoperable by a system crash or bug) by what Sony confirmed to be a leap year bug where at midnight on February 28,2010 the system clock updated to February 29,2010. Because 2010 is not a leap year there should be no February 29th. This bug prevented users from using their PS3 system at all - even if they don’t use the system online.

The problem stems from a pre year-2000 based method of calculating valid leap years. There is a nice description of the problem if you CLICK HERE that is not too technical.

Some users of the PS3 are being extremely critical of Sony with statements such as “They should fire the programmers!” and “We should get free games for the inconvenience!” The users don’t realize that Sony did everything that can be expected of a responsible manufacturer in that situation: They quickly acknowledged the problem, they communicated when resolution was expected, they advised users what to do in the meantime, and ultimately delivered the solution within the promised time frame.

Though this bug happened in a gaming platform, there are some important lessons to be learned from it that apply to our business users:

• Even high tech devices (like the state of the art PS3) can be effected by Y2k glitches
• An application can never be tested too much
• No matter how thoroughly an application is tested, glitches can and will occur
• When bugs do arise in our systems, we need to measure the developers more on the timeliness of their communication and resolution, not in the fact that a bug was allowed to occur

-Paul
***
Paul LaFlamme
President & CEO
Centrend, Inc.
508-347-9550 x115

Here in Massachusetts, Personal Information is required by law to be protected. Since most of the technical concerns we are now hearing about are regarding portable media and laptop computers, the industry focus in Massachusetts has been on encryption technologies. The new data protection regulations, effective March 1, require portable devices and storage media be secured by encryption.

Encryption of data can be done with simple desktop tools available now, the software is easy to use and doesn’t really necessitate much of a change in how you use your computer. Once encrypted, data cannot be read by anyone, even if a hacker were to bypass your password protection.

This prompts some additional questions that will be addressed in future blog entries…

› What is the difference between password protection and encryption?
› Isn’t encryption software expensive to deploy?
› Do I really need it?

If you need answers right away, Centrend is helping businesses with answers to these questions. Each business is different, so I’m inviting you to contact me directly for answers to questions about encryption for your unique situation.

- Bill

***
Bill Bowman
Senior Technology Advisor
Centrend, Inc.
508-347-9550 x135
bbowman@centrend.com

Those of you recreational gamers out there that have the older style Play Station 3 Models are most likely experiencing a problem with your system as of Yesterday afternoon. Even if you don’t use the PS3 online, you are now getting a message that says Your trophy registration is incomplete or in error. The game will now quit. It happens on most any game and whether you are trying to play locally or online via the Play Station Network. Other errors that are appearing include a 8001050F error code prompt with little or no supporting text accompanying the code.

At 8 pm EST, yesterday, Sony confirmed the problem and said the are working to resolve the issue. Resolution should come some time this evening, if Sony can keep their promise.

Another PS3 Trophy error appearing is “Registration of the trophy information could not be completed. The game will now quit.”

Some independent blog sites are recommending you dismantle your PS3 and disconnect the battery momentarily to clear the issue. Unless you are extremely technical and have a couple hours to spare (at least) I strongly encourage you not to do this as you could completely break the system. My recommendation is to wait out the problem while Sony’s engineers resolve it.

Exactly what the resolution will be, it’s hard to say. Since the PS3 can’t connect to the Play Station Network at all, it might be necessary for Sony to either send out media that the PS3 can use to read a patch from, or to even recall the units. It’s not clear at this time what the corrective action will be to get these PS3 systems working again.

Users of the new PS3 (Slim model) are not experiencing this problem as it seems to be glitch in the system clock firmware that only occurs in the older (Thick model) systems.

For the latest updates of this issue, follow my blog here, or visit the playstation blog by clicking here.

-Paul
***
Paul LaFlamme
President & CEO
Centrend, Inc.
508-347-9550 x115