There is nothing more valuable that any of us have than time. 15 minutes can be a lot, it can also be life changing, for us and for others.
Following “isolated” reports of users’ files being completely erased during upgrades Microsoft announced a “pause” of the Windows 2018 Fall Update. Microsoft has gone so far as saying that if you have a copy of the upgrade already, you should delete it instead of installing it.
Starting with the next generation of WiFi devices, WiFi will finally have a comprehensible naming scheme. In the past, different versions of wifi went by various letters, that were hard to keep track of even if you were in the industry. 802.11, 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g and so on up to 802.11ay. Each version works with the last version but unless you memorized all the versions it was hard to know which was which.
Now, WiFi will go by simple numbering, and the latest standards will be renamed WiFi 6.
It’s nearly the best thing since sliced bread.
A local residential Knoxville IT firm is leading an effort to collect used but working computers to give to the recently and near homeless. “Techies Give Back” is the brain child of Charlie Harbin, of TechNav, a local traveling IT support firm for residential customers. Specifically, donations will be given to families with school aged children to help complete school work, help parents find jobs and ultimately to enable these families to connect to the world.
If you’ve got some used machines or tech lying around get with Charlie TODAY! They’re almost ready to start handing these out!
The News Sentinel is reporting that Knox County computer systems were breached the night of the primary. It was a two stage attack, complete with with a distraction. Here is the short version.
First, the website to report election results came under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The bad guys sent more traffic to it than it could handle. This is remarkably easy to do today, as multiple services on the dark web will allow you to purchase attacks against websites of your choice. This attack, while real, wasn’t the target, it was just meant to draw IT’s attention away from the core infrastructure and servers.
Sword and Shield, a Knoxville based security company, was contracted to investigate the incident. Their official report says that logs indicate an attempt to access the database sitting behind the webserver. Further testing revealed that there was a security hole that was active on election night, although it would not have been possible to tamper with the election results remotely.
Double staged attacks like this are very common today: as noted above it’s easy to start a DDoS attack against a website, which is highly noticeable. It quickly draws away the top level talent in an organization to deal with it while hackers attempt to quietly infiltrate in a different route. It’s the digital equivalent of setting a paper bag on fire on the front porch and then going and breaking in the basement window. The fire is meant to be noticed.
It’s fortunate that the election results were not tampered with, and the Knox County appears to have done a great job designing the voting system to make hacking it very difficult. This would be a good time for them to look at prevention on website attacks as well.
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