Category
Storm Worm Botnet More Powerful Than Top Supercomputers
from Information Week.
The growing Storm Worm botnet has enough distributed power to launch a damaging attack.
The Storm worm botnet has grown so massive and far-reaching that it easily overpowers the world’s top supercomputers.
That’s the latest word from security researchers who are tracking the burgeoning network of Microsoft Windows machines that have been compromised by the virulent Storm worm, which has pounded the Internet non-stop for the past three months. Despite the wide ranging estimates as to the size of the botnet, researchers tend to agree that it’s one of the largest zombie grids they’ve ever seen — one capable of doing great damage.
“In terms of power, [the botnet] utterly blows the supercomputers away,” said Matt Sergeant, chief anti-spam technologist with MessageLabs, in an interview. “If you add up all 500 of the top supercomputers, it blows them all away with just 2 million of its machines. It’s very frightening that criminals have access to that much computing power, but there’s not much we can do about it.”
Sergeant said researchers at MessageLabs see about 2 million different computers in the botnet sending out spam on any given day, and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at about 10% of capacity. “We’ve seen spikes where the owner is experimenting with something and those spikes are usually five to 10 times what we normally see,” he said, noting he suspects the botnet could be as large as 50 million computers. “That means they can turn on the taps whenever they want to.”
No one could provide detailed and specific comparisons between the strength of the botnet and the top supercomputers, mainly because it is hard to know for sure the size of the botnet or the power of each computer that is part of the botnet.
Adam Swidler, a senior manager with security company Postini, told InformationWeek that while he thinks the botnet is in the 1 million to 2 million range, he still thinks it can easily overpower a major supercomputer. “If you calculate pure theoretical throughput, then I’m sure the botnet has more capacity than [IBM’s] BlueGene. If you sat them down to play chess, the botnet would win.”
Once, Twice, Three ways to Unlock an iPhone
from Business 2.0
With uncanny serendipity, three teams trying to unlock Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone so that it can work with carriers other than AT&T (T) have reached their goal within days of each other.
First out of the block was George Holtz, a 17-year-old student from New Jersey who posted a 10-step technique on his website Thursday that requires cracking open the iPhone and doing some tricky soldering.
His accomplishment was quickly overshadowed by a team from iPhoneSIMfree.com, which developed a software-only technique that does the same thing without having to void the iPhone’s warranty by opening it up. The group demonstrated its procedure today to Engadget’s Ryan Block, who vouches for its authenticity on the blog and in a video. (Note the “T-Mobile” in the upper left hand corner of his iPhone screen, pictured above.)
ScribeFire WordPress Plugin for Firefox
Oooh. The ScribeFire WordPress Plugin for Firefox looks very, very nice.
more info here http://www.scribefire.com/2007/08/02/scribefire-142-released/
download here at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1730
Powered by ScribeFire.
Deepest Sender Firefox Plugin
Wow. I found a great Firefox PlugIn called “Deepest Sender” which can be found at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1811. This plugin allows you to connect and send posts to WordPress from within a FireFox Sidebar. In fact I am sending this post from the Deepest Sender plugin.
I love technology. And Firefox. In that order.
13 Disasters for Production Websites and Solutions
This would be better titled “13 disasters for production web sites and their PREVENTIONS” since all of the Solutions presented are preventive measures, but these are still wonderful insights for anyone trying to develop a stable, global, expandible web application. Here is an excerpt.
Choosing the right hosting provider
Our experience with several bad hosting companies gave us valuable lessons on choosing the right hosting company. We started with very cheap hosting providers and gradually went to one of the most expensive hosting providers in USA – Rackspace. Rackspace is insane when it comes to cost and good service quality. Their technicians are very well trained and their Managed Hosting plan offers onsite Sys Admin and DBA to take care of your servers and database. They can solve SQL Server 2005 issues as well as IIS related problems that we frequently had to solve ourselves. So, when you choose a hosting provider, make sure they have Windows 2003 and IIS 6.0 experts as well as SQL Server 2005 experts. While running production systems, there’s always probability that you will fall into trouble which is beyond your capability. Having onsite skilled technicians is the only way for you to survive such disasters.
I have built a check list for choosing the right hosting provider from my experience:
Yes sir, this is me. The real me. Not a facsimile or a digital representation but the real honest to goodness me. The living breathing human prone to outbreaks of kindness in between fits of quiet rage. So stop on by occasionally to see what I'm thinking about or what current event has me ready to head for the hills. Rotsa Ruck !!
