Colin Kinsella, Author at CrashCorp.com

Cryptolocker GOZeuS partially stopped by FBI, NCA and Europol

June 4, 2014 By Colin Kinsella

Cryptolocker GOZeuS

What is it? Is your Data Secure and will a Data Service help you if you are infected.

GOZeuS are a pair of viruses both infecting computers at the same time.

GOZeuS (P2Pzeus / Game Over Zeus) – is a malware / spyware that once installed on users computers will spy on the user and seek out valuable financial data eg bank details. This data will be fed back to the criminals who can use the data to defraud the user. All of this unknown to the user.

Cryptolocker – is Ransomeware. After GOZeus has spent some days extracting data Cryptolocker turns on and encrypts common files eg Word or Excel, so that users cannot access their important data. A message pops up on screen telling the user how they can pay $300 to $600 to unlock their data.

Although it is possible to remove these nasty pair, it will be nearly impossible to access the encrypted files.

Unprecedented global co-operation to limit the damage that Crypto Locker & GO ZeuS will cause.

The FBI in the US, Europol in Europe and the National Crime Agency along with many other Government agencies around the world, plus all of the large internet companies around the world have been working together in recent weeks to try to prevent massive attacks expected against millions of computers dring June 2014.

Although this twin virus has been around since 2013 the criminals have been planning a massive propogation of the viruses by using 1000’s of already infected computers owned by innocent users around the globe, who have no idea what their computer is about to unleash on other innocents.

It is undeerstood that Russian hacker Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev and over 90 others around the world have already been arrested and authorities have been able to shut sown many of the main controlling computers that the criminals had access to. However the virus does not need these computers or the criminals to spread further.

Authorities expect many of these ‘zombie bots’ sitting on peoples computers will awaken before the middle of June 2014 and start their attacks on other computers.

Data Recovery Services will be able to remove the virus, but if it has locked your data this will be lost forever.

What can you do:

Backup important files now.
Make sure your operating system is up to date.
Make sure your anti-virus software is up to date – if you do not have anti virus softaware – install it urgently.
If there is ANY doubt about email attachments that you receive DO NOT open them – even if they come from a person or organisation that you know. These computers could be hijacked and the virus sent in an attachment from what you think is someone you know. An unfamliar email subjest line from someone you know may be a clue. If in any doubt, reply to the email and ask them if the attachment is genuine.
Similarly, if there is ANY doubt about links in emails you receive, particularly if they seem to come from a large organisation you know DO NOT click the link. Type in the web address of the company you know and click through their navigation to the page you think you need to go. If necessary call them and ask if the email is genuine.
Many of the anti-virus companies have a free tol available to check if your computer is infected. Contact the company that provides your antivirus software.

You can read more at Bloomberg.com

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Federal Trade Commission: You should have more Control over Your Data

May 31, 2014 By Colin Kinsella

How important is your personal data security?

The sharing and selling of your personal data is a multi billion dollar industry.

Big Data is all about searching through lots of small pieces of data to form an overall picture. That is how Google and Amazon display ads on your computer related to what you might be interested in buying.

If you are a recently bought dypers from Walmart or another big store and you name and address are registered with them you will almost certainly receive offers through the post for other baby products and related services including offers from companies that want you to take out life insurance or start education funds for your new child.

The Federal Trade Commission feel it is time you had much more control over what data is held about you and what these companies can do with it.

On Wednesday 27 May 2014 the FTC said

“FTC Recommends Congress Require the Data Broker Industry to be More Transparent and Give Consumers Greater Control Over Their Personal Information”

“The extent of consumer profiling today means that data brokers often know as much – or even more – about us than our family and friends, including our online and in-store purchases, our political and religious affiliations, our income and socioeconomic status, and more,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez. “It’s time to bring transparency and accountability to bear on this industry on behalf of consumers, many of whom are unaware that data brokers even exist.”

You can read the full report at FTC.gov

UK City Council pays $15000 for Data Recovery Services

May 29, 2014 By Colin Kinsella

Nottingham City Council in the UK failed to integrate one of their servers into their backup system. That serve rhas now failed and they need to recover the data.

The cost is extimated at gb£10,500 (approx us$15,000).

This is a lesson for any organisation that backup systems must be reviewed and checked for integrity on a regular basis.

Here is the full story care of the NottinghamPost

NOTTINGHAM City Council is to spend £10,500 recovering data.

The authority will spend the cash getting the information back from what it called a ‘failed legacy server’.

A council report said that “due to incomplete backups of data, the server was not integrated into the council’s standard back-up regime, and copies of data are not available for recovery.”

The council has said the data is still required, but hasn’t revealed what it is. The decision was signed off by deputy chief executive Carole Mills.

Read more about how Data Recovery Services might ‘save your bacon’ some day.

Ebay only reveals February Data Breach to users in May – theinformationdaily.com reports

May 28, 2014 By Colin Kinsella

A cyber attack which led to the data breach of approximately 145 million users’ personal information reared its head this week, as eBay clamoured to reclaim control of its security by obligating its customers to change their passwords.

Personal but non-financial information had been breached after cyber criminals seized “a small number of employee log-in credentials”; phone numbers, addresses, passwords and full names.

Luckily, as yet no evidence has surfaced of this information being used anywhere for nefarious purposes, but the event has exposed the level of trust citizens place in companies which cannot or do not necessarily protect our data.

Shockingly, it was revealed that eBay, a multinational online shopping and auctioning site, responded with scant urgency following the initial breach in February. Requesting only this month that users change their passwords, a surge in site activity crashed its server.

Thanks to http://www.theinformationdaily.com/2014/05/27/ebay-data-breach-highlights-growing-need-for-personal-data-security

May 28, 2014 By Colin Kinsella

Leave it to Google to have an engineer so brainy he hacks out machine learning models in his 20 percent time. Google says that recently it’s been using machine learning — developed by data center engineer Jim Gao (his Googler nickname is “Boy Genius”) — to predict the energy efficiency of their global data centers down to 99.6 percent accuracy, and then to optimize the data centers in incremental ways if they become less efficient for whatever reason. Part of Gao’s day-to-day job at Google is to track its data centers’ power usage efficiency, or PUE, which demonstrates how efficiently data center computing equipment is using energy. Traditionally many data center operators were seeing about half of their energy consumed by cooling equipment, but in recent years data center leaders like Google, Facebook and others have focused on tools like using the outside air for cooling, or running the server rooms at warmer temperatures, to dramatically cut energy use. You can read more at http://gigaom.com/2014/05/28/google-is-harnessing-machine-learning-to-cut-data-center-energy/

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