We’re all familiar with the story of Flight 1549′s landing in the Hudson River. This week’s Mozy newsletter told a story of two sets of Jones (sorry, obscure Big Tent Revival reference). One man performed backups by copying files from one computer to another. He also used USB drives. The second man used online backup from Mozy.
After the plane crashed the first man lost both computers and the USB drives. The second man contacted Mozy and received the backed up date on DVD in four days.
Mozy of course is pushing this story to get their name out. Its been carried by a USA Today Technology Blog and at ComputerWorld. I’ve seen some people charge that it is somehow creepy to be using this in advertising. I disagree. First of all, no one died. Second, war stories have a way of getting through to people in a way that no amount of cajoling can accomplish.
I do kind of wonder about the details of this story. A Computer Associates employee lost 250 GB of data due to a haphazard backup scheme. Don’t they use their own products? (lol perhaps that was the problem). The guy was a consultant. It should make you wonder if your backup software works for people that are constantly on the road. Does your security system and software patching work for road warriors.
If you’re not using a backup solution, check out Mozy, Home users get 2 GB backup for free. If you click on this link and start using Mozy (signup, install and backup files), we’ll both get an extra 256MB of free backup space on top of the 2 GB.
I know, I’m at risk of sounding like a commercial. This something I used and a story that I liked.
Posts tagged ‘CA’
Mozy and Flight 1549
Targeted attacks on Wordpad Zeroday
Computer Associates blogged over the weekend on increasing attacks on the Wordpad zero day originally reported in December.
In the attack a malicious document is created with the extension .DOC, .RTF or .WRI. You must manually open the document for the attack to take place. If Office is installed, .DOC files will likely open in Microsoft Word which is not vulnerable. However .WRI files will likely still open in Wordpad.
Microsoft reports that this issue does not affect Windows XP Service Pack 3, Windows Vista. Really you should have that installed by now. To obtain this update go to http://update.microsoft.com.
Symantec to buy IMLOGIC
Well shit. Suddenly that decision to purchase IMLogic (the product not the company) is not looking so good. Symantec has just purchased them.
When Symantec purchases something, its almost as bad as when Computer Associates purchases something. First I would suspect all development will go in the crapper while Symantec figures out what they bought and what they want to do with it. Good by quarterly updates. Goodbye support for AIM Triton, Google Talk and AIM file transfers. I know you were on the roadmap, but the roadmap is now burned.
Next, support will suck. I suspect my support team will now be replaced slowly by the “Gold” level drones that Symantec hires.
Third, I wonder what will happen with the Sybari integration? Will it disappear now that two corporate giants the two companies.
Will my product completely disappear they way L0phtcrack has since the @stake purchase? Will it reappear later as Symantec IM Manager.
I really expected Webroot to be picked off (as Pestpatrol was). I didn’t think about the possibility of IMLogic being bought.
IMLogic is still a better product that Facetime or Akonix. We’ll have to hope for the best.
AOL bundles CA Spysweeper
Back in August I wrote about a purchase of Aluria by Earthlink. I speculated that might end the relationship with AOL.
Well, the shoe has finally dropped. AOL has announced that AOL Spyware Protection 2.0 will be using Computer Associates Spysweeper product. And AOL just couldn’t resist some potshots at Aluria suggesting they couldn’t be trusted to categorize spyware, the dont have a large antispyware database, they dont update often enough, they dont offer realtime protection and their scans take forever. Funny AOL wasn’t singing that tune when they went with Aluria, previously unheard of company from Maitland Florida.
I’ve only evaluated the enterprise version of the Spysweeper product. It was ok back in June 2004, but now it is not performing well on recent bakeoffs.
eEye CA vuln scanner
eEye has a new free utility for scanning for the Computer Associates License service vulnerability. I use these utilities to supplement the scans that I get from my regular vulnerability scanner.
eEye has always been a bit more stingy with the free utilities than ISS or Microsoft. It has been limited to a 254 address range at a time. Not as useful as scanning everything at once, but still ok. Now with this new product, they have restricted the user to scanning 16 IP addresses at one time. They certainly dont want you scanning more than a few computers.
As if this wasn’t bad enough the product has numerous other annoyances and bugs. The scanner must be installed. Previous versions could be run as a standalone exe. Lastly the address selection seems a bit buggy. I guess sometimes you get what you pay for.
I Predict 2005
I predict
- Microsoft’s new antispyware beta will not be released until march. Upon release it will quarantine as spyware both the real player and iTunes clients.
- Steve Gibson will issue dire warnings that Windows Longhorn includes a dastardly denial of service attack weapon known as “ping”.
- Sick of the constant negativity, one of the two readers of Roger’s Infosec Blog will hack the webserver and replace the website with sales literature from Computer Associates.
- An Antivirus company will be severely embarrassed when it is discovered that several of their former engineers now work for the mafia developing spyware and spam designed to circumvent filters
- Rob Rosenberger will get a late night show on comedy central. It will be canceled after three episodes because no one gets antivirus humor.
CA purchases Pestpatrol
http://www3.ca.com/Press/pressrelease.asp?CID=61871
Computer Associates, the collector of software companies, has purchased PestPatrol. Pestpatrol was most recently in the news for providing a spyware plugin for the Yahoo toolbar, but conveniently turning off the detection for Claria (Gator) which provides a large portion of Yahoo’s income.
Pest Patrol has also released a first generation corporate anti-spyware scanner that has an interface resembling a high schoolers c++ final project.
