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| Volume 6, Issue 8 |
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In This Issue:
 What’s with all this spam?
Next year’s seasonal clock changes will send IT managers running
DHS: A key to detecting malicious email
Microsoft lays out Longhorn, PowerShell & application management roadmaps
Pimp your mouse
 With IE 7, green means go for legit sites
Zune moving at slow tempo
Intel’s quad-core processors go live
2006 (10) worst political mishaps [Photo’s]
 Dems score with better data
AOL upgrades AIM with offline messaging, chat logs
Security group ranks human error as top security worry
Dell buys IT security firm to ease Vista upgrades
 Five of anything ice breaker
Job interview tips: How to interview potential employees
 Ask the right (Interview) question
 The quiet leader – and how to be one
What’s to be done about performance reviews
 Is the boss reading your email?
Salary survey 2006: Hot skills, Hot pay
Truth, lies and caller ID
The new open sourcing
 Surprisingly healthy foods
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What's with all this spam?
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Net Worth
How does your pay stack up? Find out with
our 2006 Salary Calculator.
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Unwanted e-mail levels 'shot up like crazy'; image spam partly to blame, say experts.
Researchers and IT managers are confirming security vendors’ claims
that spam levels have spiked in the past month – some
say by as much as 80 % -- and show no signs of decreasing. “There are enormous
amounts of spam; it’s shot up like crazy since the beginning of October,” says John Levine, president of consulting firm Taughannock Networks and co-chair of the
Internet Research Task Force's Anti-Spam Research Group, who operates a number of e-mail addresses that aren’t filtered for spam. “Earlier this year I was seeing about
50,000 spam messages a day, now I’m seeing 100,000.” Levine’s assumption is this spike in spam levels is a result of a new generation of viruses and zombies that can
infect PCs more quickly and are harder to get rid of. In its October report,
messaging security vendor MessageLabs says the spike is largely due to two Trojan programs, Warezov and
SpamThru.
Others say a new breed of spam messages called image spam -- messages with text embedded in an image file that evade spam filters, which
can’t recognize the words inside the image -- is responsible. At North Shore-LIJ Heath System, a network of hospitals based in Great Neck, N.Y., with about 12,000
e-mail users, there’s been an...
Read the article. Back to top
Next year’s seasonal clock changes will send IT managers running
Shades of Y2K when the clocks change in the spring and fall. In the United States
and the United Kingdom we’ve just recently come through the transition from
Daylight Saving Time (“Summer Time” to some of you) back to “standard” time.
Back in the early to mid 1980s, this change usually meant that network managers
(or, if the IT staff was more than one person, the lowest ranking member) would
spend a Sunday going from server to server, desktop to desktop changing the
computers’ clocks. This would happen once in the spring and then again in the fall.
But the date could - and would - vary from year to year so it was impossible to
automate the task. About 20 years ago, the U.S. standardized on the first Sunday
in April and the last Sunday in October as the dates to change. Soon thereafter,
the Windows operating system knew to check the date and adjust the time on
those occasions. That all changes next year. Starting in 2007, DST will begin
on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday in November. There will
be patches for your server and desktop operating systems (and your laptops, palmtops
and all the other Windows platforms) and the automated changes will continue to
occur at the right time – provided you’ve patched your systems up to date by
the beginning of March 2007. But there’s a trap lurking on most of your computers
which, while not quite as serious as the old Y2K bug, will still be almost as
annoying to overcome. And not only is it NOT Microsoft’s fault, but you can lay
the blame directly at the feet of Sun...
Read the article. Back to top
DHS: a key to detecting malicious e-mail
Deceptive Header Screening threaten privacy, security. Spam, viruses and phishing attacks are a serious threat to your company's security and your customers' privacy.
The most effective attacks are precisely targeted using traffic analysis,
bulk message delivery, compromised Web hosts, surreptitiously installed key loggers
and large doses of social engineering.
To date, e-mail filtering has taken a conservative stance on identifying unwanted messages, accepting more unwanted messages for fear of losing real wanted
messages to misidentification. But this practice opens a significant security hole. With the increasing volume and sophistication of e-mail-borne attacks, allowing
any suspicious messages to reach downstream systems increases the risk to those systems. In a typical
enterprise configuration, e-mail passes through several layers on its way to the desktop - the perimeter system, the content filtering layer and an antivirus layer. This
model is dictated by the structure of e-mail inflows. The perimeter faces the largest volume of messages and traffic, as much as 90% of which is malicious, so
filtering methods closest to the perimeter must be the fastest. Traffic shaping can identify unwanted traffic quickly while operating at or near wire speeds.
Virus filtering requires a complex scan of each message, searching for malicious code hidden in multiple message parts. Because it is computationally expensive, it
should be done after the other layers have removed everything they can. The outermost system can remove 50% of unwanted traffic, and content analysis can remove as
much as 80% of the remainder, which leaves 10% of the original malicious traffic reaching antivirus and groupware systems...
Read the article. Back to top
Microsoft lays out Longhorn, PowerShell and application management roadmaps
Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the company's server and tools business lays out directions at IT Forum in Barcelona.
On the heels of the completion of Vista and Office, Microsoft Tuesday opened its annual IT Forum conference by confirming the roadmap for the next beta
of Longhorn Server, announcing the release of its long-awaited PowerShell command
line tool, and unveiling a host of new and upcoming releases of platform and application management tools. The announcements were made by Bob Muglia, senior vice president
of the company’s server and tools business, during his keynote speech at the conference in Barcelona, Spain. He also emphasized the management infrastructure Microsoft has
been building over the past three years under its Dynamic Systems Initiative banner. Muglia said that Microsoft released for download its PowerShell command line interface and
scripting environment, which is targeted at making it easier for IT administrators to manage their Windows environment from Exchange 2007 to Windows Server. PowerShell
also works with System Center Operations Manager 2007, System Center Data Protection Manager V2, and System Center VirtualMachine. Muglia also said that Beta 3 of
Longhorn Server, which will be the final beta for the server, is still slated for release in the first half of 2007. Microsoft plans to distribute the beta to a
wider number of users than the 500,000 beta testers of Beta 2, which shipped in May. The final release of Longhorn is still on schedule for...
Read the article. Back to top
Pimp your mouse
If you've got a tired, old two-button mouse with a rollerball on the bottom, it's time to upgrade.
Keith features three great mice to get you back in style...
Watch the video Back to top
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With IE 7, green means go for legit sites
What’s EV SSL?
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EV SSL stands for Extended Validation Secure Socket Layer. These are SSL certificates just like those that allow encrypted connections between browsers and sites.
The difference, though, is that the identity of each certificate holder has been verified. Requestors will be subject to a strict vetting process which all issuers must follow. |
Starting early next year, the address bar in Internet Explorer 7 will turn green when surfing to a legitimate Web site--but only in some cases, not all.
The colored address bar is designed to be a sign that a specific site can be trusted, giving people the green light to carry out transactions there. It is a weapon in the fight against phishing scams,
which use fraudulent Web sites. The idea is among the draft guidelines created by the CA Browser Forum,
an organization comprised of companies that issue certificates for Web sites and major browser makers. Last week, Microsoft decided to adopt that draft version for IE 7, released last month.
It plans to add the functionality in January. A primary concern is to...
Read the article. Back to top
Zune moving at slow tempo
Though Microsoft's answer to Apple Computer's iPod juggernaut officially went on sale nationwide Tuesday, the Zune wasn't exactly flying off the shelves in downtown San Francisco.
At two retail outlets, the new media player wasn't even on the shelves. The
Virgin Megastore near Union Square had them in stock, but the Zune display wasn't the right fit for the store's shelving. The players would be on sale "sometime
this week" when new signage was scheduled to be delivered, said a store representative who declined to give his name...
Read the article. Back to top
Intel's quad-core processors go live
Intel will cap off a turnaround year on Tuesday with the expected introduction of its first quad-core processors, beating rival Advanced Micro Devices to the punch by several months.
Originally scheduled to launch next year, the new Xeon 5300 and Core 2
Extreme QX6700 should make an immediate dent in servers and in high-end workstation/enthusiast PCs. In those markets, users
can take advantage of software that's already been written to
exploit four separate processing threads. The usual suspects plan to use
Intel's chips in their latest products...
Read the article. Back to top
Photos: 2006's (10) worst political mishaps
No 10: Representative Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) plays Mrs. Robinson with a college reporter.
Soon-to-be-former Congresswoman Katherine Harris made a name for herself as
Florida's Secretary of State during the controversial 2000 presidential election. Characterized by outlandish statements about religion, abrupt staff
shakeups, tight-fitting shirts, and questionable colors of eyeshadow, Rep. Harris was considered a longshot indeed in her (unsuccessful) bid to unseat Democratic
Senator Bill Nelson this year. But she never lost her campaign trail spirit--or her charm, as was evident when photographer Stephen Elliott snapped some photos of
the Senate hopeful conversing intimately with a college newspaper reporter this
past April. According to political blog Wonkette, Elliott recounted to Majority
Report Radio that Rep. Harris "sat (the reporter) down, sat next to him, and her foot was brushing...
Read the article. Back to top
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Dems score with better data
DNC's Linux warehousing project delivered on '50-state strategy'.
Behind every big success these days, there's probably some darned good IT making it happen. That appears to be the case in the surprising electoral victory by
the Democratic Party last week. New data warehouse solutions commissioned by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and also by Catalist, a for-profit group
backed by a faction of leading Democratic players, are being credited for their part in the Party's strong performance in nationwide midterm elections. Those solutions
may have helped Democrats close the gap with tech-savvy Republicans, according to a people involved with the projects and with the party's countrywide get-out-the-vote operation. The DNC solution, which was commissioned one year ago by DNC Chairman
Howard Dean, tapped a new generation of low-cost, Linux-based data warehouse technology to improve the quantity, quality, and availability of voter information used by
state Democratic parties during the election turn-out effort. Those close to the project say the new system, part of Dean's so-called 50-state strategy, helped
tip close races in the House and Senate in favor of the Democrats. The solution was developed by Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi) of Boston, a company that
develops datacenter solutions and uses a Netezza Performance Server data warehouse appliance to integrate information provided by 45 state-level Democratic parties
on about 200 million voters, according to Paul Davis, IISi's CEO. In addition to the Netezza back end and IISi code, the system uses data quality and cleansing tools
from FirstLogic and enterprise integration software vendor Sunopsis, as well as data modeling tools from SPSS, according to a Netezza statement. The new solution was
hosted at a datacenter in Virginia and allowed the DNC to rapidly update so-called "voter files" as state-level party workers provided them with new information. The
data was then cleaned up by comparing it to lists of known phone numbers and addresses. The DNC was also able to "overlay" the information and match it to data
about individuals in the lists culled from various consumer data stores, Davis said. Netezza, which makes the technology used by the DNC, is part of a new generation
of data warehousing companies that are using...
Read the article. Back to top
AOL upgrades AIM with offline messaging, chat
AIM 6.0 also sports a new dashboard to make it easier to access mobile features.
AOL has upgraded its popular AIM instant messaging service with new features like
the ability to send messages to offline users and to store IM sessions in a PC.
In AIM 6.0, AOL also doubled the number of contacts a user can have in his "buddy" list to 1,000 people, AOL plans to announce on Wednesday. AOL is involved in a scalding
hot competition in the consumer IM market with rivals Microsoft and Yahoo, which recently established a basic level of interoperability between
their IM networks.
AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo operate the three most popular consumer IM networks, but AIM users can't communicate with Microsoft and Yahoo users because each network
operates with proprietary communication protocols. Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger leads with 29 percent of users worldwide, followed by AIM with 27 percent and
Yahoo Messenger with 21 percent, according to The Radicati Group Inc. AOL is
working with Google to link AIM with the Google Talk IM service. AIM already has interoperability with...
Read the article. Back to top
Security group ranks human error as top security worry
Report shows most people fall for 'spear-phishing' attacks even after hours of computer security instruction.
The SANS Institute has some controversial advice for computer security
professionals looking to lock down their networks: spear-phish your employees. That's what the U.S. Military Academy at West Point did in 2004 to a group of 512
cadets, selected at random for a test called the Carronade. The cadets were sent
a bogus e-mail that looked like it came from a fictional colonel named Robert Melvillle, who claimed to be with the academy's Office of the Commandant
(The real Robert Melville helped invent a short range naval cannon called the Carronade nearly 250 years ago). "There was a problem with your last grade report,"
Melville wrote, before telling the cadets to click on a Web page and "follow
the instructions to make sure your information is correct."...
Read the article. Back to top
Dell buys IT services firm to ease Vista upgrades
Dell plans to offer consulting to large businesses as they upgrade to Microsoft's new OS.
Dell has acquired a British IT services firm, with plans to offer consulting to large businesses as they upgrade to Microsoft's new Vista operating system. Dell said
Tuesday it acquired ACS of London, a privately held firm that provides infrastructure consulting to businesses listed on the FTSE 100, a stock index of England's
largest corporations. Dell did not disclose the deal's cost, but said it would retain all ACS employees. Dell will use ACS to offer IT support earlier in the planning
stages of customers' application deployments, such as
migrating to Microsoft Vista, according to a statement from Stephen Murdoch, vice president of solutions and services for Dell's EMEA (Europe,
Middle East and Africa) division. Business customers have been demanding better...
Read the article. Back to top
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Ask the Right (Interview) Question
Starting Smarter
Looking for an entry-level position? Take a tip from these recent hires at L’Oréal, JPMorgan, Lockheed, and elsewhere...
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Job seekers' questions typically fall into one of three categories. To impress
and learn about an employer, it's important to know the protocol for each.
Savvy job seekers have learned that it's important to show up at a job interview
armed with smart, pithy questions. A few years ago, it was perfectly fine to ask,
"Who are your company's competitors?" But these days, employers expect you to know
the answer to that—and a dozen other company-specific questions. The first thing
to know about job-interview questions is that there is more than one kind. In
my experience, job seekers' questions fall into one of three categories, and it's
good to know the difference—and the protocol for each...
Read the article. Back to top
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The Quiet Leader—and How to Be One
If you look
behind lots of great heroic leaders, you find them doing lots of quiet,
patient work themselves.
—Joseph L. Badaracco Jr
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It sounds almost paradoxical. A quiet leader? Yet quiet leaders—managers who
apply modesty, restraint, and tenacity to solve particularly difficult problems—are
more common than we think, says Harvard Business School professor Joseph L. Badaracco.
In his new book Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing
(HBS Press, 2002), he describes what quiet leaders do and how they make their
workplace, and their world, a better place. Badaracco recently sat down with HBS
Working Knowledge Senior Editor Martha Lagace to talk about quiet leaders...
Read the article. Back to top
What's to Be Done About Performance Reviews?
It's the season for many employee performance reviews.
Why do they seem to rank alongside root canal dental work on our list of things we
look forward to as managers and employees? And what are we doing about it? If we
assume that the basic purpose of employee evaluations is to build better-performing organizations, then this has to be one of the most important things we do as
managers. But if formal evaluations weren't required, would we even provide them? Much of this season's debate has centered around whether a forced ranking system works
in such efforts...
Read the article. Back to top
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Is the boss reading your e-mail?
E-mail privacy is a myth, Sandra Gittlen explains, and what you're doing right now with e-mail, IM or blogs could get you fired.
Each day, it becomes more apparent that e-mail and instant messages are not
private. Employers are worried about liability and lawsuits, so they're monitoring employee e-mail. Their fears are not unfounded. The
"2006 Workplace E-mail,
Instant Messaging & Blog Survey" by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute found that 24% of responding organizations have had
employee e-mail subpoenaed, and 15% have gone to court to battle lawsuits triggered by employee e-mail.On the other side, 26% of employers have terminated employees for
e-mail misuse, and 2% have let employees go for misuse of IM. Even blogs are a
cause of dismissal -- 2% of respondents reported firing workers for offensive
content -- even if the blogs are not corporate based. With employees encouraged to work longer and less-defined hours on company equipment, the lines between professional
and personal use are becoming increasingly blurred. While organizations have gotten increasingly better about developing and communicating e-mail acceptable use policies, they are still lacking in addressing policies for IM and blogging.
The AMA found that 76% of the companies surveyed do have e-mail usage and content policies in place. That number drops significantly lower -- to 31% -- of employers
that have IM policies in place. And only 9% have policies that address the use of blogs. This lack of communications between employers and employees about expectations has
set employees up for serious repercussions.I recently discussed this changing
landscape with Jeremy Gruber, legal director at the National Workrights Institute in Princeton, N.J.
What rights do employees have regarding privacy and corporate e-mail? What about
using personal e-mail on a corporate computer or accessing corporate e-mail from a personal computer?...
Read the article. Back to top
Salary Survey 2006: Hot Skills, Hot Pay
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IT Careers 2010
Four years from now, the IT field will be a vastly
different place. Will you be ready?
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Hot skills got the biggest pay bounces in 2006, as companies prepared to fight for key talent.
Mike York has 15 good reasons to be happy with his job. As a network architect
at Experian Information Solutions Inc.’s data center in Allen, Texas, York saw
his salary jump 5% this year, plus another 10% as the credit reporting company
raised his pay to equal that of his counterparts at the California headquarters.
“In Texas, I’m the only network architect” for the company, York says of his specialized skills. He’s not the only one with reason to smile. While IT workers across the
board saw their pay increase an average of 3.1% again this year, a few lucky ones with the hottest skills saw above-average raises, according to Computerworld’s 20th
Annual Salary Survey, which studied the compensation and bonuses of 14,740 IT workers. Network architects like York received average pay increases of 5.3%. Web
developers, Internet managers and directors of e-commerce saw jumps of 4% or more.
(Use our Smart Salary Tool to get survey results by job title and region. Also,
see salary data for entry-level and staff positions, middle management, senior management, contractors & consultants and additional job titles. Compensation watchdogs say these IT rock stars have catapulted to popularity because of consumer demand.
“The dominant business model is now Web-based. That’s what it’s all about,” says David Foote, CEO and chief research officer at Foote Partners LLC in New Canaan,
Conn. “Customers are dictating the way they want to interact across the network with the vendors. They’re willing to define the relationship in part by how secure it is
and how easy it is to do business with them. If I’m purchasing from a Web site and the site is too slow, I’m off of it.”...
Read the article. Back to top
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Truth, Lies and Caller ID
Do you rely on caller ID for identification? If so, you’re taking a big risk.
This week, I, Sarah Scalet, just a hardworking, honest journalist born and raised in the heartland, pretexted for the first time.I placed a call from my office phone to
my colleague Scott Berinato, manipulating the caller ID in such a way that the call appeared to be coming from Scott’s cell phone. I also disguised my voice. And,
just because I could, I recorded the call as well. When Scott answered, I made up
a lame story about how I was calling from his cell phone company to inquire about problems with his service. Scott demanded to know, in an increasingly stern
voice, exactly who I was and what I wanted. And when I tried to fess up and tell him that it was actually me, Sarah, he hung up.You might think that all this
required incredible technical savvy on my part. Maybe I did some elaborate hack of a VoIP system, or built a fancy-schmancy gadget with parts from Radio Shack.
Alas, no. In fact, all I did was...
Read the article. Back to top
The New Open Sourcing
Do-it-yourself integration and support for open source will cost you plenty. So will consultants. But a new, less expensive approach has emerged.
Open source has many allures: no license costs, a wide range of support venues and
the ability to work directly with code for customization or quick repairs. But it can create IT headaches, too: The mantra of open source has been “release early and
often,” which means IT managers using a disparate group of open-source apps face frequent updates and patches, and must craft rules about how and when to apply
them. Most enterprises soon find that with the do-it-yourself approach, maintenance and integration costs equal—and sometimes exceed—the maintenance cost of
commercial software, due to the in-house resources needed to track, test, and apply patches and updates. The other option, using professional services firms to do
that work, costs at least as much. But a new, potentially less expensive approach is emerging—a certified, preintegrated suite of open-source components from one
vendor, which stays updated and integrated via periodic suite releases. This option could make open-source adoption easier, for example, for smaller enterprises
that don’t have the staff or services dollars to support the traditional open-source integration and maintenance approaches but want to use proven open-source
technologies like Linux, EnterpriseDB, Postfix, Tomcat and Apache more broadly...
Read the article. Back to top
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Surprisingly Healthy Foods
What you didn't know might help you.
Eating healthy may be virtuous, but it just doesn't seem like that much fun.
Truth is, most of us prefer the taste of French fries over that of oat bran. A
glass of Burgundy sounds more tantalizing than a cup of wheat grass juice. And
while a nice piece of fruit is no punishment, chocolate is exceedingly more
tempting. The good news: Not all of those seemingly unhealthy choices actually are...
Read the article. Back to top
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