Josh Wieder

NPR Security Week Mashable LA Times CBS Washington Post Atlantic Council Reason Magazine This week the CIA released its still-classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) regarding the threat of cyber warfare to US economic, infrastructure and military assets at home and abroad. China is singled out as the source of an enormous and non-stop sequence of industrial espionage - compromising systems and stealing valuable trade secrets.    Heads of large corporate security interests, while representing a variety of unique approaches, all seem to at least agree that federal regulation should play a larger role in online life. User's real identities should remain authenticated, core infrastructure easily available for lawful intercept, etc. Others argue that corporate attack victims should begin systematically seeking retribution when systems are compromised, terming the approach "active defense" centered often around pro-actively collecting information crucial to ...

I have received more than one report that a company that refers to itself as "DNS Services" has been sending out invalid invoices. In each instance, someone receives a physical letter referring to the recipient's website and 'Managed DNS Backup Services' that are being provided and that need to be paid for. To grant legitimacy, the letter directly refers to a pair of name servers - ns3.dnssvc.com and ns4.dnssvc.com. The trouble is, those servers are not name servers, and have not been name servers during the month-long period that I reviewed them (late December 2012 - now). The servers do not respond successfully to any requests on port 53. At the time of this writing, they still do not respond to port 53. Its one thing to make a mistake on an invoice, however I have received two complaints, both with the exact same letter specifying the same DNS information that is incorrect. Both complainants say they have never heard of this company before. DNS Service'...

Spam has been going out appearing as sourced from DocuSign. Examples are included below. According to DocuSign, this issue has been ongoing since at least as early as January 3rd . Recent activity has accelarted in the last week, with new evidence and examples coming to light. Stay safe out there.

EDIT: Due to squatting issues, joshwieder.com has been taken from me. Use www.joshwieder.net instad. I just acquired a block of new domains names and DNS settings are in the process of being updated. If you ever have issues and want to confirm your resolution with this site, we load balance the following domains : joshwieder.blogspot.com joshwieder.com joshwieder.org joshwieder.info joshwieder.net With the following IPs: 216.239.32.21 216.239.34.21 216.239.36.21 216.239.38.21

Do you resell bandwidth as part of your suite of services? You might be interested to know that Level 3 announced yesterday that they will be launching a new, tiered partner program . This will replace the legacy Partner program in place at Global Crossing, 16 months after their acquisition by Level 3. Commission rates will be changing. Most VARs have yet to see new contracts, however the tiered structure of the new program could spell lower commissions for smaller integrators, or VARs who simply do not prioritize Level 3 within their book of business at this time. Michael Jerich, Channel Chief with Level 3, has stated he expects the changes in program structure to result in 5% of their current partners having their partner status canceled as a result of minimum sales requirements.

For managing fragmentation of NTFS (Windows Server 2003/2008, XP, Vista, and Windows 7) : For general disk defragmentation, the following utilities offer a substantial improvement in overall performance and efficacy over native operating system tools: Auslogics Disk Defrag  or Raxco PerfectDisk For use on disks unsupported by the above tools, frequently executed and/or locked files or even a straightforward command line utility that can easily be used as part of a shell script: Contig from the Sysinternals Suite Contig has been of particular value when managing backup servers - servers storing huge files with substantial writes on a regular basis. Being able to specify the backup files allows for properly scheduling defragmentation by backup job, and in the process eliminating the need for downtime on these systems as part of this manner of disk maintenance. Can also be used for per-file fragmentation analysis and reporting. For managing fragmentation of ext4 file systems ...

I wish all the best to his family and I wish he had been able to weather the storm. Aaron spent 15 years making the internet a better place; his achievements will not soon be forgotten. Here is a video of a brief talk with Aaron .