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Bonaco Systems Announces New Web Site Development
Bonaco Systems, has begun Development of a New Website geared towards .NET Development and Best Practices of Code Design along with Technical Review of Existing Sites. The Website, nathantrasoras.com, which Stands for: Not Another Technical Hypothesis And New Technical Realites About Service Oriented Related Architecute and Software Will be Deployed later this Year and assist other Developers working with new .NET Technologies.
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Tony Buonopane Now Instructing MCTS Candidates.
Bonaco Systems is pleased to announce that it's President, Tony R. Buonopane, has taken on a Position at New Horizons in Providence, RI. instructing Prospective MCTS Students .NET along with Web Design and Sharepoint.
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Bonaco Systems Launches New Music Player!
Bonaco Systems has Launched a Web Music System that is Set up to be Customized for Individual Customers. A sample of this Technology is Available on our Web Site. (Under the Linked In Logo)
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Welcome to Bonaco Systems
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Bonaco Systems provides you with everything you need to make your business work for you. With customized Software Development, Network Maintenance, Internet Security, and Business Solutions, Bonaco Systems is your one stop for all your MIS needs.
Feel free to browse the site and explore.
Please Note: Registered Users have access to more features, including the ability to Download Software, and Post Topics in our Forum.
Bonaco Systems New Music Player!
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Microsoft's Security Freeware Poised for Beta Launch
Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) said Thursday it plans to release a beta test of its free computer security program next week and is on track to launch a finished product in the fall.
The program, Microsoft Security Essentials, is designed to find and kill malicious software that can steal passwords and other personal information or turn PCs into spam distribution hubs.
Once the PC security software is installed, Microsoft said it will download updated lists of identified malware daily, but will keep a low profile unless it detects dangerous software.
Theresa Burch, a director on the security software team, said the program tries to spot malicious software even if it's not on the list of known corrupters.
When it encounters something suspicious, it checks with a Microsoft server for updated intelligence before allowing the program to run, a process Burch said is almost instantaneous.
Microsoft also maintains a database of trusted software sources, so the tool won't accidentally block items like Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) Web browser toolbar, she said.
Healthy Competition
Security Essentials will compete with rival subscription programs from McAfee and Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC) , and with several other free packages. However, Burch said Microsoft isn't going after those company's customers -- instead, the goal is to improve security overall by getting people who don't have current antivirus software to protect their PCs.
In fact, it's important that Microsoft's competitors stay in business, Burch said.
"If there was only one solution out there addressing threats, all the malicious software developers out there would have a very easy target," she said.
The security software will come as a free download, but it won't be part of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system, which goes on sale in October. Bundling the two could be fodder for antitrust complaints.
After the final version launches, Microsoft will discontinue its existing security program, the more robust US$50 Windows Live OneCare.
Not Good Enough?
In a statement Thursday, antivirus software maker Symantec objected to Microsoft's description of Security Essentials.
"Referring to Microsoft's basic antivirus and antispyware product as an essential security solution is misleading," said Dave Cole, a senior director at Symantec. He said PC users need the extra firewall protection, spam fighters and other features that come with subscription security programs.
"The freeware space is crowded, and Microsoft is just joining the fray," Cole said
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Dell Drums Up Virtualization-in-a-Box
Less than three months after announcing a slew of products and services to propel its thrust into the data center market, Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) on Wednesday released several out-of-the-box virtualization solutions targeting both enterprises and SMBs.
These are aimed at simplifying virtualization and helping customers cut their costs.
In addition to hardware and hypervisors, Dell is offering virtualization, lifecycle and system management capabilities.
Dell also announced a set of flexible, modular virtualization consulting services.
For the Big Boys
Dell is offering the Data Center Virtualization Configuration for the enterprise.
This combines Dell PowerEdge M-series blades and EqualLogic P6000 iSCSI storage technology.
Other components of the bundle are Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) Catalyst networking switches, VMware (NYSE: VMW) Sphere 4 and Novell's (Nasdaq: NOVL) Platespin Migrate to let customers create an intelligent, automated data center.
VMware vSphere 4 lets customers transform their data centers into internal private clouds that can be federated on demand to external clouds so an enterprise can deliver IT infrastructure as a service.
This is in keeping with VMware's vision of bridging internal and external clouds, which it first announced at VMworld 2008 in September.
PlateSpin Migrate moves server workloads over the network between physical servers, virtual hosts and image archives. This is critical to balance out workloads in a virtualized environment in order to cut costs.
Novell acquired PlateSpin in March 2008.
This One's for SMBs
Although small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) know that virtualization will help them cut costs, they tend to shy away from the technology because they lack the skills to implement it.
"Many SMBs don't have the technological background or skills on-site to make virtualization happen in a cost-effective way," Charles King, principal at Pund-IT, told TechNewsWorld.
For the SMB, Dell offers a configuration consisting of the PowerEdge R710 server, Dell PowerVault MD3000 and PowerVault DL 2000 storage arrays.
The PowerVault DL2000 is an appliance that makes it easy to back up data to disk drives. It runs Symantec's (Nasdaq: SYMC) Backup Exec solution.
The SMB configuration also comes with Dell's PowerConnect networking technology and Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) virtualization suite -- Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, System Center Essentials, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008.
"We want to help people dramatically reduce the time it takes to plan and deploy their systems, and operate and manage them more easily, especially for SMB customers," Dell spokesperson Matt McGinnis told TechNewsWorld.
Tech Specs of the SMB Configuration
The PowerEdge R710 is based on the Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) Xeon processor and is a 2U rack server that comes with Dell Lifecycle Controller for advanced systems management.
The PowerVault MD3000 is a highly available modular disk storage array that supports up to four PowerEdge servers and 45 disk drives; it has a capacity of 45 TB (terabytes). It supports both SAS and SATA drives.
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Bonaco Systems Announces New Web Site Development
Bonaco Systems, has begun Development of a New Website geared towards .NET Development and Best Practices of Code Design along with Technical Review of Existing Sites.
The Website, nathantrasoras.com, which Stands for:
Not
Another
Technical
Hypothesis
And
New
Technical
Realites
About
Service
Oriented
Related
Architecute and
Software
Will be Deployed later this Year and assist other Developers working with new .NET Technologies.
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Friend or Fraud? Security and Social Networks
Back in January, friends of Seattle, Wash., resident Bryan Rutberg were stunned when they read e-mails from his Facebook account accompanied by his photo. In the messages, Bryan appeared to claim he was in big trouble and that he needed their help.
At least one friend wired him money. However, Rutberg wasn't really in trouble and was in no need of assistance -- his Web page had been hijacked by cybercriminals.
This is just one of the cyberscams that have hit Facebook, the world's leading social networking site.
Facebook's size and rapid rate of growth attract cybercriminals the way honey attracts flies. However, it's not only everyday users who are at risk. Because Facebook has tie-ins with several vendors offering software to the business community, corporations are at risk too.
Social networking sites are vulnerable to cybercriminals because they need to be open in order to attract more members. That sometimes runs in opposition to the general philosophy of data security, and that makes it difficult to secure social networking sites.
Other Facebook Scams
In cases like Rutberg's, a criminal tricks a user into giving up personal information like passwords (a practice known as "phishing"), then uses that info to gain control of the person's account. From there, the phisher can make all sorts of plays -- convince that person's friends to send money, for instance, and intercept it once it's sent. Between April and May of this year alone, there were three major phishing attacks on Facebook involving large numbers of users.
February saw spammers hijack the "5,000,000 against the new version of Facebook" page on the Facebook site. They sent various "spamvertisements" to the page's more than 1.5 million members.
Malware authors have also struck at Facebook -- since last year, the Koobface worm and at least one variant have repeatedly hit the site.
Why Social Networking Sites?
Facebook is certainly not alone in this. LinkedIn , a social networking site for professionals, has been hit too. MySpace used to get hit quite regularly -- until Facebook's growth left it in the dust.
Why have social networking sites become such prime targets for hackers, malware authors and other cybercriminals?
One reason is that people love them. Social networking sites account for 10 percent of all the time people spend on the Internet, according to research firm Nielsen Online. Two-thirds of people on the Internet (the digital universe, so to speak) in the U.S,. Europe, Brazil and Australia visit social networking or blogging sites.
The numbers are staggering: the so-called digital universe totals almost 156 million people in the U.S., Nielsen spokesperson Michelle McGiboney told TechNewsWorld. In the UK, more than 29 million people go on the Internet; and in Brazil the number is more than 25 million. If two-thirds of these people visit social networks, the numbers are just too large for many scammers to ignore.
Gotta Keep Growing
Another reason cybercriminals love social networking sites is that these sites have to remain easily accessible in order to grow their memberships.
"It's critical to a social networking site's success and popularity to let members share data and Web tools and dynamic gadgets," Ryan Barnett, director of application security research at Breach Security, told TechNewsWorld.
Security experts generally prefer the exact opposite -- they would rather make it difficult for people to get into a network.
"From a security perspective, however, this increased flexibility means increased risk of abuse of functionality."
Can these conflicting forces be resolved and social networking sites made safe?
The Path of the Righteous Is Hard
Facebook has been working to secure its site, spokesperson Barry Schnitt said.
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Study: U.S. Broadband Adoption Leaps Despite Recession, Rising Prices
The recession may indeed be forcing you to cut back on some cellphone and cable television services, but apparently it will only get your high-speed Internet access when it pries your computer mouse from your cold, dead hands.
The latest Pew Internet and American Life Project study, released Wednesday, shows broadband adoption growing in the face of a sour economy. The study put the adoption rate at 63 percent, up from 55 percent last year -- with senior citizens and low-income Americans experiencing the largest growth rates year-over-year.
Pew interviewed 2,253 people -- 651 via cellphones -- and 22 percent of those said they had either cut back or economized on cell phone and cable TV service over the past year, as the recession has deepened and job losses have increased. However, the broadband adoption rate rose, as did monthly average prices for home broadband service -- US$39 in April 2009 compared to $34.50 in May 2008.
"A majority of home broadband users see a home high-speed connection as 'very important' to at least one dimension of their lives and community, such as communicating with healthcare providers and government officials, or gathering and sharing information about the community," wrote John B. Horrigan, Pew associate director. "A growing share of broadband subscribers pay for premium service that gives them faster speeds. They are also paying more for the extra speed than they did a year ago."
A Broadcast/Broadband Blend?
Pew's findings came as little surprise to Ben Bajarin, who heads the consumer technologies practice at the consultancy/research firm Creative Strategies. In fact, they mirror similar studies done by others showing a content shift from broadcast to broadband, he told TechNewsWorld that
"It's logical, following the cocooning mentality that happens during times like these," Bajarin said. "More people are watching DVDs, and they're cutting costs, but they can still consume a great deal of entertainment and can communicate through their high-speed connection. It's just a shifting of habits, where they (consumers) are looking to bundle and do more with a particular medium. They know how much content exists online, and they use that (broadband connection) for more rich media and entertainment."
Thanks to the rise of one-word entertainment options delivered digitally -- Hulu, Roku, Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) , YouTube -- "it's quite possible to get the vast majority of television programming online for free. If you counter that with what the average bill for Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSK) is, about $80, that's a tough sell in this economy. Even if you need more broadband, you just pay an extra $8 to $10 a month."
Sensing the seismic shift in consumer viewing habits, cable companies have also starting adding more on-demand choices from broadcast and cable networks.
Implications for Government Initiatives
The Pew study saw two groups that have traditionally resisted high-speed access suddenly show signs of jumping on the broadband bandwagon: senior citizens, with a year-over-year increase of 18 to 30 percent adoption, and low-income households with average annual incomes of less than $30,000, rising to 34 percent adoption. Cheaper computers and more Web-focused devices like netbooks are two factors for this, according to Bajarin.
The study's findings may also play into the Obama administration's desire to expand broadband access to more of the country, especially rural areas that have few or no high-speed providers. The study showed that those areas with more competition paid less in monthly average bills, giving credence to arguments from open-access advocates like Free Press.
"We need to continue to drive the accessiblity and the costs down of just general broadband -- anything between 1.5 and 2.5 MB in speed," Bajarin said. "There's more accessibility from a simplistic device standpoint. Netbooks are just designed to get online.
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Beware of the Information Security Inertia Syndrome
We all know that some things are easier to do than others. In fact, what separates an average manager from a great one is the ability to balance decisions based on two almost totally unrelated sets of criteria: ease of accomplishment on the one hand vs. value to the organization on the other.
Think about it this way: A manager that only focuses on the quick-to-accomplish "low-hanging fruit" isn't going to last long because he or she is not focusing on what's critical to the organization and of the highest value. In other words, these folks might get a lot of individual tasks done, but what they're doing isn't in line with what the organization most needs. On the other hand, a manager who can't show progress to the next tier up (because they're focusing only on complex, slow-moving, high-visibility, initiatives) isn't likely to last long either.
We need to show progress while at the same time understanding that sometimes the things that are most important take a while and need doing too. In short, it's all about moving forward -- moving forward at a rapid rate for those things that are easy to do, but also being mindful that there are also forces that might make our projects take longer. For example, it's natural that a complex project with lots of moving parts will take a bit longer than a simple one.
However, sometimes organizations get caught in a dynamic where they can't make any progress forward. No matter how simple or complex, they become locked in a "death spiral" where absolutely nothing gets done. It's true -- and breaking out of it can be nigh-on impossible.
Think of it like the inertia we all learned about back in Physics 101: It's a situation where we're not able to move for whatever reason, but also where inaction today facilitates (or in some cases actually ensures) further lack of action tomorrow.
Information Security Inertia
First of all, it's important to recognize that setbacks and inertia are not the same thing. There are always forces that are going to slow down progress on any particular project, and we shouldn't start freaking out just because we've run into an unexpected dependency or another situation that slows us down.
For example, we might run into a situation where we want to pen-test a particular environment, but we find out we need to get permission from the system owners first. That's just a dependency -- and once we overcome it, we move forward again at about the same pace we did before.
Another example: We want to build a disaster recovery plan, but we need the business impact results to come in first -- and those folks are behind schedule. Again, not an ideal scenario because it impacts our dates, and we're stuck waiting for someone or something else that we didn't originally expect. However, all these things are natural with projects.
Real project "inertia," on the other hand, is a self-reinforcing, systemic culture of inaction. It stops work from happening today and guards against it getting done in the future. Whereas a setback slows us down for a limited period of time, inertia mires us down and leaves us stagnant -- unable to proceed until a major shake-up knocks everything loose.
It's easiest to explain this by example. Imagine a situation wherein an organization erroneously decides that a particular regulation is not applicable to their business -- perhaps a hospital or educational institution deciding that PCI is not in scope. Those familiar with PCI might point out that accepting credit cards via a gift shop/cafeteria/bookstore/charitable contributions office translates directly to the requirement to comply with PCI; those people would be right, but not everyone's there yet.
Since our hypothetical university or hospital already made the decision that PCI is out of scope, they've forgone taking specific steps to comply in the short term. At the same time, efforts to become compliant in the future have also become incrementally harder.
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Opera Gives You a Server of Your Own
Norway-based Opera Software opened access Tuesday to what it described as a "revolutionary" technology that allows average computer users to set up browser-based servers to share files and photos, stream music and chat.
"Unite," as the service is called, is included in a beta release of the company's Opera browser, which ranks a distant third behind Internet Explorer and Firefox in user adoption worldwide.
How It Works
A Unite-enabled Opera browser allows users to designate the content they want to share and who should have access to it via a custom URL. Access can be set to public, password-restricted or private access for the account owner only.
Users who want to access the Unite browser-based server need not be running Opera, according to the company, but some services did not appear to work Tuesday when accessed from Firefox.
Opera did not respond to an email request for comment about the new service. However, in a statement, Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner called the technology "one of our most significant innovations yet, because it changes forever the fundamental fabric of the Web."
The service currently lets users share files and photos, stream music, chat and leave messages for friends using a virtual refrigerator motif. In a posting to the company's blog, Opera product analyst Lawrence Eng said the initial set of applications constitutes little more than a demo.
"The key to Opera Unite is that it enables a whole new class of social software on the Web, applications that benefit from two or more people being online at the same time," Eng wrote.
User-Made Apps on the Way
Developers, including average users, will be able to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to make and upload new services that others can install on their own Unite sites, according to Opera.
An example, Eng wrote, might be a jukebox that mixes playlists submitted by a group of online friends. Each user would hear the same distributed playlist, "harking back to the days of going to a friend's house to listen to records," he wrote.
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Neutralizing the Smartphone Security Threat
Nearly half of the large organizations that participated in a recent security survey conducted by Infonetics said they relied solely on the security offered by their smartphone operating system. Even the BlackBerry OS, which is considered comparatively robust, "won't necessarily cover Internet threats including email and Web-borne malware," according to the report.
There are many common, but inaccurate, assumptions about the security and privacy of smartphones and other handheld converged devices. For many corporate employees today, mobile phones and PDAs have replaced PCs. Enterprise workers are now performing the same functions they previously carried out on their desktop PCs on much smaller devices, virtually anywhere and anytime.
One of the hidden dangers most CSOs and CIOs aren't adequately addressing these days is rogue code infecting their employees' mobile phones -- or worse, their corporate networks. That's unfortunate; although no major incidents have been reported yet, it's only a matter a time before some serious event takes place.
Interestingly, it's not as though these corporate executives aren't paying attention to mobile security. After all, there are management tools to disable lost phones and passwords to protect in-use devices. Still, too few enterprise security execs have given enough thought to the possibility that malware downloaded onto these devices could infect the entire network.
Malware can take many different forms. Depending on the type of application, a piece of malware could cause a phone to dial foreign numbers, send an exorbitant number of text messages, or cause some other form of disturbance designed to drive up the user's phone bill. Or it might flood the network with meaningless messages or render the device inoperable, causing increased help desk costs for the carrier.
The Dawn of a New Mobile Era
Think back to the movie "Independence Day," in which humans defeated alien invaders by planting a virus in their mother ship's computer, which led to the destruction of the entire alien fleet. While that movie is a fantasy, hundreds of known malicious software programs have been written to attack mobile devices. Putting a virus into a program that gets distributed via a mobile phone network would be an effective way to infect the entire network.
Consider the danger: Once the mobile device is infected, the malware may tunnel into the network, where it could seek out password or credit card information. As with a time bomb, the enterprise may have no idea of the danger until it is too late.
Millions of enterprise mobile workers frequently transact business using devices powered by BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and other OSes that are vulnerable to viruses and malware unless certain steps are taken. The same criminals spoofing Web sites in order to gain access to individuals' personal information have figured out that access to enterprise information is far more rewarding. Major hacks into corporate sites already seem like monthly news, but mobile device hacks may be lurking in the wings.
Smartphones today are basically minicomputers, able to browse the Internet and download code from many different places. In fact, many carriers provide download sites for their customers to use as one-stop-shops. In addition, vendors provide applications for many different operating systems.
Scammers can advertise rogue code and point browsers to their Web site to trick users into downloading an application that is not legitimate. Consider a phishing attack, for example, in which an unsuspecting user receives an email with a link to "update" his bank account info. He is then directed either to a rogue Web site where code can be silently downloaded or prompted to download a screensaver or some other application that looks legitimate but is really malware.
The fact is, mobile phones are here to stay and have become woven into the fabric of corporate information processing.
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Bonaco Systems is committed to protecting your privacy. See our privacy policy
Also, please read our Disclaimer for additional information.
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