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Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »August 15, 2008 — IDG News Service —
Hackers targeting Georgia in the midst of its conflict with Russia have started sending out a new batch of malicious spam messages, apparently with the aim of building a new botnet network of remote-controlled computers.
The poorly worded messages started going out early Friday morning, and now make up close to five percent of the spam traffic measured by the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Spam Data Mine, according to Gary Warner, a director of computer research and forensics at the university. That's about a third of the volume of the CNN- and MSNBC-related spam that has been flooding inboxes this week, but it's still significant, he said.
With headlines like "Mikheil Saakashvili gay scandal! New of this week!" the stories try to trick victims into clicking on a fake BBC story about the president of Georgia. When the victim clicks on the link, however, he is taken to a malicious Web server that then tries to infect his computer.
Disturbingly, the attack code used by this Web server is not blocked by most antivirus products, Warner said. In tests, his team found that only four out of the 36 antivirus products featured in the Virus Total malware testing service spotted the code.
So far, Warner's team has tracked the messages back to 44 spam-sending computers, none of which has previously been associated with junk e-mail. Interestingly, six of these computers are located in Russia, which is rarely a direct source of spam, and one of them lies within the Russian Ministry of Education.
Although the spammers seem to be setting up a botnet, the ultimate use of this network remains unclear. Warner speculated that it could be used to launch further cyber-attacks against Georgian government computers.
Symantec has identified the malicious software as a variant of the Trojan.Blusod program, said Kevin Haley, director of product management with Symantec Security Response. In the past, spammers have used this program to install fake antivirus software on victim's computers, which then falsely identifies problems and offers to clean them up for a fee, he said.
Warner disputed Symantec's analysis, noting that Symantec itself was not detecting the Trojan program, according to Virus Total. "This is new malware," he said.
The question of whether Georgia and Russia are engaging in state-sponsored cyber-warfare has been a matter of some debate, following the eruption of hostilities between the two countries on Aug. 7.
On Monday, Georgia moved its Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web site to Google's Blogspot, claiming that a Russian cyberattack had knocked its server offline.