With the U.S. currently in tax season, online criminals have, once again, sought to take advantage of this. Robert Stetson, one of our malware researchers, spotted a phishing email posing as Intuit Inc., a company that “develops financial and tax preparation software”. They developed Quicken and TurboTax. Below is a screenshot of the said email:

click to enlarge

Email details are as follows:

Subject: Please verify your tax information ASAP.
Message body:
Good afternoon,

With a view to agree that exact data is being kept up on our systems, as well as to be able to give you better quality of service; INTUIT INC. has taken part in the Internal Revenue Service [IRS] Name and TIN Matching Program.

We have found out, that your name and/or TIN, that is specified on your account does not correspond to the data on file with the Social Security Administration.

In order to verify the information of your account, please enter the secure section.

Regards,
INTUIT INC.

Corporate Headquarters
2632 Marine Way
Mountain View, CA 94043

Clicking the link leads readers to download a Blackhole exploit.

Our friends at Sophos found a variant of this phishing email.

This is not the first time that online criminals have taken advantage of the U.S. tax season. In light of phishers banking on brands as a part of their social engineering ploy, legitimate companies such as Intuit Inc. does not normally send out emails of this nature. In fact, Intuit Inc. have made it a point to make clear to their clients what they will do and what they will not do in the context of sending out emails. Intuit clients are wise to take note of this point under the “What we’ll do” section: If we need you to update your account information, we will request that you do so by logging into your account.

It is important that you, dear Reader, are familiar with how your service providers conduct their services and how they respond to online threats that target them. Equally, these providers must be responsible in informing you of the latest threats affecting you and their brand and provide ways on how you can protect yourselves from such threats.

Detection—————————-Type——————-Percent
Trojan.Win32.Generic—————-Trojan——————-35.1
Yontoo (v)————————–Adware——————-2.23
FraudTool.Win32.FakeRean———–Rogue Security Program—-1.62
INF.Autorun (v)——————–Trojan——————–1.28
Trojan.Win32.FakeAV.mqa (v)——–Trojan——————–1.21
Trojan.Win32.Ramnit.c (v)———-Trojan——————–0.94
Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen (v)————-Exploit——————-0.86
GameVance (fs)———————Adware——————–0.82
Pinball Corporation. (v)———–Adware——————–0.79
Trojan.Win32.Jpgiframe (v)———Trojan——————–0.77

In this weeks episode I discuss some backlash from my coverage of Foxconn, using ATI Eyefinity with Flight Simulator X. I give a presentation of Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 Essentials.

In this weeks edition, our topics include resolving the video issues with my Dell XPS 8300,and Insync for gmail. Finally the topic turns to the deplorable working conditions at Foxconn

In last weeks edition of Business Computing Weekly, I  dedicated a fair amount of time discussing Microsoft C.E.O. Steve Ballmer. In a short clip for this years CES, that I included in the show, Steve stressed the importance of Windows 8 in the coming years ahead for the company.

Let’s be clear Windows 8 is huge deal for Microsoft, in fact it could be the most important version of Windows in the history of the company. Why? It goes something like this. A few short years ago, 95% of devices connected to the Internet were PC’s, today that percentage is 80%. It is now anticipated that in a few short years the number will be 20% or less.

Microsoft and Intel now face the reality that the world can get by without devices powered by Intel processors running Windows. Already Microsoft’s income is being generated more by Office products and Server platforms than from Windows itself. For all of this, many pundits, believe that Windows 8 will not be successful in the marketplace. This belief is based on looking at the poor performance of Windows Phone 7 which has 2% market share, and the fact that for the foreseeable future the iPad is tablet computing, Windows 8 devices are already starting way behind its competition.

It is my opinion that while Mr. Ballmer is an excellent numbers guy, what Microsoft needs now more than ever is a great product guy at the helm. I am not alone here. Look, the reality is the Microsoft’s stock has been essentially flat for the last decade, and while revenues are strong today, they are poised to tank in the post PC era. If Windows 8 turns out to be another Vista, I think Mr. Ballmer will be asked to retire by the Microsoft shareholders, and the once mighty Microsoft will become irrelevant in the mobile and cloud based future.

So what’s the catch? Simple really, the discount applies to new licenses of the software, version upgrades, and additional licenses. The discount does not apply to maintenance contract renewals or subscription renewals. The offer is not valid with any other offer. For more information call Bruce at (260) 724-2748.

Thursday, 05 January 2012 15:16

If there’s one thing an Exchange admin is used to doing, it’s monitoring disk utilization on their mailbox servers. Users hoard email like gold, and as mailbox databases increase in size, backups take longer, restores can exceed recovery time objectives (RTO), and servers can run out of disk space. Admins might look to quotas to reign in runaway mailbox sizes, but those that implement quotas soon find that all this does is force users to move email to PST files, which brings a whole new crop of problems. Performance problems, corrupt files, and data loss all pop up, all that email is still consuming disk space; they’ve simply shifted the load from the mailbox servers to the fileservers. Fortunately, there’s a better answer to the problem of email storage. Email archiving can solve all of these issues without introducing any of the problems associated with other ways to manage email storage. By bolting on email archiving to an existing Exchange infrastructure, users can continue hoarding email, database sizes can remain manageable, and admins can focus on more important issues. Let’s look at three of the best reasons why you need email archiving.

1. Unlimited mailbox sizes

We may as well get the users’ concerns out of the way first, as they are the most direct cause of problems associated with all that email. Email archiving provides users with another place to store all the email they want to keep. This other place is simply made up of less expensive disk space than what your Exchange mailbox servers use. It remains available to your users in Outlook. It can be searched. Users can move email into and out of the archive manually or using rules. You can set up automatic archiving that moves mail based on subject, date, etc., to the archive. The email remains available to the user. This is not the same as archiving email in a PST. Email archiving is server side technology and has none of the problems of PSTs. There’s no risk of data loss that comes with storing PSTs on the local hard disk; there’s no performance hit or data corruption risks from storing PSTs on network shares either. This is a 100% server-based, centrally managed solution.

2. Mailbox database RTO maintained

A big challenge for Exchange admins is making sure that mailbox databases can be backed up and restored within allocated time. DAGs (Database Availability Groups) can help maintain availability in the event of a failure, but they do nothing to recover from things like user deletions so you must still back up, and be able to restore a mailbox within set times. By using email archiving to move older email to an archive, you can keep your mailbox databases fit and small enough so that you can do daily fulls instead of having to work with a mix of full and incremental or differential backups. Email archiving makes your backup jobs become that much easier, faster to complete, and if you have to do a restore, it’s a one tape job.

3. More databases per server

When databases are kept smaller, you can serve more from the same mailbox server. That means you can perform more precise and selective backup/restores, perhaps even implement DAGs on lesser hardware, and won’t have to spend nearly as much time moving mailboxes from one database to another as you try to balance out the heaviest users. Email archiving gives you the ability to keep everyone on an equal footing as far as their Exchange mailbox size is concerned without resorting to quotas that lead to PSTs. Moving older email to the archive automatically keeps that mailbox size in check while still keeping the email accessible to the user in Outlook. No user action required!

Email archiving offers a lot of other advantages to Exchange admins. Central searching makes audit, compliance, and discovery operations easy tasks to complete. Doing away with PST files solves headaches for everyone, and having another way to get at email when Exchange is down for maintenance are just a few. For those of you with disk space woes, the top three listed above are huge benefits that you will appreciate immediately after implementing email archiving.

“The threats we uncovered last month illustrate the consistent reuse of tried-and-true attack methods slightly modified to target new groups of potential victims,” said Christopher Boyd, senior threat researcher at GFI Software.

I have received many requests to talk about getting the funds to start or expand a small business. Here is some info on how the SBA works. This video is slightly older but still very much relevant today.