Netflix in need of a fix

At the time of writing this, the US online video service, Netflix is still attempting to recover from an outage. This is now the third day, that the company has been affected. They cannot send confirmations back to customers to have returned DVDs to them, nor process orders for new rentals. Ouch!

There have been no details, that I can see, as to what has caused the problems.  In a curious turn of events however, the streaming video service is up and online and still being able to service customers. Is this a case of the companies online business showing its worth versus the off-line business? Well maybe not, we have to remember the off-line (no pun intended) business is down, is due to ‘IT system’ issues. 

This is yet another reminder of just how dependent companies are on their systems. The implications are significant. The loss of revenue and hence, one would assume, profit. The inconvenience to the customer of not being able to get the films they wanted. All this ends up in a significant hit to the brand image – this can be seen in comments left on the company Blog site. A timely reminder to all of us, to ensure that we have a plan in place ‘just in case’. I am off to run a backup of my laptop!

August 15, 2008 | Filed Under Backup and restore, Customer service | 1 Comment 

The $160Billion question?

The security focused news-wires have been busy this past week reporting on the impact of ‘ransomware’. This is in response to the discovery of a new variant of Trojan.Gpcoder. This is a particularly nasty threat that uses public key cryptography to encrypt files on a person’s computer and subsequently requests payment from the user in order to recover the files.  What was newsworthy about the new variant was that it was using a 1024-bit encryption key. In lay-man’s terms, this means that it is tough to crack the code to release the encrypted data.

The latest variant of the virus, first reported on June 4, appears to not have the implementation flaws of previous versions. While 1,024-bit keys are considered weak for high-security applications, the encryption is strong enough to foil reasonable attempts to brute force the solutions. In a blog on the Symantec Security Response site, Eoin Ward, notes that by some estimates a machine that could break one 1024-bit RSA key in about a day, would cost $160 billion when adjusted for today’s prices. Wow!

Ransomware has been about for quite a while. It is a nightmare scenario for many users, However, it is relatively uncommon, simply because it is hard to ‘cash-out’. By that, I mean the ability of the bad guys to get money for it.  They have to setup a payment mechanism to get the ‘ransom’ and in doing so, they make themselves vulnerable to being detected.  In those cases that people have paid up, the ‘ransom’, has tended to be pretty low i.e. in the range of $50-$100. So, I don’t think there is any prospect of $160 billion being spent to solve this. So, what is to be done?

Well, what this incident brings to the fore is the need for regular backups. This will mean you have something to fall back to, if you were to fall foul of this type of attack. Now, whilst the debate rages on about how to generate a key to decrypt this variant of Trojan.Gpcoder, definitions have been created and released to identify it. Therefore, ensure your AV definitions are up-to-date.

June 16, 2008 | Filed Under Backup and restore, Data loss, Security | Leave a Comment