Oct 2007

Dear Client,

This last month ran fairly smoothly other than last Thursday when we did a minor update to the mail firewall that went south on us. It didn’t recognize the update properly and went into an emergency shutdown/restart procedure which among other things moves known working copies of critical configuration files into place. The control file wasn’t the most current one and redirected traffic to itself for over half our network, knocking web servers and mail servers offline. Took us about 15 minutes to figure out what happened and fix it. These things are always scary when they happen until the root cause is discovered. In this case, the fix was simple—copy the current configuration file back where it belonged and reboot.

One of the quickest growing forms of Internet crime has been identity theft. The growth is fueled by spam that is starting to look pretty official, coming from banks or other institutions that we believe to be accurate. Current estimates are that every 4 seconds, a person’s identity is stolen in this country. Chris Hansen of MSNBC’s Dateline news program did a piece on this a few months ago and tracked down the group responsible for one such theft. It is extremely hard to track and most (but not all) of the groups come from Nigeria. The amount of money stolen is so large that it is in their country’s best interest not to crack down on those responsible—it has become a revenue stream.

It often starts with an official looking email and after clicking on it, you are taken to a log-in page where you try to log in but it doesn’t work. Problem is—this isn’t the real institution you thought it was. Soon they have your vital statistics and start stripping current accounts and opening new ones until you are tapped out.

One bright spot in the war against these criminals is the 3 major credit reporting companies are near agreement on letting us as consumers freeze access to our credit. For a modest fee, we can block access until we choose to open it back up. That’s a good start, although more could be done.

The weather here is finally starting to cool off. I recently had to replace the roof on our shed that was improperly installed a year and a half ago. I’ve been doing a lot of fall chores, including planning the fall/winter garden. Will probably plant peas, several lettuce varieties, broccoli, spinach and cauliflower. Not sure what else. We’re still harvesting some tomatoes, bell peppers and jalapeno peppers.

Sincerely,

Ben Conner