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Study Says Hackers Becoming Advanced
August 14, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Security consultant Mandiant (mandiant.com) announced last week that its latest research has found that hackers are more frequently using rogue active server pages as a way into a Web server in order to remotely view, copy or delete files, according to a report by Information Week.
Kevin Mandia, president of Mandiant, spoke at a Black hat conference in Las Vegas, Nevada where he shared research results that proved attackers are using increasingly sophisticated methods to evade detection and make life difficult for security incident response teams.
Mandia says the sophistication of hackers' tools are outpacing that of investigators' forensic tools, and one of the consequences is that incident response teams charged with investigating attacks on networks are taking between five and eight days to find malicious code.
As incident response teams search for the malicious code, the most common assumption is that a hacker has used kernel level rootkits to access sensitive internal data. Rootkits are software tools designed to hide running processes, files or system data and enable attackers to maintain control over a system without the user's knowledge. A kernel level rootkit takes this a step further by adding or modifying part of the kernel code. Although Windows security breaches make up the majority of security incidents, the kernel level rootkits Mandia has come across thus far have been Linux-based.
Mandia says the main reason hackers aren't running kernel level rootkits as much anymore and are choosing the ASP route is because rootkits can make systems unstable, which could blow their cover.
The report adds that profit-motivated attackers usually operate by hacking a victim's PC and installing a keystroke logger or by getting their victims to fall for phishing scams. Mandia says these attacks are tough to stop because the attackers tend to work quickly and leave little evidence behind.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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