Mirai
You may have heard about the biggest DDOS attack ever against my colleague Brian Krebs. Brian’s Website has been attacked by devices on the internet which have been compromised by a malware called Mirai (please visit Brian’s website for more details).
I read the source code of Mirai and developed a new security check for you which will be available in NetworkToolbox after checking for the latest data update in the settings. This new security check will scan for the same vulnerabilities Mirai is using to infect devices.
So you may want to run this security check on some or all of your network devices. If the security check reports a certain device is vulnerable, it doesn’t mean it is already ‘infected’ by Mirai but if Mirai would by chance pass by and visit your network, it is most likely that it will infect that device.
According to what I have seen while inspecting the code, fortunately Mirai will disappear once you restart the infected device. So what you should do, once the new security check reports a vulnerable device is, to restart that device and either remove it from your network or try to update it’s firmware and perform another Security check.
Yahoo
You may also have heard of the latest news about Yahoo.There are three strong arguments why to leave Yahoo as soon as possible:
- As mentioned in previous posts, Yahoo is about to be sold. Most likely to Verizon. You may also remember my post of Verizon’s Super-cookie.
- 500 Million Yahoo accounts have been hacked.
- Yahoo has scanned all mails for NSA and FBI.
A single fact from the above list should be enough to say good bye to Yahoo but I am still surprised to receive many Questions and Support mails from user with Yahoo accounts.
A few weeks ago, I was about to block all Yahoo mails as this would reduce the amount of Spam mails quite a lot (Spam is probably a fourth reason against Yahoo). But since I still receive so many Yahoo mails, I decided against blocking yahoo.
Your question might be, what else should I use? Google? Definitely not! Keep in mind (and this applies very much to Yahoo as well): “Nothing is for free”. Think twice: why should a company who needs to earn money to pay at least their employees offer a service such as Email for free? If you want security, you have to pay – period.
My best advise is, to look for one of the many service Providers who offer simple web-hosting and Email services for a good price and (most important) with a good reputation. Such a provider can be used to register your favorite domain name such as your surname (or combinations like surname-city.com for instance) and they can run a well working Email service for you. This way, you will have personalized and nice Email addresses combined with a reliable and secure Email server. Such (good) providers will also take care of Spam and While/Black listing. Often way better than the big guns like Yahoo or Google.
For a temporary time, you can forward your Yahoo (or Google) mails to this address.
Don’t be trust the evil.
Marcus