Robert Lemos

How to Shrink The Data Center: 4 Lessons Learned

The business that manages New York City's hospitals consolidates 11 data centers into two facilities, dispensing with two-thirds of their physical servers for a predicted savings of $70 million over 5 years. Consider these four tips.

CIO

Botnet takedown sets legal, not technical, precedent

In the security industry, researchers have often been able to infiltrate botnets. Yet, the next step has always been a big question mark.

Now, defenders may have a new slate of options. The takedown of the Coreflood botnet marks the start of more aggressive stance against botnets, say security experts. Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice obtained a temporary restraining order forcing registrars to reroute requests from infected computers, not to Coreflood's command-and-control servers, but to a substitute server managed by a non-profit group. Under the judge's order, the sinkhole server can issue commands to prevent the bot agents from carrying out normal operations.

The result has been a drop of several orders of magnitude in the activity from the botnet, says Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence for Dell SecureWorks.

CSO Online

Microsoft Builds Legal Weapon to Take Apart Botnets

The take-down of the Rustock botnet in March gave Microsoft another head for its mantle: two in just the last year. That’s an impressive take for any private firm, and one of a string of actions against bot networks in recent years. But security experts say that the company’s success in building a legal basis for moving against botnets is an even bigger achievement.

threatpost.com

Spearphishing worries follow Epsilon breach

Security experts warned Monday that banking customers should worry about a wave of spearphishing attacks utilizing the recently-breached email database stolen from marketing firm Epsilon.

The email addresses leaked during the attack could be used to send targeted attacks to the customers of Epsilon's clients, which include a host of banks such as Barclays Bank of Delaware, CapitalOne, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase. The banks are "freaking out" about the leak, says Avivah Liten, vice president of security research for analyst firm Gartner.

CSO Online