Securing Your Virtual Growth

Cleaning up after facebook

We have had a flurry of customers, friends and family members ask for help recovering from facebook scams recently, and there seems to be no end in sight.

The typical chain of events is that a facebook user decides to view a video or picture that they notice “advertised” in their feed or on another friend’s wall. In order to see the video or picture, the user has to click the like button and follow a series of steps. Chances are, the scammers running the scheme are interested in one of several things: your facebook credentials, inspiring you to download a virus disguised as a movie player or other software, or encouraging you to visit a website that places malicious programs on your computer.

When the scam leads to a virus or malware being installed on your computer without your knowledge, the group quite possibly has control of your computer and perhaps the availability to see and collect passwords and secure information used to login to bank accounts, email, workplace applications and yes, even facebook.

How do you tell if a popular video or picture is a scam?

Here’s a recent scam, and some tips.

Babysitter Goes to Jail After She Uploads This HORRIBLE Baby Photo Online

A screenshot after clicking the link to the facebook page

A couple things tipped me off right away. First, in the lightly shaded box that contains a sampling of people who like the picture, you can’t click on 2,325 people to view their names. You also can’t click on the individuals listed in the shaded box. I clicked on the Wall tab to compare numbers of fans. When I first started writing and researching this piece on Sunday evening, there were over 200,000 fans.

Screenshot from wall view

As of Monday evening, there were only 73 fans. That’s good! 200,000 people realized this was a scam and unliked it. You can also see the Report Page link is circled. You can always click that link to report a page for spam, inappropriate material, etc.

Here’s another feature of the page that made me think this page was bad news:

I couldn’t click on Andrew Martin Tomlinson to view his profile. When I used the facebook search box to find him, here’s the profile I found:

When you change your profile picture on facebook, it follows you everywhere until you change it again. Because the search results only found one Andrew Martin Tomlinson, they should have shown the same profile picture in both locations. Because the text in that lightly shaded box wasn’t clickable, it was likely a screen shot.

Odd grammar and misspellings, too good to be true promises of goods or coupons, or requiring you to fulfill certain steps before viewing can also be signs of a facebook spam page.

Don’t feel bad if you have fallen prey to such a scheme – the strategies for persuading people to follow through with the instructions are becoming more and more believable, and some users are reporting that the like button is actually being hidden under other text causing accidental clicks.

What should you do if you have made this mistake? First, delete the link from your page. This will stop other friends from making the same mistake you made. Also, if another friend begins sending weird video and photo links to your wall, delete those as well and notify the friend. And, change your facebook password. Many business sector security policies require users to change passwords for email and computer login every 45 days, and that is not a bad idea for social networking accounts like facebook.

Additionally, on your own profile under your account settings, click on the application link to see what applications are currently running and showing in your facebook profile. All of these applications can access some of your facebook information, and sometimes your friends’. If you don’t use an application or don’t know what it is, delete it.

And, if you believe your computer was compromised, run an antivirus/malware scan immediately.

You can also visit the facebook security page to learn more about what happens if your account is hijacked, and what type of schemes invite trouble for facebook users.

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Joel Althoff, July 13th 2010 | Tags: facebook, hacking, phishing, Security, spam, users
Posted in Security, Solutions

The Annoyance of Encrypted Searches

A month ago, Google rolled out its encrypted search option, which allows users exploring through https://www.google.com to seemingly search in stealth mode.

For public library and internet cafe users, bored private sector employees, and non-American Googlers, this news was heralded with great excitement and a flurry of key presses; nobody can see what we are Googling anymore! (To be fair, I must also mention that Firefox also rolled out an extension last week called HTTPS Everywhere that encrypts data between users and sites whenever possible, but I haven’t had a chance to read more on the release.)

For many other users and network administrators, encrypted searches are a minor annoyance.

For example, our K-12 Education clients that rely on federal E-rate funding for bandwidth and internet related hardware must comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). Adherence to CIPA policies requires that schools design and implement a policy that monitors the online activity of minors. Allowing students to use encrypted searches, whether through Google or elsewhere, violates CIPA and a school’s qualifications for E-rate funding. Google is aware of the issue, and recently changed the url of their encrypted search to https://encrypted.google.com. Schools looking to block access to Google’s encrypted search engine should be able to do so within their URL filters or by blocking access to the above hostname.

Earlier I said that nobody could see what you were Googling when you used the encrypted search, but that isn’t exactly true. Google still tracks and compiles that data, but webmasters and others that rely on analytics and search engine data to judge the effectiveness of their sites, products and marketing campaigns will no longer see what keywords led viewers to a specific webpage when using an encrypted search. For many of our web hosting clients, this is dismal news. Small- and medium- businesses typically depend on their website as the hub of their marketing presence. If consumers are led to a site through an encrypted search, businesses will see the same statistics as if the consumer had simply typed the address in the browser without using Google’s encrypted search.

Many businesses will also find that encrypted searches are not allowed in their company Internet access/privacy policy. We typically recommend that a privacy policy read something like this:

NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY- Employees are given computers and Internet access to assist them in the performance of their jobs. Employees should have no expectation of privacy in anything they create, store, send or receive using the company’s computer equipment. The computer network is the property of the Company and may be used only for Company purposes. WAIVER OF PRIVACY RIGHTS- User expressly waives any right of privacy in anything they create, store, send or receive using the company’s computer equipment or Internet access. User consents to allow company personnel access to and review of all materials created, stored, sent or received by User through any Company network or Internet connection. MONITORING OF COMPUTER AND INTERNET USAGE – The Company has the right to monitor and log any and all aspects of its Computer system including, but not limited to, monitoring Internet sites visited by Users, monitoring chat and newsgroups, monitoring file downloads, and all communications sent and received by users. Failure to monitor in specific situations is not a waiver of the Company’s right to monitor. BLOCKING SITES WITH INAPPROPRIATE CONTENT- The Company has the right to utilize software that makes it possible to identify and block access to Internet sites containing sexually explicit or other material deemed inappropriate in the workplace.

If Google’s encrypted search remains an optional tool, it will remain just a minor annoyance for IT staff. But, if Google favors the encrypted search for its sole search engine, schools, webmasters and businesses may be Googling for a new search engine.

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Joel Althoff, June 29th 2010 | Tags: cipa, encrypted, engine, firefox, google, schools, search, Security
Posted in Education, Security

Riptides

While attending the Ingram-Micro Spring Partner Connection Summit this May in sunny Hollywood, Florida, I watched lifeguards rescue swimmer after swimmer that lost track of their location in the ocean and were pulled out to sea in a dangerous riptide.

My wife and I couldn’t understand why swimmers weren’t splashing within the limits of the buoys – each time the lifeguards hauled someone in, they pointed out the buoys to the rescued swimmers AND to any swimmers within shouting distance on the beach.

A few days later, when we boarded a vessel for an off-shore snorkel adventure, we found just how easy it is to be whisked away by waves and scenery. While observing the schools of fish beneath us, I popped my head up to see how close we were to the dive flag the marked our boundaries. Mere inches!

We sometimes find ourselves in similar situations when working with small businesses; they may be unaware that they are caught in an undercurrent of poor technology practices, hardware purchases, dismal security and poor policies. Once businesses feel the pull and pressure of the current, they panic. Businesses fight the waves and current instead of swimming parallel to the shore into the clear waters of prosperity and growth.

While we are happy to lifeguard for clients and rescue them from a sea of break-fix spending, we find much more satisfaction in working with clients to place buoys in the area where they are comfortable swimming. Swimming within the buoys helps them stay clear of the dangerous break/fix riptides and enjoy the many benefits of leveraging technology to move their businesses forward.

A marketing session at the conference asked us to take a closer look at our passions to determine where to focus our marketing efforts.

Our passion is providing total support and peace of mind to our clients.

Iowa Data Centers and Infrastructure Technology Solutions – Trusted, IT solutions.

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Joel Althoff, June 16th 2010 | Tags: consulting, small business, SMB, technology
Posted in Solutions

Evaluating 1:1 Initiatives

I was talking with a school administrator recently that is retiring from his Superintendent’s position this June.

Earlier this year, his School Board had been discussing and planning a 1:1 laptop initiative. The Superintendent is tech-saavy; he can knowledgeably reboot servers and run commands from terminal, but also knows how to make technology work as a tool and learning companion in his school. He felt obligated to inform me that because he, the technological innovator of their school community, was leaving, there would be no 1:1 initiative next year for sure.

I thanked him for thinking of us, and said, “To be honest with you, I’m glad they are delaying the 1:1.”

While he was surprised at my remark, he agreed wholeheartedly.

I continued to explain that often when we see 1:1 initiatives fail, the school has done their homework on hardware, policies, installation, etc., but hasn’t really thought about how to integrate these tools into their classroom. Instead of multi-media tools, students have a personal (and pricey) word processing device, calculator and entertainment vessel.

Researchers draw the same conclusion: 1:1 initiatives are only good when they are in the hands of teachers that are already innovators in lesson planning and collaboration, and in a school community where administrators set strong models for technology integration. The administrator I was speaking to would have had great success with a 1:1 initiative next year, because his staff already knows how to get the best learning experience from the technology they currently have.

They place the technology in the hands of learners, create developmentally appropriate learning opportunities, and know how to drive value from technology assets. It’s too bad that a 1:1 initiative wasn’t realized two years ago, giving the Superintendent time to implement the program before reaching his retirement this year – we all could have learned from their success.

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Joel Althoff, June 5th 2010 | Tags: 1:1, initiatives, k-12, laptop
Posted in Education

Schooled in the Cloud

Cloud computing and collaborative environments topped the 2010 Horizon Report of technologies to watch and expect in the K-12 arena for the coming year, and both private companies and publicly funded entities are creating and merging products to meet that expectation.

Infrastructure Technology Solutions serves 20+ K-12 education clients throughout Eastern Iowa with security cameras, consulting, web design, web hosting, firewalls and content filtering, and data backup.

Many of these K-12 clients are also one of 54 schools/districts served by Grant Wood Area Education Association (GWAEA). There are ten AEAs throughout the State of Iowa, which are state funded and have no taxing authority. Instead, they are funded via a per-pupil ratio determined by the Legislature and other governing bodies, as well as grant money and sale of services.

GWAEA provides a myriad of solutions and services for our local schools; lending libraries, child support teams, parent and educator training opportunities, graphics and printing, and managed/hosted services.

From hosting payroll and budget applications, to email and websites, GWAEA serves as a model of how schools can use cloud computing to eliminate costs and increase efficiencies. While some of the hosted offerings at GWAEA might be better defined as software as a service (SaaS), it is certainly exciting to see our public schools and associated bodies evolving technology right along with -or ahead of – the private sector.

Schools are no stranger to hosted services, and it makes sense. When schools use hosted solutions (via GWAEA or elsewhere) for business and student management programs, schools can concentrate on integration of technology in the classroom and maintaining equipment used daily by staff and students for learning and growing. Schools can also take advantage of local training opportunities when a group of schools use the same budgeting tools or student management systems, and have a larger support network.

As schools begin to take advantage of more cloud computing services, they will have the ability to grow their network space during times of peak usage. Yearly events such as student registration, fiscal year planning, benefits enrollment and parent-teacher conference scheduling can burst into the cloud when needed, and shrink back to the original allocation after the usage has subsided.

With the advent of state-wide academic expectations known as Iowa Core Curriculum, Iowa and its AEAs have a tremendous opportunity to provide collaborative environments for students and educators as well. Companies like Pearson, Google, Microsoft and ePals are rolling out new products to excite and engage students across the curriculum.

Education is evolving, and our Iowa schools and AEAs are right on track.

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Leslie Althoff, April 28th 2010 | Tags: challenges, cloud, horizon report, k-12, school, trends
Posted in Cloud Computing, Education

Smart Web Strategies for Small Business

Before we built our data center and developed our consulting offerings, we built a lot of web sites for customers. With a guy to write code and a guy with a sharp eye for design, and we could roll out sites that showcased businesses’ products and services fairly quickly.

The customers we worked with didn’t necessarily have a background in html, and couldn’t easily edit their pages without some sort of specialized software. Rather than encouraging clients to purchase Dreamweaver or Contribute, we wrote a Content Management System (CMS) that provided a user-friendly interface for inputting and editing information on the site.

Now, we turn to Wordpress.

WordPress helps small and large business alike have a website that’s easy to maintain by providing a built-in content management system. While WordPress has several free themes to start you on your website adventures, a little knowledge of html and CSS will take you ever further. Custom coding and sites can easily be developed to take advantage of all WordPress has to offer as well.

In addition to the CMS, WordPress is an open-source platform, which means that developers are constantly adding new plugins, themes and tools for other users and developers. These plugins are snippets of code that run in your website to help you flash through photos in a gallery, connect clients to your social networking sites, provide a “contact us” form, or even count and track visitors to your new website.

A simple and secure WordPress login allows users to author, edit and publish pages on the website, depending on the amount of permissions given to them.

After converting our website to WordPress, we are excited to roll out our first client sites in the next few weeks. We know that our clients are excited to have a web presence that is eye-appealing, user-friendly, and cost-effective. And, we are excited to show you what a WordPress site can do for your business.

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Leslie Althoff, April 8th 2010 | Tags: cms, small business, Web Design, wordpress
Posted in Education, Web Design

Broadband Buzz

My wife loves to tell people how we happened upon the parcel of land that is now Infrastructure Technology Solutions (ITS); we simply followed the fiber.

No, we didn’t drive around Eastern Iowa aimlessly following neon orange fiber markers – we simply took note of which fiber ran where in the areas that could support a data center. Multiple fiber providers happened to intersect on one parcel of land and provided the redundancy we sought, and the land happened to be for sale.

During the purchasing process we also discovered that two power companies served the parcel, which sweetened the deal immensely.

ITS is fortunate in its find: broadband availability in Eastern Iowa can be spotty, especially in rural areas and smaller communities. Finding multiple providers to service one municipality is especially rare.

Leading up to the release of the National Broadband Plan, cities in Iowa began announcing plans to compete in Google’s “think big with a gig” contest that utilizes dark fiber Google began quietly purchasing in 2005. Ames, Des Moines and Iowa City have all released grassroots web campaigns to woo Google and make a case for the awesome things their city could do with faster and more affordable broadband.

If Google’s gig doesn’t choose your city, perhaps the US Government will. Below we have listed several of the main goals of the National Broadband Plan (from http://www.broadband.gov/) recently released by the FCC, and shared our thoughts and experiences where appropriate. We would love to hear yours, as well.

Goal No. 1: At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second.

Do you know what your current download and upload speeds are, and what that even means? We use the websites www.speedtest.net and www.speakeasy.net/speedtest to test bandwidth when we are testing equipment and setups.

Most LAN networks were, and many still are, 100 megabits/second. Picture moving around the internet at the speed that you could move around a snappy network at school or at the office – nice, right? Adding the component of Cloud Computing makes more robust bandwidth even more exciting – you could have a snappy, LAN-like connection with your data no matter where it is stored.

Even more importantly, downloading information at 100 megabits per seconds also means that you can stream your Netflix or download your iTunes movies fluently.

Goal No. 2: The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.

Doing business at the speed of light…does that mean we can finally get iPhones in this area?

Goal No. 3: Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose.

Goal No. 4: Every community should have affordable access to at least 1 gigabit per second broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals, and government buildings.

Schools can currently take advantage of e-Rate – a government program that provides up to a 90% discount for schools and libraries that qualify based on free/reduced-lunch numbers and rural/urban location.

However, schools applying for E-Rate discounts cannot use equipment funded by those monies to provided internet access to communities, whether acting as an ISP or opening the computer lab for after-hours users.

If E-Rate funding increased (something we haven’t seen in ten years), could schools with powerful broadband connectivity become an internet hub for their communities? If so, how would schools handle the filter settings they must comply with when accepting E-Rate funding. Would second-hand users of the school broadband be limited by the same filters?

Goal No. 5: To ensure the safety of American communities, every first responder should have access to a nationwide, wireless, interoperable broadband public safety network.

Goal No. 6: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.

It will be interesting to see how providers and government entities prepare to address nationwide broadband concerns, and how that impacts businesses, communities and consumers.

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Joel Althoff, March 20th 2010 | Tags: broadband, Cloud Computing, Iowa, plan
Posted in News

cloudonomics at Cloud Connect

InformationWeek is gearing up for its co-hosted event, Cloud Connect, in two weeks in Santa Clara.

This week, they released some articles to preview sessions and tracks offered at Cloud Connect.

One of great interest to me is “cloudonomics”, or how to leverage cloud offerings in the best fiscal sense. As a cloud services provider, I want my prices to be fair and appealing while still having a little income left after paying for the utilities. I also want to help my clients determine when to use their existing servers for hosting, and when it makes more sense to utilize the cloud.

Joe Weinman’s piece in InformationWeek does a fair job assessing the pros and cons of using only self-hosted solutions, only cloud solutions, or a hybrid of the two.

To get a more detailed look at the numbers driving cloud pricing, check out another blog by Joe Weinman.

The article uses the example of several industries that see variable demand for their services at specific points during the year; retailers peaking in the Christmas season, tax preparers in February through April, and mortgage lenders being busier during late spring and summer. The article assesses that those industries have a typical baseline for data/hosting services that can be met with their current setup. During their peak periods, however, they could easily burst into the cloud for pay-as-you-use services.

In a specific and recent example, the State of Iowa offered its own “Cash for Clunkers” rebate program for consumers looking for new, energy efficient appliances. Consumers could call a hotline or access a website to secure a rebate code for use when shopping.

The website went live at 8:00 AM on a Monday morning, with enough rebate codes for about 9,000 people. ($2,775,150) At 4:00 PM, the State reported that the rebates had been exhausted.

During the rebate claim process, consumers experienced downtime on the website, broken links and much frustration. While the State of Iowa reportedly contracted out the rebate process and didn’t use their own servers to route traffic, a hybrid solution that burst into the cloud may have helped consumers move on with their day earlier than 4:00 PM.

I’m excited about helping clients use existing infrastructure to meet their needs, and even more excited to show them how cloud services can be a critical component in efficient data management.

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Joel Althoff, March 5th 2010 | Tags: cloud burst, cloudonomics
Posted in Cloud Computing

iSavior?

Apple’s iPad is finally here.

Amid the hype and speculation of its features and design are also the musings of educators seeking to enhance student learning experiences in their classrooms.

Educational soundboards everywhere are asking readers for ideas on how to utilize the new iPad in their classrooms.

More than finding ways to integrate technology into the classroom with the iPad, I’m interested to see how this will affect application development through the App Store, and, most importantly – whether it will drive change in textbook publishing.

Online textbooks are more readily available, and what better way to interact with your studies than to curl up with an iPad? You can use your fingers to zoom, scroll and flip pages, and there are no library fines for dog-eared pages.

What we need, though, is the ability to annotate your textbook and make choices about learning.

Is reading text enough for you? Or, do you need to doodle in the margins, underline and highlight words, or even jot thoughts down on a sticky note. Maybe you need to hear the text, or see a video, image, or animation? Perhaps you would learn best by interacting with an applet on your eReader and stacking up bricks to make a physics theorem really ‘happen’?

Going further, perhaps you think of a question while reading and want to leave it on the blog of an expert. Or, you have finished reading your assignment and want to take the end of chapter quiz to check your comprehension – with immediate feedback, of course. Maybe something you read catches your attention, so you record a sound file with your thoughts and tag it to a certain phrase from the text for pondering later. There are also links to further reading, videos, websites, blogs and assignments, all provided by your teacher. These textbook interactions are where education is headed.

In a study released last week by The Kaiser Family Foundation, groups of students were observed and surveyed in 1999, 2004 and 2009 about their media use. Theses students, ages 8-18, are spending 8-10 hours of their day interacting with media devices like phones, computers, mp3 players, and TVs. The study also reported that students with the highest number of hours media use reported the lowest grades, most discipline problems, and most feelings of boredom, sadness or fatigue.

I hear many educators discuss how technology integration – especially with devices like the iPad – will be the savior that our institutions need. Collaboration and access to resources will increase, as well as enthusiasm and participation. But if students are already spending all of their waking hours outside of school engrossed in some sort of media device, won’t teachers still be struggling to find new ways to captivate their audience, even if they do have a shiny new Apple?

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Leslie Althoff, February 1st 2010 | Tags: Apple, Education, iPad, technology integration
Posted in Education, Mobile

Securing Your Virtual Growth

Cleaning up after facebook

Babysitter Goes to Jail After She Uploads This HORRIBLE Baby Photo Online

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The Annoyance of Encrypted Searches

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Riptides

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Evaluating 1:1 Initiatives

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Smart Web Strategies for Small Business

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iSavior?

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