06Jun 2018 by nathan

Comcast Telephone Service Outage at Cyber Tech Cafe

CTC NEWS
At approximately 12:30pm ET, we were alerted of problems with inbound telephone calls.  We confirmed and found that outbound calls are also down. At approximately 12:40pm ET, we reached out to Comcast Business and were alerted of a known issue and given an expected resolution time of 3:55pm ET. Outbound calls are currently unavailable and inbound calls are being redirected to a message that the "Verizon Wireless customer you called is not available at this time".  Some of the inbound numbers seem to be working intermittently (specifically, 678.792.7785) but nothing consistently. In the interim, please use our website contact form (https://www.ctc.co/contact-us/) to submit new support requests or our web portal (https://www.ctc.co/clients/) to check the status of existing support requests. We apologize for the inconvenience. UPDATE - 3:58pm ET - At…
Read More
30Apr 2018 by nathan

April 2018 News and Updates

Monthly Newsletters
Executive Summary - There were significant updates from Microsoft and Adobe this month as long as a minor update to Java.  The most interesting updates that I've seen thus far address a vulnerability in the Windows Font Library (CVE-2018-1010, -1012, -1013, -1015, -1016).  These could be exploited remotely by an attacker via social engineering attack (phishing, etc.) to get access as the logged-on user and then chained together with a privilege escalation vulnerability (like CVE 2018-1034) to gain administrative or system level access. News Managed Firewall Services - We are considering offering a managed firewall solution and are looking for 3 to 5 clients that would be interested in helping us to pilot the program.  Test sites would need to have a minimum of 5 workstations and a maximum of 10…
Read More
14Feb 2018 by nathan

February 2018 News and Updates

Monthly Newsletters
Executive Summary - Spectre and Meltdown dominated the news during the last update cycle but seem to be winding down.  The good news here is that strides are being made to mitigate the problem, including a Meltdown and Spectre Detector tool in Microsoft Windows Analytics.  The bad news though is that a number of other critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft Outlook and Adobe Flash Player have stepped up to take the place of Spectre and Meltdown. News DC770 In The News - DEF CON North Atlanta, or DC770, made the front page of the Cartersville Daily Tribune on Wednesday, 6 February 2018.  DC770 is a DEF CON group that meets monthly at Jefferson's in Cartersville.  More information is available at the DC770 website and the article is available at the Daily…
Read More
06Feb 2018 by nathan

The Results Are In – Backblaze Hard Drive Statistics for 2017

Industry News
If you're looking to purchase a hard drive and want to know which ones have the best track record, it would be harder to find a better source of information than the annual report from Backblaze. Backblaze is a cloud storage provider that uses exclusively off-the-shelf commodity hard drives in it's datacenter. They maintained detailed statistics on how well various drives performed and, in 2013, they began analyzing that data and making it available to the public. Since then, the annual Backblaze Drive Stats report has been an authoratative source of data on which drives to buy (and which to avoid). Links - Backblaze - https://www.backblaze.com/ - Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2017 - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2017
Read More
16Jan 2018 by nathan

Possible inclement on Tuesday and Wednesday

Uncategorized
The National Weather Service and local weather stations are reporting the possibility of inclement weather starting this evening (Tuesday) and potentially lasting through Wednesday.  Additionally, temperatures are expected to remain well below to only slightly above freezing during this time.  Cartersville City as well as Bartow County (and several surrounding school systems) have already adjusted their schedules in preparation for the potential of snow and / or ice.  We will be watching the weather closely and will be posting updates and announcements to our Facebook page.
Read More
09Jan 2018 by nathan

January 2018 News and Updates

Monthly Newsletters
Updates News Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities - There's a LOT of buzz about the two of these.  I won't be going into any detail in this newsletter about either but we've been pushing information out to social media as we get it and will likely be posting an article here later. Mailing List - The response to (finally) getting the mailing list back online has been overwhelmingly positive (and appreciated).  We have a sign-up form on the right-column of our website if you'd like to sign up. MyIT - The newest version of the Network Ninja (NNv2.1) is finally operational and has been deployed to a number of MyIT clients already with stellar results.  We finished with the beta group last week and will be reaching out to all of…
Read More