Hmmm that worm sucks

Well the new worm that was reported is a nasty one. ZoTob, what kind of name is that for a worm?!?! We had to do some serious patching at work because one of the other parts of the company got hit hard. We got patches in fast enough that we only had a couple of machines that got hit. The big moral of this story is make sure to update any Windows computers right away!!!

On another note, I wrote a script for Active Directory that will go out and scan all the computers (well we were scanning servers) and pull the OS version and Service Pack version on the computer. I need to figure out how to post files on my blog and then I might start putting some of these up there.

While I am on security, if you have wireless in your house or business, make sure it is secure. At the very least you need to turn on WEP. The 64 bit key is a start but if your systems will support a 128 bit key use it. Also, this is a hexadecimal number. What that means is that the letters A through F are considered numbers too. This allows "numbers" like deadbed or deadbead. You can also mix in numbers that look like letters to form other words, like badb0d if you use a zero for the o... or b1d using a 1 for the i to get it to look like bid.. how about b100d... this way you can make a key that is a bit easier to remember. You need to put the key in both the wireless router/access point, and the workstations that are attaching.

If you are in a more populous urban area (out in the country there just are not that many hackers - we have more of a life) you can also restrict the wireless access based on MAC address. This is a hardware address that is set on each network card. To find the MAC address on a Windows 2000 or XP computer, open up a command prompt and type ipconfig /all then look for the wireless adapter. There will be an entry for Physical Address. This is the address (another one of those hex numbers) that you need. Just put it in the wireless router in the MAC address list and then you will be able to get through and those that are not on the list won't.