ReadWriteEnterprise

If you are looking for a basic but solid course on how to teach your entire staff the essentials of good email security and how to avoid common phishing attacks, you might want to look at the education package offered by Wombat Security Technologies. The series can be accessed by any Web browser and has some solid pedagogy behind it.

The operating word here is basic: you aren't going to get any of the industry security certifications here. If you need to educate your mailroom and loading dock workers and even some aging executives about cyber security, then this is the program for you.

Crisis averted, so far. Last week's hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was stacked in favor of the Internet blacklist bill but we seem to have come out unscathed.

Public outcry against the bill rallied enough opposition to keep it from sailing through. Google testified against the bill, MasterCard voiced some objections, and tens of thousands of users lit up their representatives' phone lines thanks to Tumblr. But it's not over.

Last week the news blogs were filled with information about a second attack on a computer-based supervisory control system (SCADA) at the Curran-Gardner Township Public Water District based near Springfield Ill. The first was the Stuxnet malware targeted at an Iranian nuclear facility that was extensively covered. We wrote about how the Symantec anti-virus researchers decompiled the malware and demonstrated it to us here earlier this summer, and how variants on Stuxnet called Duqu were also found last month floating around European networks.

The surprising results of an IPv6 census conducted by the Measurement Factory and sponsored by Infoblox are that the lion's share of actual working IPv6 nodes are being hosted by Go Daddy. I know, any excuse to plug their spokesmodel Danica Patrick is shameless, but what is really going on here?

In their census, the number of active IPv6 addresses went from 1.27% of all overall IP addresses in the 2010 sample to 25.4% in the 2011 sample. And more than 80% of the v6 addresses are being hosted by Go Daddy.

It's no exaggeration to say that, sometimes, anonymity is a matter of life and death. Which is why it's important to know just how trivial it is to track down an "anonymous" blogger using their Google Analytics code.

Andy Baio, who runs the popular linkblog Waxy.org posted Wednesday about using simple tools like eWhois and Statsie to unmask several bloggers.

The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) is reporting a major vulnerability in BIND 9, with an apparent exploit in the wild. According to the announcement, servers running BIND 9 and performing recursive queries should upgrade immediately.

The actual exploit for this vulnerability is not yet reported. ISC says that it will cause a resolver to cache an invalid record, then crash when responding to queries that request that record.

You may not know the name J.D. Falk off the top of your head, but he worked tirelessly to protect your inbox from spam. Falk's untimely death came yesterday at the age of 37, but he fought cancer long enough to see his IETF RFC published.

Jesse David Falk was a founding member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), and was an active member of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

If you think there's a lot of demand for data storage now, you better brace yourself. According to projections pulled together by CenturyLink, we're in for a deluge of big data. By 2015, CenturyLink says that we'll see a four-fold increase in data being created and replicated.

This year, CenturyLink projects that 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created. By 2015, the projection is 7.9 zettabytes. That's the equivalent of 18 million times the digital assets stored by the Library of Congress today.

Fans of Paul Newman will recognize his character's famous line in Cool Hand Luke. Never in the history of electronic communications do we have so many choices and yet experience so many communication failures. This was made clear to me recently when I tried to get in touch with a "friend" of mine. I put the word in quotes because I mean it in Facebook terms: someone that I may or may not have met f2f, but want to stay in touch. Let's call this friend Bob for simplicity.

The days of speculating on Internet domain names have been with us almost as long as when one could first purchase a .COM back in the middle 1990s. But is there any way to really quantify things to figure out whether you are better off with a particular suffix? Given that the gTLD space (as these are called) is about to widen considerably, it is a good time to ask this question.

So let's say you can't afford the six-figure deal to buy your own gTLD, like .strom in my case. If you are going old school, is it better to go with a .COM, .NET, .ORG or one of the newer ones such as .MOBI or .TV? There is a service that can provide some insights.