-----Original Message----- From: information_technology-admin@private [mailto:information_technology-admin@private] On Behalf Of InfraGard Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2003 8:47 AM To: Information Technology Subject: [Information_technology] Daily News 11/26/03 November 25, Government Computer News - Los Angeles suburb dials up VOIP. The city of Rancho Palos Verdes, CA, has adopted a voice over IP (VOIP) system. The city has installed the VOIP architecture for voice, video and integrated data (AVVID). Dennis McLean, the city's director of finance and information technology, and his team deployed the AVVID system for 95 phones about a year ago. "The beauty of this system is that the phone is attached to the city's network," McLean said. To add a new user to the system, McLean and his team plug a handset into a wall jack. The phone is then configured like a PC linked to the city's network, which runs over Category 6 cabling. The use of city staff to make routine changes to the system is saving the city between $5,000 and $10,000 a year, he said. McLean said that the city next plans to add teleconferencing features to the system and create an emergency wireless network. The VOIP system cost about $85,000, with annual support costs amounting to about $18,000, McLean said. Source: http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/24292-1.html November 24, Reuters - Solar hurricane hits earth in repeat of October storm. Magnetic solar hurricanes hit Earth last weekend, confusing satellites and causing aurora borealis displays as far south as Florida, Finnish meteorologists said last week. "The storm has already begun, and it grew incredibly strong [Sunday, November, 23]," said Heikki Nevanlinna, research manager at the Finnish Meteorological Institute said. Magnetic solar storms, caused by a burst of charged particles from the sun hitting the Earth's magnetic field, caused technical glitches around the world at the end of October in some of the most intense storms ever detected. The current storm stems from the same giant sunspots that caused last month's solar flares, but is clearly weaker than the October storm, Nevanlinna said. Nevertheless, Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receivers were experiencing disturbances, as have mobile phone networks, Nevanlinna said. "(GPS receivers) may give bad coordinates or it may take them an extremely long time to get data," he said. Source: http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22917/story.htm November 24, Associated Press - Government evaluates simulated terrorist attacks. Experts inside government and the Institute for Security Technology Studies at Dartmouth College are still formally evaluating results of a simulated terrorist attack carried out by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over five days in October. The "Livewire" exercise simulated physical and computer attacks on banks, power companies and the oil and gas industry, among others. "There were some gaps," said Amit Yoran, the chief of the agency's National Cyber-Security Division. "The information flow between various sectors was not as smooth as we would perhaps have liked." Yoran said the mock attacks during the exercise tried to broadly disrupt services and communications across major industrial sectors, enough to make consumers to lose economic confidence. It modeled bombings at communications facilities outside Washington and cyberattacks aimed at companies and other networks. Yoran said the exercise affirmed that troublesome interdependencies exist throughout the nation's most important systems. A broad power outage could also bring down key telephone or computer networks, disrupting repair efforts. Source: http://securityfocus.com/news/7518 Current Alert Levels AlertCon: 1 out of 4 https://gtoc.iss.net Security Focus ThreatCon: 1 out of 4 http://analyzer.securityfocus.com/ Current Virus and Port Attacks Virus: #1 Virus in the United States: WORM_LOVGATE.G Source: http://wtc.trendmicro.com/wtc/wmap.html, Trend World Micro Virus Tracking Center [Infected Computers, North America, Past 24 hours, #1 in United States] Top 10 Target Ports 135 (epmap), 1434 (ms?sql?m), 137 (netbios?ns), 25 (smtp), 445 (microsoft?ds), 80 (www), 53 (domain), 57 (priv?term), 139 (netbios?ssn), 161 (snmp) Source: http://isc.incidents.org/top10.html; Internet Storm Center _______________________________________________ Information_technology mailing list Information_technology@listserv
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