There are a few ways to clear the cache on your computer.  The first and easiest is to simply reboot your computer.

If this isn’t an option for some reason there another way.  Click on the Start button, then click on Programs (or All Programs depending on how your computers is configured).  Then click on Accessories, and find the Command Prompt (it should look something like the picture below).

If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7 and you have the User Access Controls (UAC) enabled right click on Command Prompt and select the “Run as Administrator” option from the menu (see the image below).  After you do this the screen will go gay, and ask you to confirm that you want to do this. Click Yes or Confirm depending on which one you are presented with.

Now if you have Windows XP, or you have Windows Vista or Windows 7 without UAC enabled you won’t see the “Run as administrator” option.  In this case simply click on the Command Prompt item.

In either case at this point you should have a black box with a blinking cursor in it.  In the box type “ipconfig /flushdns” and press the enter or return key on your keyboard.  The window should look similar to the one shown below.

One you get to this point you can click on the Red X in the upper right hand corner of the Command Prompt window and the window will close.

At this point you can navigate back to the site that directed you here (you should be able to just close the window or tab) and click the refresh button in the web browser.  If the message has gone away and you are greeted with the normal login prompt then you are all done (don’t forget that if you are monitoring a different computer than the one you view the data on you’ll want to follow these instructions on that computer as well).  If that message is still there then you fall into one of a few categories.

1. You are a corporate customer and your company’s internal DNS Servers have our old IP Addresses cached.

2. You are at work, but a personal customer and your companies internal DNS Servers have our old IP Addresses cached.

3. Your Internet Service Provider has our old IP Addresses cached and they aren’t following the guidelines that we published for how long to keep our addresses in the cache.

If you fall into group #1 or #2 then talk with your systems administrator at your work and ask them to clear the DNS cache on your internal DNS Servers.

If you fall into group #3 then your Internet Service Provider will eventually clear the cache of our IP Addresses automatically.  We ll monitor which ISPs aren’t clearing the cache and contact them to ask that they do so.

If you’ve gotten to this point and you are still getting the warning about connecting to the old IP Address please feel free to click the link on that page to take you to the login screen.  These things will sort themselves out in the long run, we just want to give you the best experience on our websites possible.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact our Customer Support department through your normal support options and they will be happy to assist you as quickly as possible.

If any additional information about the RFP is needed the contact information is contained within the PDF linked to above.

The project is very time sensitive, and has a short date for proposals to be submitted.

Denny

We are releasing the RFP here so that vendors with solutions which we may not be familiar with can submit proposals.

Denny

Update 4/1/2010 8:10pm (Pacific Time) – The document has been updated.

These days people are way to used to posting information on the Internet thanks to sites like MySpace and Facebook.  The downside to this is that everyone knows way more information about everyone, including people that they don’t know personally.  It is amazingly easy to find out when people are out of town, or out at dinner, and where they are.

This is especially true of the younger kids on the Internet.  They may think nothing of posting way to much information on the Internet, information that you as a parent you don’t want them posting.

As these kids get older they may begin posting things on the Internet which could get them in some trouble at work, or even cost them their jobs.  There are several stories of people getting fired from their jobs by posting on Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Here’s a guy that was fired from a brand new job for posting something stupid on Twitter, or this girl who was fired for posting that her job was boring on Facebook.  There are countless others out there just like these.

The even bigger number who probably be the collage grads who don’t change there security status of their Facebook profiles before starting the job hunt.  All those fun college parties probably shouldn’t be public while looking for that first office job.  While the hiring manager assumes that you had a good time in school, the pictures of you doing a topless keg stand will not help you get the job.

Those of us that write and live our lives publicly are probably not the best examples to follow sometimes, but we have been doing this a while, and when we interview we are given a little more leeway on some of this stuff than someone who is new to the field (what ever field that may be).

While it may not seem fair that your future employer is going to search the net looking for you, they are.  Live isn’t fair, and the company which may hire you needs to make sure that they are getting the best worker for their money, and how you spend your after hours time is taken into account.

While changing your security settings on Facebook is a good plan, it isn’t going to fix the problem.  Google, Bing, etc will have all those photo’s and posts cached so while Facebook won’t let someone see the page, the cached versions will still be available via the search engines, not to mention the Internet Archive.

Denny

As of December 10, 2009 over 132,000 websites have been compromised and are serving up the malicious content.  The attack loads up an Iframe onto the websites via the data returned from the database which eventually leads the user (without there knowledge) to download data from 318x.com which then installats a rootkit-enabled variant of the Buzus backdoor trojan.  The full path of what happens can be found on the link above.

We’ve talked about the securing your website from SQL Injection attacks here, here and here, apparently there are tons of sites out there which haven’t been listening.

Denny

Customers at T-Mobile UK have been found to have been selling customer information to data brokers who work on behalf of other cellular phone companies in the UK.Obviously T-Mobile wasn’t aware that this was happening. However they needed to put more projections in place to ensure that this didn’t happen. Hopefully other companies will learn from this data breach and ensure that their employees aren’t selling off customer data.  I can’t stress enough that this wasn’t an external break-in.  This was employees selling customer data which they got from the customer management system.

I also hope that the prosecution of people responsible for this data theft and sale makes the next person think twice about doing this.  As the case moves forward I’ll be sure to post updates here.

Denny

Google has a translation of the article, and the original can be found here.

The power company is question claims that the blackout which hit 18 Brazilian states on Tuesday was not caused by the hackers.  However the timing out the attack and the outage is very suspicious.  This just goes to show that utilities needs to take even more care that other companies to secure there environments to ensure that the services which they provide remain online as peoples live depend on the power staying on.

Based on the results of testing against the sites as reported by Darkreading the standard SQL Injection attack may have been used in this case to attack the site and break in.  One would think that a company as large as a countries power company would be able to have developers which wouldn’t allow SQL Injection attacks.

Denny

According to the researchers who presented there findings recently at the Virus Bulletin Conference in Geneva it appears that the bulk of these bot nets are controlled, or at least configured using inside information.  It also appears that the bulk of these bot nets controllers are very hands on, but they did not specify if the bots are being controlled from within the network or outside the network.

One very important piece of information which wasn’t included in this article which I think should have been, is the number of companies networks which they looked at.  If they looked at 5 companies to come up with these numbers then these are just scare tactics.  If they looked at 10,000 companies networks and 100% of them had infections, that’s a little more impressive; and way more meaning full.

Denny