In February, Russian antivirus provider Dr. Web was the first to report the Flashback Trojan affecting Mac computers. Fast-forward to March and reports estimated as many as 670,000 computers worldwide were infected.

A recent VentureBeat article described the attack:

“The Flashback Trojan enters computers through infected websites. When a user visits the infected website, they are prompted to download a browser plug-in, such as Flash, in order to see more content. When they download the “plug-in,” the malware accesses a hole in Apple’s customized version of Java and thereby gain access to the computer.”

This map, taken from Dr. Web, shows that over half of the infected computers were in the United States, with 274 reports from Cupertino, CA, where Apple is headquartered. Ninety-eight percent of the affected computers were running OS X. Apple has since patched this vulnerability. You can see if your computer is infected and, if necessary, get the Apple update here.

The Flashback Trojan is notable because it’s the first time in Apple’s history that an attack didn’t require some kind of phishing or social engineering scheme to work. The Flashback Trojan has actually been around since September 2011, though early versions required an admin password to launch.

While the Flashback Trojan targeted a Java vulnerability, a second variant of the Trojan, called Backdoor.OSX.SabPub.a (SabPub) or SX/Sabpab-A, attacks through Word docs that are attached to emails, which once downloaded and opened infects the computer. You can learn more about this variant here or here.

It’s likely that these are only the first of (probably many) future Mac Trojans. As Macs become increasingly more popular, so to will attacks of this sort. Here are some good computer and Internet techniques to keep you and your Mac workstations protected.

• Always install the latest software and security updates.
• Turn Java and/or Flash off in your Web browser.
• Stay vigilant when visiting new websites or receiving software download requests or emails from senders you don’t know.
• And lastly, perhaps it’s time to consider Mac anti-virus.

To be considered for the Inner City 100, a majority of a company’s operations must be located in an economically distressed urban area, which is defined as having 50% or higher unemployment, 50% or higher poverty and 50% or lower median income than the metropolitan statistical area. Businesses must also have at least 10 full-time employees, a five-year operating sales history and current revenues of at least $1 million.

We love being located on Music Row, a historic, culturally and business rich area in Nashville. More importantly, we couldn’t operate our business from the suburbs because a large part of being an IT service provider is computer and technical support. Our engineers have to be able to respond to customers’ emergencies within 30 minutes, and often that means traveling to their places of business. If we weren’t centrally located, we wouldn’t be able to provide the same quality of service. It’s that simple.

You can check out the complete list of winners here.

Unlike SOPA, CISPA isn’t primarily concerned with piracy; rather it’s designed to help government agencies and businesses share “cyber threat information.” The legislation, which is co-sponsored by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), and has the backing of Facebook, IBM, Verizon and AT&T, to name a few, is supposed to get rid of barriers that limit interaction in cases of security threats.

Just like SOPA, individuals and companies against CISPA are concerned less about the intention of the bill and more about the unintended consequences its vague and broad language may have on existing Internet rights. For example, in the phrase “cyber threat information” what does the word “threat” mean? Could a private email, Facebook or Twitter update, or an individual’s Web browsing history be considered a threat? If these types of user behaviors are targeted then the government could bypass laws that otherwise keep companies from sharing this information.

Additionally, companies and government agencies already can share information. One example a recent ArsTechnica article highlighted is that a private company is already free to notify the FBI if it detects an attempt to hack into its network.

The bill passed through the House of Representatives Thursday with a vote of 248-168. It now moves onto the Senate.

TheNextWeb succinctly described the initiative as the following, “The government is quickly trying to amend old security acts to reflect the new realities of technology, and if the consumers aren’t paying attention, they might find themselves under new scrutiny and surveillance that undermine their civil liberties.”

The American Civil Liberties Union took a stronger tack when condemning the bill, “This broad legislation would give the government, including military spy agencies, unprecedented powers to snoop through people’s personal information – medical records, private emails, financial information – all without a warrant, proper oversight or limits.”

The Obama Administration recently joined the anti-CISPA team, and so should you. To learn more, read the full text of the legislation here.

For over nine years, Bradley Extended Care has provided one-stop shopping for Middle Tennessee’s prescription medication needs, durable medical equipment and medical supplies within a 60-mile radius of Nashville. Bradley Extended Care is part of Bradley Health Services, which includes Everything Diabetic, a full service diabetic center; Bradley Drug Company, a prescription provider; and Bradley Health Care, a leading provider of durable medical equipment.

A Concept Technology client since August, Bradley Extended Care has one server and approximately 30 workstations. Six days a week, the company depends on its IT technology to process insurance claims and prescriptions. “Extended Care processes 12,000 prescriptions a month – and that doesn’t even factor in our sister businesses. If our system is down for even two hours, you can imagine how backed up we become,” said Pamela Cornachione, administrative assistant for Bradley Extended Care.

Bradley Extended Care (understandably) expects reliability from its IT provider. The company also requires experts in business IT, rather than residential IT, which means:

• Rapid response from IT engineers
• Engineers who are on-call nights and weekends
• The ability to get someone on the phone when needed
• Engineers with a good sense of proprietary software

To fill Bradley Extended Care’s needs, Concept Technology has set an hour-long conference call with the company once a week to discuss routine issues. For emergencies, engineers are available to help remotely, or can visit Bradley Extended Care’s West Nashville location the same day a problem arises, even after the business closes at 7 p.m.

Takeaway:

• For companies that process a lot of sensitive data, timeliness and security are key components of their IT strategies. Invest in an IT provider who can provide almost-immediate response and a depth of expertise.

Bradley Extended Care

5206 Charlotte Avenue

Nashville, TN 37209

615.383.9516

BradleyHealthServices.com

It could mean office/personnel practices like telecommuting, working virtually and Web conferencing. Or, reducing paper printouts by moving systems with physical outputs like data reports online.

Green IT could also refer to software tools and applications that your business could implement to save energy. Simply utilizing default hibernation settings on your operating system, for example, can save your business $50 per PC per year, according to IEEE Internet Computing (July/Aug. 2009).

The phrase could also point towards new technologies like virtualization software or cloud computing.

Virtualization lets multiple operating system environments (typically servers) run on a single hardware platform to reduce hardware requirements and overall energy costs. It’s been shown that virtualization can help to reduce the need for CPU by more than 15% on average.

Cloud services include software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and can significantly reduce your company’s overall investments in storage and server equipment.

However you define green IT, it’s important that you discuss the phrase and its multiple meanings, and keep abreast with new trends and tactics. By exploring and making conscious decisions about any of the above tactics, you can determine and implement a strategic green technology plan that saves your company money, energy, time and resources.

Have some important green tech trends that you think I missed? Leave your ideas in the comments below.

Side note: In researching this entry, I stumbled across this nifty little infographic by geekaphone that asked (and answered) the question: How green is your iPhone?

Who knew that if all the iPhones sold in 2010 were charged once, it would be equal to leaving a normal light bulb on for over 357 years. Check out the graphic on TheNextWeb and fill your random statistic quota for the day.

Let’s take a look at the first factor: new technology. The article described,

“Some of the most common shortcomings include handing emerging trends such as virtualization, process automation, and collaboration. But even core areas such as network security and updating equipment are also falling by the wayside.”

Sure, it’s hard to find staff for emerging technology positions, but this isn’t a new trend. It has always been more difficult to find individuals who truly understand and can anticipate the next big thing, but at least in Middle Tennessee, staffing for core areas remains the primary concern.

The Nashville Technology Council’s Technology Hiring Trends Report for the fourth quarter of 2011 found that there were over 1,000 open technology positions in Middle Tennessee. From the report,

“The most prevalent tech position title advertised in Middle Tennessee during the fourth quarter was Developer; with Analyst positions remaining in high demand. .Net remains at the top of the list in middle Tennessee, with JAVA and SQL requirements seeing significant increases both locally and statewide.”

We’re not talking cloud computing or virtualization technology, but core competencies that have the most weight on the industry and need to be addressed first.

A more telling statistic from the report could be that eight in 10 businesses were found to be negatively impacted because of this perceived IT skills gap. Which brings up the second largest contributing factor according to the study: lack of training.

How many businesses actually significantly invest in training their IT staffs? At Concept Technology, we offer continuing education reimbursement to our employees, but we’ve found our practice to be in the minority.

It’s easy for a company to blame the economy for the lack of training resources, but more likely many within IT feel as this commenter on the ZDNet article feels,

“It isn’t merely due to today’s economy. This was a problem with a lot of companies over a decade ago as well. Almost all of my training was paid for by myself, not my employer.”

To fix the industry trend, companies need to first look to patch holes within their own training policies.

Equitable Trust is 100% local. The firm is based in Nashville and has no other branches, which means that Equitable Trust’s 20+ employees are focused on providing valued wealth management, investment, trust and estate counsel and planning for the Nashville community, your friends, family members and co-workers.

Equitable Trust’s Nashville-centric and personal approach to its customers also extends to its business partners. It’s highly important for the firm to partner with other locally owned and operated businesses whenever possible.

Because of the changing demands of IT technology, Equitable Trust has always felt that it isn’t feasible for one IT staff member to keep abreast with changing technology, so the firm has always outsourced its IT needs, which include two servers and 21 workstations.

So when the firm was looking for a new IT vendor, they came to Concept Technology for help. Equitable Trust wanted to find a local partner who was aligned internally as they were and able to respond to issues with expertise and consistency.

“Consistency of service is key. When we have an IT issue, it’s extremely helpful to get someone to come out who is familiar with our IT configuration to address our needs,” said Darlinda Jones, senior vice president and trust officer for Equitable Trust. “Everyone at Concept Technology has been extremely helpful and effective in communicating issues with us in layman’s terms.”

In Concept Technology’s first 90 days of working with Equitable Trust, we’ve been able to update aging equipment, replace the firm’s firewall and add an additional internet source to build in redundancy and increase Equitable Trust’s efficiency.

We are looking forward to continuing to find ways to optimize Equitable Trust’s performance and build a long partnership with this great company.

Takeaway:

• Choose vendors who match the core values of your business. If your organization values local ties and close, family-type relationships, pick a vendor who’s independent, local and treats its customers with the same closeness and respect.

Equitable Trust

4400 Harding Pike, Suite 310
Nashville, TN  37205

615.460.9240

equitableco.com

In traditional setups, the capacity of your server hardware (CPU, memory, etc.) is often underutilized. You can assign your servers many roles, such as serving email and websites or file and print sharing, but for security or supportability reasons, you often need to keep these roles separate from one another. Traditionally this means buying more servers, which translates into more power, space, noise and cooling and maintenance costs. This cost is constant, regardless of how much capacity is actually being used, so there’s lots of room for waste. For example, a computer that serves websites may only be using 10% of its total capacity of CPU power, memory and disk space.

Virtualization allows you to tap into this unused hardware capacity and lower your hardware costs and power consumption. Who doesn’t like that proposition?

Virtualization can work in one of two ways.

1. You can install software within your computer’s operating system. Some popular virtualization software for desktop computers are VMware Fusion, which allows Mac users to simultaneously run OS X and Windows environments, and Microsoft’s “XP Mode,” a feature of the Windows 7 operating system that allows continued use of older software.
2. You can use a “hypervisor,” a bit of software with a very small footprint that is installed directly on the server hardware instead of a full operating system. Some popular hypervisor platforms for servers include VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V.

In both cases, software is used to imitate a sort of “hardware sandbox” in which the virtualized computing environment is run. This software translates requests from the virtual environment (or VM, virtual machine) to the physical one, relaying instructions from the encapsulated operating system to the physical CPU(s), memory, disks, and network adapters, using a set of parameters that determines which percentage of available resources to allocate to the virtual machines.

And the million-dollar question: Why isn’t everyone doing it?

In a word: Cost.

Most businesses have relatively limited IT budgets, and virtualization can come with a hidden price tag. Although Microsoft and VMware each offer a “free” version of their hypervisor, both require a paid license and a good bit of professional know-how to really take advantage of their full benefits. These technologies can also be difficult to integrate with existing backup processes, especially for small businesses that have invested in tape-based backup systems.

When power is lost, most small businesses with physical servers rely on signaling from UPS (uninterruptible power supply) systems to alert servers to initiate a graceful shutdown of the system. This becomes an issue with virtual servers because the hypervisor sits between the server operating systems and the hardware, but since the hypervisor is not a full-featured operating system in itself, it cannot process the shutdown signal from the UPS data cable. The work around for this problem—buying a network-attached UPS which signals software running within the VMs—also adds to the system’s cost.

The “thin” nature of hypervisors also presents unique problems in a small business environment. If one of your servers breaks down, you can no longer access a physical console.

Lastly, consolidating your servers through virtualization can be akin to putting all of your eggs in one basket. When a hardware failure occurs, well, you get the metaphor.