Today, our hosting provider IXWebhosting took one in the shorts in the form of a massive server outage. Email, web, and database servers were unavailable for nearly 5 hours for an undisclosed reason. How lovely.
We’ve had little issues with our hosting provider over the last few years, so I guess it was all a matter of time. I was impressed with their blog/twitter updates keeping customers apprised of the situation, though.
I had a cool post about the recent “here you have” virus that is ripping through Windows user’s machines, but it was lost during the outage so I’ll just paraphrase.
At my place of employment we have a monthly Java Users Group meeting to discuss industry topics affecting development within our organization, and today the topic was malware/virus intrusion. The meeting started at 1:30pm, and shortly before I hopped in the elevator I got this rather suspicious looking email. Since I don’t have an extra chromosome or chase cars, I certainly didn’t click on it. Within seconds other employees popped their heads our of their cubes stating they received a similar email. Sounded like a good old fashion email worm found its way in, just moments before I sat in on a discussion covering the very topic of concern. Irony at its finest.
During the discussion the presenter stepped through the process of a few well known bot-net attacks and how they took over a user’s Windows machine. I kept my tongue bit until he was finished, and then had my hand in the air ready to ask a question.. or should I say, begin pointing out the obvious that Linux would be impervious to this attack. To my surprise another attendee who got the mic first beat me to the punch. Between the two of us we quickly had the guy circling around typical Windows fanboi jargon, shooting him down at every twirl. He had that look in his eye that said, “crap, Linux folk, Ballmer save me!”
It was then that I realized something.. something that, now that I look back over the years, I’ve known all along but was just too blind to see. Those in the IT Security business LOVE Windows as Microsoft is practically guaranteeing their job security! After the quick spread and proliferation of this latest worm, it would seem the market for Windows security staff solidified a bit more.
