Here’s what you should have in place to maximize protection against zero day attacks and how to respond if you do fall victim.

The words “zero day” strike fear into the hearts of most IT security professionals. The phrase refers to the first day that a new malware (such as a virus or worm) or intrusion vulnerability makes its appearance. Since traditional antivirus software works by identifying and protecting against known threats, it offers no protection against an attack that has never been seen before.

What can you do to keep your systems safe from a brand-new threat? While there is no way to guarantee your company will never suffer a zero-day attack, there are steps you can take in advance to cut that risk to a minimum. And if it does happen, there are ways to minimize the damage.

Before zero day

Keep security up to date. “Keeping your network up to date and following security best practices could prevent exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability,” says Russell Smoak, director of technical support, Cisco Systems, Inc. And of course, if a virus or threat gets through because your security software wasn’t up to date, the effect can be just as bad as a zero day attack.

Christian Chase, CFO and managing partner of Everything Tradeshows learned this the hard way when he deliberately turned off updates because they were causing errors in some computers. “It was silly of me,” he says. “All of a sudden, things started going down and down and down. Our accounting system was corrupt. As it turned out, we had 14 viruses.” Fortunately, Everything Tradeshows had backups in place, so the company only lost three days of data.

Now, Chase is something of a poster boy for security best practices. In addition to having a firewall and keeping up to date on all definitions and patches, the company has its IT provider do a one-hour review each month to make sure there are no known vulnerabilities. It also maintains a blacklist of websites where users are not allowed to browse. “I’ve learned there’s always a way in,” he says. “So you have to arm yourself with the best fort available.”

Keep an eye on your systems.  Your best chance of spotting a zero-day attack early is to make sure your system activity is constantly monitored, either by your own staff or an IT outsourcer. “A traffic spike, or a sudden increase in unusual error messages could all be signals of a zero-day attack,” notes Joe Dallatore, senior manager in technical support at Cisco.

Keep an eye on security news. Security providers and the tech media always put the word out as fast as they can when a zero day event is detected. So staying on top of this information can help you stop a new threat before it does you any harm. Make sure that either you or your IT provider is monitoring security threat information and is ready to respond if an application you depend on is known to have new security issues.

Make sure you have host intrusion protection. HIPS or host intrusion protection software can actually stop a zero-day attack because it does not rely on lists of definitions or signatures to block viruses. Instead, it identifies a threat by analyzing its behavior in your system, and uses rules-based monitoring to prevent such intruders from making unwanted changes.

“Host intrusion prevention used to be very costly, but now it’s included in many of the large providers’ security suites,” says Adam Hils, a primary research analyst focusing on the small and mid-sized business market at Gartner. He recommends reviewing security contracts with a view to making sure you have this protection. “And it should be turned on as the default setting,” he says. If HIPS is turned off as the default, that may indicate the company is aware of compatibility issues that you need to know about, too.

On zero day

Execute your plan. Well in advance of zero day, you and your IT team will have created a response plan for security attacks. Once you suspect an attack is underway, it’s time to put your plan into action.

The specifics of your plan will depend on your company’s “CIA” priorities — meaning whether confidentiality, integrity, or availability is most important for your data. “If confidentiality is paramount, disconnecting from the Internet might be your first step,” Dallatore says. “If availability is most important, it might not be.”

If the plan calls for disconnecting from the Internet, and perhaps cutting off your ecommerce, some of your company’s executives are likely to object, and these issues must be addressed ahead of time, Smoak adds. “The group executing the plan must have the authority to take these measures.”

Contact your security provider. Letting your IT outsourcer and/or security software company know what’s going on should be an early step in any plan. Their representatives will be able to tell you whether what you have on your hands is a known threat or a genuine zero day event.

In order to find out, however, they will need detailed information about what’s been happening in your systems. Thus, it’s important to have good log management in place, so that they can review your log information quickly and easily. (For more on log management, see previous article.)

“Once you communicate that you’re under attack, the security provider will either say, ‘Yes, we know about that, here’s a patch,’ or ‘No, we’ve never heard of that before,’” Hils says. If it’s the latter, sharing your information may help save others from suffering through zero day.

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At the moment, AMD GPG (former ATI Technologies) could be considered as the only division in AMD that is firing on all cylinders. The 7-series chipsets, the mobile Puma platform, XGP and the Radeon 4800 series are all fantastic products. The CPU division had less luck with its recent products, especially if you think about the underestimated competitive threat from Intel, the catastrophic Barcelona B2 revision and a 45 nm architecture that is about to miss its initial launch target. But things are changing and the company may be able to compete with Intel sooner than some may think.

Industry sources told us that AMD is making progress on several fronts that are believed to make the company more nimble and effective against its blue rival. On the corporate side, we are hearing chatter about internal restructuring currently taking place so that launches of processors correspond to launches of chipsets and graphics processors. While the launch of the Spider platform launch got buried under the TLB disaster, AMD thinks it now has a better understanding of the needs of individual markets - at least that is what our sources told us.

On the product side, AMD wants to regain influence in the enthusiast market with affordable, but highly overclockable processors - such as the upcoming Phenom 9950. AMD is apparently shooting for a 12,000 CPU score in 3DMark Vantage. However, we were not able to get any specifics about the overclock required to hit this point. Since current Phenoms are checking in at less than 10,000 scores, we would expect a 20% higher clock rate.

However, looking at AMD’s more and more marketed “balanced platform” approach and the continuing advance of GPUs in everyday computing should put AMD into a much improved market position soon.

AMD’s team in Austin managed to use two R700 dual-GPU graphic cards (four RV770 chips) to get a score of X12515. This was done with four GPUs, while Nvidia uses three GTX280 boards to achieve a similar score. The R700 boards were clocked at 778 MHz, while the GDDR5 memory was clocked at 980 MHz QDR (that’s 3920 “MHz”, or just 3.92 GigaTransfers/sec), we were told. This brought the total on-board video bandwidth to an impressive 250.8 GB/s.

R700 boards are planned for introduction within the next seven weeks and if we trust our sources, then we should expect the Phenom 9950 in a similar timeframe. The 790GX chipset will ship with two new Southbridge chips - the SB700 and SB750 will also arrive in time for these new products. So, we are taking note: AMD will have an overclockable graphics card, an overclockable processor and an overclocker-friendly chipset.

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Apple’s latest iPhone 3G will be more profitable than any other product in its line-up, which includes iPods, Macs, and iTunes. Despite a price tag that is half of the previous iPhone, the numbers of markets targeted around the world are a major contribution to the company’s success.

Reducing the component cost helps the new iPhone to exceed the 50 percent level achieved by Apple’s most popular media players, according to a preliminary study by research firm iSuppli Corp. “Apple’s iPod and iPhone products typically are priced about 50 percent more than their (materials and manufacturing) costs,” iSuppli said. “With the new iPhone sold at a price of $199 and the estimated subsidy of $300, Apple will achieve an even higher margin. ISupply estimates manufacturing costs for Apple’s new high-speed iPhone totaled $173, compared with $265 for the original iPhone, released one year ago for about $500 with no subsidy. After what it called “component price reductions,” the initial iPhone carried a cost of $226.

Wireless phone carriers are expected pay a subsidy of about $300 to Apple for each of the new iPhones, iSupply said. Note that this is another important factor which would contribute to Apple’s Profits. The cost estimates don’t include software development, packaging, shipping or included accessories like headphones. The phone will go on sale in 21 other countries on July 11, at varying prices, all subsidized by carriers.

On the other hand, The BlackBerry Bold 9000, the latest addition to Research In Motion Ltd.’s (RIM) BlackBerry smartphone arsenal and its first with 3G support, won’t hit the streets until the next couple of months, opening the door for the Apple iPhone to get its 3G device into users’ hands first. According to a Wall Street Journal report, phones based on the Android software won’t hit the market until roughly the fourth quarter, mostly due to Google’s 30 plus partners having trouble hitting deadlines. Google had initially projected that Android-based devices would hit the market around the second quarter. The Android delays put another arrow in the 3G iPhone’s quiver, since its Apple will have its 3G device in the hands of the smart phone hungry public before Android-based devices reach the market.

Beginning as a thin veneer for older software code, it has become an obese monolith built on an ancient frame. Adding features, plugging security holes, fixing bugs, fixing the fixes that never worked properly, all while maintaining compatibility with older software and hardware — is there anything Windows doesn’t try to do?

Painfully visible are the inherent design deficiencies of a foundation that was never intended to support such weight. Windows seems to move an inch for every time that Mac OS X or Linux laps it.

The best solution to the multiple woes of Windows is starting over. Completely. Now.

Vista is the equivalent, at a minimum, of Windows version 12 — preceded by 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, NT, 95, NT 4.0, 98, 2000, ME, XP. After six years of development, the longest interval between versions in the previous 22-year history of Windows, and long enough to permit Apple to bring out three new versions of Mac OS X, Vista was introduced to consumers in January 2007.

When I.T. professionals and consumers got a look at Vista, they all had this same question for Microsoft: That’s it?

Just after Vista’s birth, Kevin Kutz, a manager at Microsoft, issued a cranky statement in February 2007, “In Response to Speculation on Next Version of Windows,” announcing that the company could not say anything about post-Vista Windows “other than that we’re working on it.”

The internal code name for the next version is “Windows 7.” The “7” refers to nothing in particular, a company spokeswoman says. This version is supposed to arrive in or around early 2010.

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From mainframes to minicomputers and then PCs, each new computing generation has displaced its predecessor by reaching a broader audience and costing far less. And each time, the dominant company in one generation loses control in the next.

That’s why the PC industry’s commanding chip maker, Intel, might do well to be alarmed by the computer chips being designed by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cellphones. An engineer at Qualcomm’s gleaming corporate campus here demonstrated a palm-sized circuit board capable of displaying high-definition video. What was striking about the demonstration was not the quality of the video images, which is now commonplace. Rather it was that the microprocessor chip, called Snapdragon, drives the display with less than half the power of a similar chip recently introduced by Intel. Qualcomm designers say it will also cost less.

As the PC shrinks in size, it is on a collision course with the multifunction cellphone. Many expect the resulting impact to transform both devices and all the companies that make them. The new smartphones, always-on portable Internet devices that are part cellphone, part computer, change the rules of the game in computing because computing speed — at which Intel excelled — is no longer the most important factor. For a cellphone relying on a small battery, how efficiently a chip uses power becomes more important.

The new mobile world represents a special challenge for Intel, which until four years ago ignored the issue of increasing power consumption in its flagship X86 chips, which have been the PC industry standard for almost three decades.

Other chip makers have not ignored power consumption. Just this month at Computex, a huge computer and consumer electronics trade show held each year in Taiwan, the Silicon Valley graphics chip maker Nvidia demonstrated a small mobile computer that worked five times as long on a battery as a similar portable machine powered by Intel’s most recent low-power chip.

Qualcomm and Nvidia share a chip design licensed from a relatively tiny British chip firm, ARM Holdings. ARM has had a big impact on the communications world. Its processors sell for substantially less than Intel’s more powerful X86 chips and are far more numerous: they are standard for the cellphone industry. Cellphones outsell PCs by about five to one.

“This battle is being fought in ARM’s backyard, not Intel’s,” said Michael Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia’s mobile group.

In addition to Qualcomm and Nvidia, there are more than 200 licensees of the ARM processor design, including major chip makers like Marvell and Texas Instruments. Together, they supply the more than 1.1 billion cellphones, many of which use multiple ARM chips. The chips are also used in a growing array of special purpose consumer electronics like G.P.S. navigators and set-top TV boxes.

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After weeks of speculation, Blizzard has officially announced Diablo III at its World Wide Invitational event in Paris.

Said to feature more quests than ever, the anticipated sequel will stick to its roots by being “first and foremost a cooperative game.”

The game will also include several control improvements, including full zoom capability and a hotbar to easily access skills. Players will be able to quickswap between skills using the mouse wheel or tab key.

Armor will now be class-specific, designed to provide each character a unique look. Classes themselves are more diverse, as it was noted that there will be female versions of both the Barbarian and Witch Doctor.

In a demo of the Barbarian class, the company noted that less of an emphasis will be placed on potions for health. Instead, red orb-like items will drop that immediately recover health once the player picks them up.

Environmental destruction was also shown off, with a character at one point busting through a solid wall. The environment can also be used to kill enemies, as in the case of objects that fell from a wall, killing a group of monsters.

Enemies were shown to be larger in scale than in past games, with giant evil trees and a massive demon called a Siegebreaker.

For more information, pictures and videos visit Blizzard.
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Motorola has quietly started shipping three new Linux-based “PDA” phones. Available now in China, and also approved by the FCC for use in the U.S., the MotoMing a1600 and a1800 are higher-end versions of the popular a1200, while the a810 adds a lower-end Ming model.

The new Ming phones succeed Motorola’s highly popular Ming a1200 (pictured at right), which sold a million units in Q2 2006 alone, according to a Canalys study. Although officially distributed only in Asian markets, unlocked a1200s have been a staple on eBay with U.S. buyers for years, due to their richer smartphone feature package than Mot offers in its Linux phones for the U.S. market.

The new MotoMing a1600 and a1800 both support GSM/GPRS phone service (850/900/1800/1900MHz), with EDGE class 10/12 and GPRS class 10. There is no 3G support, however, nor is there built-in WiFi. The a1800 adds two extra SIM slots that offer dual-mode functionality for flipping between GSM and CDMA networks. As with the Ming a1200, the two phones are targeted primarily at China, but are also said to be aimed at South East Asia, India, and EMEA.

The a1600/a1800 clamshell design measures 3.8 x 2.0 x 0.7 inches and weighs a little over four ounces, according to Motorola. The 2.4-inch display offers 240 x 320 resolution, with 262K colors, and includes handwriting optical character recognition (OCR), along with a business card reader. The 3-megapixel camera includes an 8x digital zoom mode.

To support the AGPS/GPS component, Motorola includes a “turn by turn navigation application,” as well as one or two city maps that can be loaded from a CD via a computer and the phone’s built-in micro-USB port. The Java ME-based phones are said to be compliant with CLDC (connected limited device configuration) and MIDP (mobile information device profile).

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