Friday, February 18, 2005

Vigilante Group Attacks Cyber-criminals

According to reports, an Internet vigilante group known as the 419 Flash Mob, launched a two-day bandwidth attack last Wednesday against spammers attempting to defraud people by providing hosting services for fake bank sites.

The criminals, reports say, run the "419 scam," which sends out emails, faxes and letters, asking individuals for help in recovering money from banks in exchange for a percentage. These criminals have reportedly graduated to hosting fake bank sites, hoping to lure victims to deposit money in their illegitimate accounts.

The 419 Flash Mob reportedly launched a distributed denial of service attack against the spammers' bandwidth and have reported them to their Web host and other legal authorities.

Reports said the sites attacked had the names Abbey Trust & Offshore Bank, First Global Trust, Crystal Bonds & Securities, Allied Trust Bank UK, KASH BANK CORPORATION and Liberty Stronghold Securities and Finance.

The 419 Flash Mob is supported by Artists Against 419 (aa419.org).

Thursday, Feb 17, 2005

February 2005 - Top 25 Web Host Awards

Each month HostIndex.com searches out the best web hosting companies that are listed in our directory! Our criteria includes feedback from our users, website navigation, features and pricing, financial stability, along with customer support. The host with the highest number of votes is not necessarily the top host. Instead HostIndex.com takes the time to examine each hosting company to obtain a more rounded picture.

Of the thousands of hosting companies worldwide, the companies listed at the HostIndex.com Top 25 represent the TOP 1% of HOSTING COMPANIES from around the world! A mere 25 companies out of the 8,000 web hosts in our directory make the cut. These web hosts have demonstrated considerable leadership and superior delivery of their hosting services. We recommend you include them in your consideration set of potential web hosts for your online presence.

Note: This ranking was prepared as of February 1st, 2005 and is updated on a monthly basis. The next Top 25 ranking will be released on March 1st, 2005. Any user feedback received about a web hosting company between February1st and February 28th will be reflected as of our March rankings.

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Wednesday, Feb 16, 2005

Verizon Communications Acquires MCI

Verizon Communications (verizon.com) announced on Monday that it has acquired MCI (mci.com) for $4.8 billion in equity and $488 million in cash, confirming reports that emerged late last Friday.

MCI will also pay a special dividend, Verizon said, bringing the value of the deal to $6.7 billion. Verizon will assume MCI's debt, estimated at $4 billion.

Verizon said the acquisition enhances its ability to serve large business and government customers with a complete range of services, and ensures that MCI's Internet backbone network will have the financial strength to be maintained and improved.

The acquisition comes just a few weeks after SBC acquired AT&T. Like AT&T, MCI is an attractive asset because of its extensive national infrastructure and strong corporate customer base.

MCI also has strong Web hosting capabilities, bolstered by a strong enterprise hosting base built through its acquisition of Digex. According to research and analysis firm Netcraft (netcraft.com), MCI is the world's ninth largest host, home to 878,000 hostnames. MCI's customer base, Netcraft says, has been growing at a rapid pace, adding 233,000 hostnames in the last year, with 61,000 coming in the last two months alone. MCI's high-profile hosting clients include The Weather Channel and Bloomberg.

Verizon has an extremely small Web hosting presence with just 10,000 hostnames, according to Netcraft.

The Verizon and MCI boards have approved the agreement and both companies expect to attain regulatory approval within the year.

Just last year MCI emerged from the largest bankruptcy in corporate history amid a massive accounting scandal. Former CEO Bernie Ebbers is currently facing fraud charges.

Tuesday, Feb 15, 2005

Anti-Spyware Activist Web Site Attacked

According to a report by research and analysis firm Netcraft (netcraft.com), the Web site of anti-spyware activist Ben Edelman (benedelman.org) suffered an extended period of downtime earlier this week due to a distributed denial of service attack.

Edelman said on his Web site, which is back online, that the site was down for much of Monday and Tuesday, as well as several hours last week. According to Edelman, his host Globat (globat.com) informed him that the site was the victim of a large-scale DDoS attack, the like of which the company had never seen, bringing traffic of more than 600MB per second.

In a posting Edelman said his site was brought back online with the help of the Internet Software Consortium (isc.org), which now provides Web hosting for benedelman.org.

Edelman's Web site documents the methods used to install adware and spyware programs. The information has reportedly been used in legal cases against adware and spyware advertisers.

Monday, Feb 14, 2005

Hosting ZOOM deploys ClamAV email anti-virus

Hosting ZOOM, a full-service provider of web hosting services, has upgraded security on its servers by installing ClamAV anti-virus software.

Every web hosting account now comes with complete spam and virus protection absolutely free.

“Recent market studies along with customer surveys clearly demonstrate that hosting customers rank email viruses as one of their major concerns,“ according to Kiet Duong, President of Hosting ZOOM. “With the addition of our free email anti-virus services, our customers will be assured that their systems will be free of viruses and other malicious programs that can arrive via email.”

The new measures safeguard hardware and software by eliminating the opportunity for end users to receive and deploy harmful viruses via email. They especially protect non-technical users from downloading attachments with viruses in them

Clam AntiVirus is an anti-virus toolkit for UNIX. The main purpose of this software is the integration with mail servers and attachment scanning. The package provides a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner, and a tool for automatic updating via Internet.

To view more details of free spam filtering and virus protection on Hosting ZOOM, visit www.hostingzoom.com