Little Things Give You Away.

The last couple of days has been interesting and stressful at the same time. We got the License for the MailServer and Firewall as promised and surprisingly it came as promised on Monday. I was sort of surprised when i got the e-mail from Techsol with the License from Kerio in it. I was actually expecting the License on Tuesday. This just shows how competent Techsol is, and like i said they are really up to the task.

I quickly downloaded the new versions of both applications and ran the installation. I then added the Licenses to it and everything was up and running. I now had McAfee Antivirus running on my MailServer which would scan all incoming and outgoing emails. I decided that i will have a different Antivirus that will be running on the Firewall. This will make things really tight should in case one of the AV does not catch a particular virus, the other one will surely find it. I have not made up my mind yet on which of the AV's in the market this will be. Ill Google and then have a discussion with Techsol, and i think they will be able to advice me on that.

I finally got to know the reason why we were having so high response time. After so much work and thinking all these days, the answer came so easily. Because we had been running our Firewall without a license and no Antivirus on it all these while, a lot of doors had been open to attackers and spammers. Our IP address had been marked by these spammers. So any time we came online, they located us and attacked. From what i noticed, they used our MailServer for spamming. So anytime our Firewall was up, which gave them access to the MailServer, they attacked and started spamming through it. Now since our MailServer sends mails through the Firewall, they could not have access to the MailServer when the Firewall was down.

I noticed that while restarting the Firewall, only the users on our LAN are present on the Active Host tab. Then after a couple of minutes, i noticed a lot of unusual IP address that connected to the Firewall. Now clicking on these IP addresses to see there activities, i noticed they were all using our MailServer as there source and sending to other destinations. This was where our problems were coming from. It had been looking at me all these days and i never noticed it. What i did next was block everything on our MailServer's Block list, applied and restarted the Firewall. To my surprise, the response time was stable for over an hour, before there were some fluctuations.

I just learnt from this experience that just like in life, you should always look very well before you leap, also not to over look the little things in life. The little things are always the most important. Like Linkin Park said, "The little things give you away".

Ill keep you posted on my decision of Antivirus, and how i finally settled the matter of the high response time.

Description of Computer and Network threats.

This is a description of what the difference are between the various threats on a computer or network.

Adware
Adware (or spyware) is a small program that is designed to show advertisements (in various form and degrees of intrusiveness) on your computer. It often reports personal information back to its owners. As a result your sense of privacy can be violated.

Backdoor
A backdoor is a small malicious program that is used to gain access to a computer by bypassing the computer access security mechanisms. It gives the attacker almost unlimited rights. While it can be used to spy on a user, it is mainly used to install other malware on the system.

Heuristic
A technique designed to detect malware by empirical means but without having the specific data.

Malware
A generic name for all types of malicious programs: adware, backdoors, rogues, trojans, viruses and worms.

Rogue
A rogue program is a malicious program that is disguised, for instance, as trustworthy anti-spyware programs or registry cleaners. But these programs are only put on the market to scare you into buying these programs because they make exaggerated claims about the safety of your computer or, worse still, give erroneous scan results or put their own malware in your system.

Trojan
A trojan (or Trojan horse) is a small malicious program that pretends to have a particular function, but that only shows its real purpose after execution and that purpose is often destructive. Trojans cannot multiply themselves, which differentiates them from viruses and worms.

Virus
A virus is a small malicious program that multiplies and is capable to attach itself to other programs after being executed. It then causes an infection and causes various degrees of damage to your computer.

Worm
A worm is often characterized as a malicious application that will use a host machine to infect other machines. Therefore worms can create enormous damage on networks with multiple computers.

License on the way

Today is a good day. I did some major clean up in the house, and didn't leave for the office until about 3Pm, just one of those days that i have some time for myself and i have a 9ice time in the house listen to some good ole rap music and chill out.

Well i must say that i archived some things this week. I got my company to finally buy the license for the MailServer and Firewall. We paid for it on Thursday with a cheque of 400K. The actual value was 420, but yesterday i went to pay 20K in cash to them. We are getting the software from Techsol Professional Services Limited. They are one of the Kerio resellers in Nigeria. I was impressed with them actually. They were the only once that replied my email when i wrote to all the Kerio resellers in Nigeria, asking for a quote for a license. I got a returned mail from one of the supposed resellers and the other one didn't even border replying. Maybe they thought we were not serious. Well like i said, i am very impressed with Techsol, and i will continue doing business with them, because they have a great customer relation and are also resellers to HP, DELL, CISCO, Novell, APC, IBM, Microsoft and a host of others. I think that's why they take there business seriously unlike other Nigerian businesses. Techsol promised to send me the license latest on Tuesday. So by Tuesday, i can officially download the latest Kerio Firewall and MailServer application.

like i said, the week was OK and not so stressful. Just for the fact that i still had problem with unnecessarily high traffic on from my server. I still don't know where that is coming from, but i think its a malware or spyware problem. I found a very helpful website, that has a very good support for malware and spyware problem, and the guy that attended to me has been very helpful and all this for free. I think thats really interesting to give support for free. Should in case you have any malware or spyware problems, you can visit them here. If you want a direct link to the message i posted and how i was helped out you can visit it here. Well i used all the tools i was asked to use and my system was clean. I concluded that i had issues with my firewall, because when i stop it everything becomes normal on the network. As usual i will keep you updated.