Archive for December 6, 2011

| December 6, 2011
One comment

How to Use the Last 5 Minutes of Your Work Day

How to Use the Last Five Minutes of Your Work DayPeter Bregman a strategic advisor to CEOs and their leadership teams wrote in the Harvard Business Review that most of us get smarter as we get older. But somehow, despite that, we often make the same mistakes ay home and work. On the flip side, but no less comforting, we often do many things right and then fail to repeat them. He believes it’s because we rarely take the time to pause, breathe, and think about what’s working and what’s not.

think about what's working and what's notMr. Breman says that people should look at their past behavior, figure out what worked, and repeat it while admitting honestly what didn’t and change it. He theorizes that if a person can do that well, everything else takes care of itself. That’s how people become life-long learners.

Five minutes to become a life-long learner

The article says it only takes about five minutes to become a life-long learner. Life-long learners take a brief pause at the end of the day to consider what worked and what didn’t.

before leaving the officeMr. Bregman proposes that every day, before leaving the office, save a few minutes to think about what just happened. Look at your calendar and compare what actually happened, the meetings you attended, the work you got done, the conversations you had, the people with whom you interacted, even the breaks you took, with your plan for what you wanted to have happened. Then ask yourself three sets of questions:

  • How did the day go? What success did I experience? What challenges did I endure?
  • What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do — differently or the same — tomorrow?
  • Who did I interact with? Anyone, I need to update? Thank? Ask a question? Share feedback?

Maintaining and growing relationships

This last set of questions is invaluable in terms of maintaining and growing relationships. It takes just a few short minutes to shoot off an email — or three — to share your appreciation for a kindness someone extended, to ask someone a question, or to keep someone in the loop on a project.

If we don’t pause to think about it, we are apt to overlook these kinds of communications. And we often do. But in a world where we depend on others to achieve anything in life, they are essential.

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| December 1, 2011
2 comments

Blackhole Malware

Blackhole Malware Dark Reading reports that attackers are increasingly using the Blackhole exploit kit in phishing campaigns. The latest phishing scam poses as an email notification from an HP (HPQ) OfficeJet Printer that has sent around 36,000 per minute resulting in nearly 8 million emails thus far and uses 2,000 domains to serve up the malware.

BotnetResearchers at AppRiver told Dark Reading the trend demonstrates how Blackhole is following the pattern of popular malware kits Zeus and SpyEye. Blackhole traditionally has been used to infect legitimate websites for drive-by infection purposes. “This attack is unique because Blackhole added an email vector to its format and is flooding the Internet with similar methods used by Zeus, SpyEye, and others, essentially moving it into prime time,” says Fred Touchette, senior security analyst for AppRiver.

Blackhole, which was previously marketed as a high-end crimeware tool, costing $1,500 for a one-year license, in May was unleashed for free in some underground forums. That has propelled more use of the toolkit according to the AppRiver blog.

Appriver logoMr. Touchette said that attackers using Blackhole have changed tactics, “This is the first that I have personally noticed that leads email recipients to Blackhole websites. Before that, people using the Blackhole Kit relied on techniques such as SEO poisoning to lead victims to their sites,” he says.

The OfficeJet email campaign, like other Blackhole attacks, is trolling for victims’ online banking credentials according to Dark Reading. It works a lot like Zeus and others, using browser vulnerabilities on victims’ machines and creating a backdoor for downloading and installing the Trojans. AppRiver’s Touchette says Blackhole appears to favor Sun Oracle (ORCL) Java (I wrote about Java holes here) and Adobe (ADBE) bugs (I wrote about Adobe bugs here).

HP“This most recent campaign is still trickling in, but will soon stall as most of its domains have been picked up and blacklisted by security professionals … we were seeing malicious emails related to this campaign coming in at a rate of around 36,000 per minute,” Mr. Touchette says.

Recent botnet takedowns have spurred an increase in malware attacks recently as botnet operators try to rebuild, AppRiver’s Touchette told Dark Reading.

rb-

Yeap- We are still seeing these trickling in and still have users reporting they can’t access their OfficeJet.

Related articles
  • Positive Trend in Malware: Rootkit Developers Killing Each Other’s Code (pcworld.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
  Recent Entries »