ETC Blog, The Tech Resource
WordPress 5.8 is released
The folks at Wordfence have a good video about the new Wordpress revision 5.8. It's got some new image type support along with a removal of support for internet Explorer. There's other feature updates as well. Fully managed clients will be getting upgraded after a...
Exciting Times Are Ahead for ETC Maryland
ETC Maryland will soon be a DBA of Emmanuel Technology Consulting. As the business has grown the days of sole proprietorship are done. This is going to allow ETC Maryland to grow further and serve clients with a wider selection of services. It will also allow us to...
REvil Ransomware Strikes at MSP’s to Encrypt Thousands of Companies
This is now the SECOND time their VSA product has been compromised. How Kaysea still exists at this point....I have no idea. https://helpdesk.kaseya.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360000333152 (previous compromise) https://helpdesk.kaseya.com/hc/en-gb/articles/4403440684689 ...
10 Things Your Host Needs to Have..Wordfence
ETC Maryland has services for those who want fully managed hosting to if you want to do nearly everything yourself. Let's go through the points Wordfence raises: Backups. We do two backups per day. One is at noon and is on another server in the datacenter. The...
Web Server Upgrades Completed..Along With A Side Benefit
I just completed a server replacement. Here's the vitals on the two machines: Old Web1: Dual Xeon 6 core L5640 12 cores w/HT @ 2,2ghz for a total of 24 threads cpu release date 2010 64 gigs ram dual ssd's in RAID1. 50 megabit connection Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Virtualmin...
Web Services Downtime Alert
You can also see there service alerts on the Twitter page. This upcoming Sunday Jun 27, all web services will be offline from 5pm until midnight. This is to facilitate a server replacement and upgrade. New hardware, operating system, and Internet connection will all...
My Base Unifi Settings For Those With IOS Connection Problems.
A common refrain i see from folks is they are having problems with IOS and Unifi. I simply do not have these problems..but I have some default settings I use on every single site I setup to start with. These are controller settings..i use on everything. Cloudkey,...
SCALE Project ends as Quickly as it Begins
Remember this post? My quest for an open source hypervisor as part of my ongoing software stack continues. It appears SCALE will not be part of that stack going forward. I have since figured out that SCALE is not going to be able to handle the use case I am looking...
Watchguard firewalls Under Active Credential Attack
I do work for another firm out in California and one of the biggest clients there suddenly found their guest network offline. When the firewall was attempted to be logged into all account credentials have either been changed or deleted..locking us out of the...
Thrive Theme Vulnerability Allows unauthentic Remote Takeover Of WordPress Sites
Wordfence discovered these vulnerabilities in the Thrive Theme had been silently patched on March 12th. As of the 23rd many sites using this theme and it's associated packages were still not updated. Further analysis discovered two vulnerabilities than when used...
Some Android Devices Experiencing Performance Problems. Google Release a fix..That’s Only Part of the Story.
So a story is going around about an Android component update...however it's mainly the non-pixel phones that are being affected. All other android vendors install other software in addition to just Android. Int he case of Samsung it's android, then Samsung's software,...
Elementor Site Builder Plugin Vulnerability Announcement
The wildly popular Elementor site builder plugin has a vulnerability that can allow a third party site to secretly compromise a Wordpress site if the user is logged into the site as the administrator. Normally when you are on one site..a third party site is blocked...
A New Research Project Begins
With the completion of my ransomware resistance storage research and product announcement, I have now embarked on a new research project. I am looking for an open source virtualization host. I have already tried XCP-NG and I just could not get it to work...
Major Remote Authentication Bypass Vulnerability in Elementor Plugin Leads to Site Takeovers
A plugin for the Elementor sitebuilder has a major vulnerability that allow remote attackers to create administrative accounts without any need for authentication. The admin users can then do anything a Wordpress user can do which is add or remove content, create or...
Netgate Announces Move Away From PFSense..I Begin my Move Towards Something Else
Right as I start building a firewall monitoring and configurations service...things change drastically. Luckily, as a smaller company I am able to be quite agile in responding. I had heard rumblings of something a couple of weeks ago...now those rumblings have been...
It’s Time to Stand for the Constitution in Business
If you are a person with a tactical site or other pro-2A site you have a friendly refuge here. I can do domain registration, hosting, dedicated servers, and server co-location. DMCA notices are PROPERLY handled within the bounds of the law (unlike many other places)....
When Hardware Gets a Mind of It’s Own: R520 Fan Edition
I have had a Dell R520 server here at my location for a bit now and it's been a great upgrade for my business. In addition to providing network storage it also has been the final testbed for my new network attached storage product I recently announced. I have been...
Windows 20h2 Bug Eats Partitions, TrueNAS Core Saves Data Again
I had 1909 on my machine and it decided to upgrade to 20h2(mainly because i forgot to disable feature updates after some windows maintenance). Things immediately went downhill from there. I knew something was funky when it kept saying my E drive(my iscsi gamecache)...
The SolarWinds Compromise is Worldwide in Nature(Podcast)
This is the first in a series of podcasts about the SolarWinds hack. As details come out I will be making more podcasts and providing links in futher posts. Hang on folks..it's going to be a fun ride. You can download the podcast episode here. Here's the linklist i...
ETC Maryland Interviewed About Web Hosting
Nathan Neil interviewed me about my hosting product. It's about 25 minutes long. We talk about why I started my company, my hosting products, how I am different. We also talk about the value I present in the hosting space and how my attention to detail gives me the...
The end of CentOS and my moving to BSD.
RedHat announces the death of CentOS. To quote the article: In the past, CentOS has been a community build of the current RHEL source, providing a robust production distro for those willing to do without Red Hat support. When RHEL gets a fix, the project aims to have...
ETC Maryland Officially Announces Affordable, Ransomware Resistant Network Storage for Micro and Small Businesses
Remember this post? This has been 4 years in the making. I have tested this extensively at my office and at a clients remote location. With ransomware going nuts I am targeting this launch towards protecting against ransomware and offering an affordable, onsite...
Comcast Adds Data Caps to its Northeastern Residential Service Area
Comcast released a website that says they are capping residential at 1.2 Terabytes of data usage. If you go over it's $10/month per 50 gigabytes. Your maximum overage charge is $100/month. At least Comcast is not trying to say it's for network management. This is...
UEFI Being Used to House Nearly Unremovable Malware. Warned About in 2015.
ZDNET has a concerning article about UEFI malware found on some PC's. According to the article this most recent UEFI infection was not the first. The Russian APT group Fancy Bear was using it back in 2018. Things like this usually means you can count on at LEAST 1...
ETC Maryland Stance on Hosting Software
ETC Maryland takes server security seriously. One way ETC Maryland provides is to make sure the Linux version used are Long Term Support releases. This maintains the code base at a set level. This also means a reduced bug count and increased system stability. ...