ETC Blog, The Tech Resource
Major Internet Outage Affecting Comcast and Other Providers
There have been multiple fiber cuts affecting the largest Tier 1 backbone providers. This is causing connectivity issues for Comcast, Verizon and other providers. If you are experiencing Internet issues or communications issues this is going to be why. ETA right...
How Important is Your Website Security?
Many businesses think their website is just a piece of advertising. However a website needs to be maintained in terms of updates from a security standpoint. If your site gets compromised there are tangible detrimental consequences for your business. Many webhosts...
ETC Maryland Rescues Gaming Site
There is a site I frequent called the Christian Gamer's Alliance. I used to be many things on the site, server administrator, forums administrator, chat administrator...just to name a few. Over time I faded away from the site as the clan I was in(God's Frozen...
The FBI’s Nonsensical Advice to Reboot Infected Routers
The gov't is a dubious source of information about cyber security. I have personal experience in this area..... Rebooting an infected router will do NOTHING to stop this botnet. Rebooting the router(and the FBI is aware of this) will only stop the active payload...
ETC Maryland Now Offers Free Private Domain Registration For All Domains
ETC Maryland is proud to announce that effective today, May 31st, 2018 all domain registrations or renewals will now get private domain registrations at no additional charge. With online privacy being a large concern and online privacy regulations like the EU GDPR...
Managed IT and ETC Maryland
ETC Maryland has not jumped into the "managed IT" for quite a while now. My main concerns were anything cloud based. While ETC Maryland sees the market demand for network monitoring I was unable to find a solution that met my security standards. One of the things I...
How does ETC Maryland’s Hosting Stack up Against Bigger Companies?
I am a Brunswick based webhost and I wanted to let you all know you do not have to overpay the bigger boys for many things that can be provided at a much more reasonable cost..or even for no additional cost. If you look at only the bottom line you will miss out on...
My Local Backup Strategy
I have not been at my computer as much and I missed the fact that March 31st was world backup day. This article on extremetech details some of the author's backup plans. I wanted to have ransomware resistant backups at all levels so my system is a bit more elaborate:...
The Upcoming SSL Deadline. ETC Maryland Has Been Ready.
ETC Maryland has been offering free SSL certificates for nearly two years now. ETC Maryland saw quickly the need to moving to SSL as Google was already informing SEO partners of their intentions to add SSL as a major ranking signal. ETC Maryland is determined to...
If You Pay The Ransom Do You Get Your Data Back? It Is A Coin Toss.
Ransomware is now making it into mainstream television. Chicago Med(Season 2 Episode 19) has an episode where they get hit with ransomware. Unlike Hollywood though most folks who pay loose not only their money but also their data. I have never been an advocate of...
Comcast Business Fiber Fiobles..Temporarily Stymied
November, 2017: I received an e-mail saying that Comcast has pulled fiber into this area and that their gigabit pro service was available to me as a business class customer. This is a pure fiber to the premises service that would net me 2 gigabits both up and down. ...
Spectre and Meltdown. How Susceptible Are you?
There's a ton of crap running around about these vulnerabilities. This video talks about the vulnerabilities on a user level and gives some background on exactly where the problem lies and much you should worry. A technical paper on this is upcoming. This is only a...
Incoming Weirdness Across The Net Today
We are going to see a bunch of weirdness today as all major software vendors are patching their infrastructure against some serious hardware flaws in all CPU chips today. Your machine may say it cannot activate..certain Internet based things may be slow or not work at...
Damage Control Begins RE: Intel Hardware Bug
Intel is in full damage control mode about their hardware flaw....unfortunately they are trying to drag AMD down with them....however AMD is vulnerable only in its older CPU products. Their latest product, XEN(or Ryzen) is not affected as of right now. This is an...
Is The Cloud About to Become Fog?
It very well could be. right now I am seeing signs about an embargoed(aka being kept secret) serious HARDWARE security problem RE: virtualization(aka the cloud) that affects Intel processors. The amount of software patching going on is massive and even open source...
Net Neutrality. Karl Denninger Continues to Show the Flaws in the Screamfest
I have run a small business myself and I can tell you this is 100% true. There are folks online like Leo Laporte of Twit.tv who obviously has no idea about how networking operates because I routinely have heard him say the bits are free. That's absolutely false and...
How bad is the IntelME problem?
Every machine Intel has shipped from 2007 to present has had this below firmware..below the operating system thing in it. All Intel CPU's use the ME to boot at first..then the bios takes over..then the OS. It is too bad it tool this long to come out. Honestly, I...
AMD Pro…Any Better Than IntelME?
AMD is now releasing their Ryzen Pro cpu offerings for businesses. AMD is claiming their "management" solution is more secure than IntelME. Given the extremely low bar set by IntelME that's not hard to accomplish. I have not had the time to research the Ryzen Pro...
Intel Skylake and Newer CPUs Expose JTAG Over USB. “GOD Mode” Attack Details to Come.
As if the Minix OS that runs on the chipset of ALL Intel processors isn't enough...it has now been shown that you do not even need any complicated steps to get to the IntelMe engine. You can now access JTAG over ANY PCH(southbridge) and it is called DCI(Direct...
Amazon key(Based upon IOT) makes your house absolutely insecure
Amazon Key IMO is a bad idea. The fact that it is based on IOT makes it worse. The very concept of you give someone access to your house with no other controls...there's a camera to watch them but a camera will not stop anyone from doing anything else..jsut record...
Apple Values Your Privacy…Not Really.
We all know google mines everything..that's been well established by Google themselves. We knew Apple mined our data and "keeps it private". I always called BS on their privacy stance...Here's the proof:...
If you have a device that depends on the cloud to run…keep in mind you do not own it.
Logitech is going to brick their cloud IOT devices under the Harmony Link brand with a software update in March 2018. Your remedy? Logitech gives you a discount on their newest Harmony Hub devices.
Bruce Schnier Destroys the State Sponsored Angle in the Equifax Breach
The instant I saw folks start pandering the absurd theory that China or Russia had financed this attack I knew it was bogus. The problem was a well-known and well published vulnerability in their website that their site(and many other larger websites) used called...
Post-Mortem on the Nationwide “Comcast Outage”
I started getting multiple calls about issues on Comcast this afternoon. My initial research showed it was not an IP issue, however dns was not responding on the Comcast network. Comcast has had DNS outages before. I tested my network by switching to Google DNS...
Intel Graphics FINALLY Die…
I heard about this more than a year ago. This is one I wanted to sit back on and watch. Sure enough, after many years of futility, Intel has finally decided to stop torturing us with their craptacular graphics drivers that never fully worked and have decided to...