Do you use Sony's PSN? All of your personal information has now been compromised!

It's been a week since Sony's PlayStation Network was taken offline and it took nearly that long for Sony to acknowledge why they took PSN offline. The PSN was compromised by hackers that gained access to over 70 million customer accounts and the information attached to those accounts. This includes:

• Customer Names
• Customer Addresses
• Customer E-mail Addresses
• Customer Birthdays
• Customer PlayStation Network and Qriocity passwords
• PSN & Qriocity and user names & as well as online user handles

Now - Sony cannot confirm if Credit Card information was accessed but it is my opinion to assume that it was. I would recommend to any client that was using PSN to watch their credit card charges very carefully. The most drastic measure to take would be to cancel the credit card attached to the PSN account and get a new one.

You can find out more details here:
CNET News.com story
Yahoo! News story

2K Networking in the York Sunday News

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Amazon's EC2 Cloud Service surffers a major outage

The secret to today's quick launch Internet 2.0 businesses is Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service offering. This provides a cloud-based infrastructure that many companies run their databases, websites, and other services from.

Unfortunately, Amazon has had a major outage that has taken down a huge amount of these high profile companies, including FourSquare, Reddit.

To say that running your company entirely off of this type of cloud service is risky would be an understatement. You can read more from the Yahoo! New story here.

2K Networking Renews as Microsoft Partner

2K Networking is very excited to renew their prestigious silver level partnership with Microsoft. The 2K team continues to strive to improve themselves with additional training and certification, and we are proud to be recognized by Microsoft for that effort:

"Did you know that only about 5 percent of Microsoft partners worldwide can distinguish themselves by having attained a high degree of proficiency with a Microsoft silver competency?"

Another Followup on the Epsilon Email Database Breach

I received information from one of our clients that Verizon is now included in the list of companies affected by this problem.

CNET has a great article on who Epsilon is and why they have your data - please read as it's very eye-opening.

CNET's Video Podcast "CNET to the Resecue" yesterday dedicated nearly its entire episode to this issue and goes over some recommendations for affected users that include changing the email addresses and passwords that are used for those affected companies.

Followup to the Epsilon Data Breach

From information I've gathered across the internet over the past 24 hours as of now here is a list of major companies affected by the email breach includes (but is not limited to):

• Abe Books
• American Express
• Ameriprise Financial
• Barclays Bank of Delaware
• Best Buy
• Borders
• Brookstone
• Capital One
• Citibank
• City Market
• CollegeBoard
• Dillons
• Disney Vacations
• Food 4 Less
• Fred Meyer
• Fry’s
• Hilton Honors
• The Home Shopping Network (HSN)
  
• Jay C
• JP Morgan Chase
• King Soopers
• Kroger
• LL Bean
• Marriott Rewards
• McKinsey Quarterly
• New York & Co.
• QFC
• Ralphs
• Ritz Carlton
• Robert Half
• Smith Brands
• TiVo
• US Bank
• Verizon
• Visa
• Walgreens
• 1-800-FLOWERS

Other possible companies are Target, Home Depot, AirMiles Canada

CRITICAL ALERT: Two Data Breeches started last week will affect millions

2K does not make alert statements often, but when we do it is urgent that our entire client base know about them as quickly as possible.

The two data breeches that we are alerting you to are going to cause targeted spam messages that will most likely NOT be blocked by the Barracuda Spam filter as they ramp up AND will cause fake antivirus or fake computer maintenance utility alerts to pop up.

The targeted spam is going to be coming from a huge database breech at Epsilon, a commercial email and PR company. Epsilon's clients include Kroger, TiVo, Walgreen Drugstore, Capital One Financial, and the Home Shopping Network (HSN). The information that was vulnerable was, for the most part, limited to names and email addresses of account holders with the companies that Epsilon had as clients. Over the weekend, many of those companies affected sent out official email alerts to their users (I received one from TiVo and Capital One) about the data breech. And I have already started seeing targeted SPAM messages on my personal account asking me to click on links that would then infect my computer. You can read more about this at Yahoo Finance.

The Second data breech involves hackers using an SQL Injection attack against servers running Oracle/Sun's open source database program MySQL. This started early last week and gained momentum as the week progressed. Webfiltering company WebSense was the first to report on this. This attack is being known as the Liza Moon SQL Injection attack due to some of the domain name hosting the attacks. While this attack is not gaining access to personal information, it is causing fake antivirus and fake system maintenance alerts to be served up from millions of websites. These alerts can be very deceptive and look very real. Clicking on any of these alerts would infect a computer and begin prompting you for credit card information as payment to clean the computer.


Should you feel that you have been affected by either of these attacks, please contact 2K immediately at 717-724-0537 for assistance.