Top 5 world botnets generate 80% of spam

I’ve been reading through the most recent Symantec MessageLabs Intelligence Report (April 2010), and one thing I noticed is that the top 5 botnets in the world generate over 80% of the total amount of spam being sent over the Internet, with the top 2 botnets (rustock and grum) getting a combined share of over 50%… And these botnets now spread over millions of computers worldwide (their estimate for the total number of computers that are part of a botnet is between 3.7 and 5.6 million).

The report is full of some pretty cool pieces of information. All in all, quite an interesting lecture. ;)

2010
04/30
CATEGORY
Downloads
Interesting facts
Security
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System Center Essentials 2010 RTM

Yup, SCE 2010 and DPM 2010 have both reached RTM today! :)

To be honest, due to all the extra features it comes with, I definitely believe SCE 2010 is hands-down the best tool to manage small virtualized or mixed infrastructures (of up to 50 servers):

System Center Essentials 2010 (SCE 2010) provides IT professionals in mid-sized organizations with a unified physical and virtual management experience. It enables you to better secure, update, monitor, and troubleshoot from a single console, so you can efficiently and proactively manage your IT environment.

The main addition to this second System Center Essentials release is the seamless integration of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 technology, making it quick and easy for midsize business to begin realizing the cost-cutting benefits of server consolidation using virtualization. SCE 2010 will enable you to rapidly move from a physical to virtual server environment while maintaining the control and simple management you have come to expect from the product.

Data Protection Manager 2010 also comes with a few (very nice) improvements as well:

System Center Data Protection (DPM) 2010, meantime, delivers unified data protection for Windows servers such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Virtualization and file servers — as well as Windows desktops and laptops. Microsoft has re-engineered DPM 2010 to be more scalable so that both midsize and enterprise-class organizations can take advantage of it.

Key additions in DPM 2010 include:

  • The ability for roaming laptops to get centrally managed policies around desktop protection, so that your laptop data is protected, whether you are connected to the corporate network or remote
  • Enhanced virtualization protection, including Hyper-V R2 LiveMigration scenarios and the ability to recover single-files from within host-based backups
  • Additional protection and recovery capabilities for Windows application servers like SQL Server, Exchange or SharePoint
  • Native site-to-site replication for disaster recovery to either another DPM server or an off-site cloud provider
  • Significant enterprise-scalability increases for deploying DPM in large environments
  • Centrally managed System State and Bare Metal Recovery

This is amazing news for the mid-market/SMB segment! :)

Also, another interesting Windows client management cloud product was announced today, called Windows Intune. Head out to the official website for more info. ;)

2010
04/19
CATEGORY
Microsoft
Virtualization
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Finally, back home

Yeah, I know I haven’t been updating my blog lately, but I’ve been mostly away (travelling) for the past couple of months. Here’s what’s been keeping me busy:

  • a 3-week trip to the US, visiting Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond (MVP Summit), New Jersey/New York (SolarVPS HQ), Miami (Parallels Summit) and Las Vegas (Channel Partners Conference); had a great time with Ross (@solarvps), Jason (@dedicatednow) and Bogdan (@bogdanfetita)
  • a 4-week national launch tour for System Center Essentials 2010, along with Adrian Stoian (System Center MVP), covering 9 events in 5 cities around Romania (Bucharest, Cluj, Timișoara, Iași and Brașov); we’ve had somewhere around 500 people attending the events
  • 15 airplane flights (that’s an average of one every four days) on 6 different airlines
  • 8 train rides (each with an average timespan of 7-8 hours)
  • 30.000+ km in total (flights, trains, etc)

All in all, even though it’s been very tiresome, I had a lot of fun! :)

Now that I’m back, besides the fact that I’m (hopefully) done travelling for a while, I’ll be spending some time catching up with some of the pending stuff, and I’ll also go back to work on a little project that I’ll be announcing soon.

On a side note, Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 are out, and Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 RTM-ed and will be coming out soon. :D

2010
04/19
CATEGORY
Life
MVP
Microsoft
Travelling
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The 2010 MVP Summit experience

I’ve just returned from this year’s MVP Summit, and it’s been quite an experience! Got the chance to talk with a few fellow MVPs, and most of all, got to spend a couple of amazing days with Ben, Mike and the rest of the Virtualization team in the Microsoft Campus over in Redmond (or the “NDA Campus”, as people ended up calling it on twitter, due to obvious reasons). We were among the few “privileged” MVPs that got a good load of “super duper secret special NDA” material. But all I can say right now (while still under NDA) is that really cool things are coming, and they’re well worth the wait! :)

The Sheraton in Bellevue was also a very nice location to stay in, and Bellevue in itself is quite a treat. The flight to New Jersey wasn’t as pleasant as I would have expected though, but hey – you win some, you lose some, I guess.

I’ll be staying in the US for another 2 weeks or so, getting to go to New York, Miami and Las Vegas. Should be fun!

2010
02/21
CATEGORY
Events
Life
MVP
Microsoft
Travelling
Virtualization
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SCE 2010 RC is out

Yesterday, David Mills, Senior Product Manager on System Center announced that the System Center Essentials 2010 Release Candidate is available. This is from the Nexus SC blog:

Microsoft® System Center Essentials 2010 provides a unified IT management solution that enables you to simply and efficiently perform complex management tasks across virtual and physical servers, PCs, hardware, software and IT services from a single console.

Essentials 2010 -

  • Delivers single console monitoring and management with summary information, common tasks, alerts and reports, allowing you to quickly see and manage your IT environment.
  • Provides rapid provisioning, importation, management and live migration of virtual servers.
  • Simplifies complex management tasks like packaging and deploying software, and configuring Microsoft and third-party updates.
  • Helps quickly solve problems using integrated alerting, expert knowledge and troubleshooting for servers, PCs and IT services running in your IT environment.

Here is the SCE 2010 Release Candidate download link.

2010
01/20
CATEGORY
Downloads
Free stuff
Microsoft
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Microsoft launches Kodu

If you’re into maths, design or programming, this new visual programming language called Kodu designed especially for creating games might be the thing for you. Even though it was originally released for Xbox-360 only, it’s now available on the PC as well. Here’s a list of features from the official Kodu website:

Kodu provides an end-to-end creative environment for designing, building, and playing your own new games.

  • High-level language incorporates real-world primitives: collision, color, vision
  • Runs on Xbox 360 and PC
  • Interactive terrain editor
  • Bridge and path builder
  • Terrain editor – create worlds of arbitrary shape and size
  • 20 different characters with different abilities
2010
01/15
CATEGORY
Downloads
Games
Microsoft
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White Hat Hacking course round-up

Okay, now that the WHH course is over, here’s a quick link to all the presentations [in Romanian]:

Also, for all those who attended the course, I have some extra content available for download on whh.tudy.ro. For the ones that weren’t present at the last meeting: you may contact me directly for access. ;)

A big thanks to MAP UBB for their help in organizing this, and of course to all the attendees, along with a note that I’m still available for any questions/discussions you might want to raise on the subject. :)

2009
12/06
CATEGORY
Events
Life
Security
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