Updates

On Thursday, August 7, the BigDrum network experienced a service outage. This outage was the result of the firewall failing at the datacenter where our servers are located. As a result, no data was able to access our servers, which did not experience any failures during this time period. The total downtime for this outage was about 25 minutes, from initial monitor notification to the successful reboot of the firewall. This unit was replaced later that evening, with no loss of service.

Email service was migrated to a new email server last evening, 6/13. This migration is part of the move to a new data center where the BigDrum network will be co-locating its servers. This new server will continue the improved spam and anti-virus filtering you have experienced, as well as improved whitelisting.

Please note that most ISPs have updated their DNS (domain name service) records, but there are still some, like SBCGlobal, that are still pointing to the old mail server. It can take up to 48 hours for all DNS records to be updated across the Internet. We will keep the old email server available until 6/23/08.

This week, security software company McAfee reported in a blog that presence of a new trojan malware named Downloader-UA.h. As reported on May 6, in a 24-hour period, this trogan has been detected by McAfee VirusScan Online on more than 119,000 computers out of almost 436,000 scanned, an infection rate greated than 25%. Typical malware that McAfee tracks has an infection rate in the 1% to 5% range.

The malicious files tend to be MP3 audio files or MPEG video files and are typically found on P2P sites like LimeWire and eDonkey. As noted in the blog, "When a user attempts to load one of these MP3 and MPG files, they don’t get the music/video they were hoping for; instead they’re directed to download a file named PLAY_MP3.exe. In fact, the MP3/MPG file they downloaded was completely fake, playing no media clip what so ever."

BigDrum recommends that you keep your virus software definition files up-to-date. In addition, ensure that your corporate Internet usage policy addresses P2P file-sharing.