Monday, February 22, 2010

Sophos finds Windows 7 UAC is largely ineffective

Sophos Labs, the threat testing division of Sophos, has recently reviewed the effectiveness of UAC (User Account Control) in Windows 7 in protecting against viruses, trojans, and worms. Their tests showed that some of the most potent viruses will break through the UAC.

The results of this study suggest that UAC offers little protection for your computer and you still need a good anti-virus to protect your system. TrialWorks began using Sophos products last summer and we have been thrilled with their effectiveness.

Most of our sites, that are managed by our networking team, operate the Sophos Security Suite for SMB. http://www.sophos.com/products/small-business/sophos-security-suite/ . It offers in depth messaging protection, anti-spam, anti-virus, application control, and firewall. We have been especially pleased with how well the anti-spam systems work.

In addition to deploying Sophos at our client sites, we also completed an extensive roll-out of Sophos on our own networks. Our environment is far more complex and includes dozens of servers. We are pleased not only with how easy it is to deploy and manage, but also how well it interacts with our virtual infrastructure.

http://www.sophos.com/blogs/chetw/g/2009/11/03/windows-7-vulnerable-8-10-viruses/

BlackBerry Internet Services and "Cannot connect to email server or invalid server name"

I just had to setup BIS for a customer and had a few problems. Proved to be a valuable learning experience.

When setting up BIS there is basically one error it will give, "Cannot connect to email server or invalid server name"

This error, however, can mean several different things.

Invalid address: check your address, it's generally https://mail.domain.com/exchange (for 2003) or /owa for exchange 2007.

Invalid logon name: it is generally DOMAIN\UserName

Invalid Mailbox name: this one is tricky... It's generally the same as user name, not necessarily what you find in System Manager. It has to be exact match to active directory. This setting is what got me today.

Email address must match the server address. So if you try to use karl@domain111.com when the server address is https://mail.domain222.com; it will fail.

Oh, and last but not least, invalid password.