An example randomly inserted script is added below.

iframe src="http://{random domain}/{random string}/{random string}/" width="114" height="171"


The issue is almost impossible to locate, unless you are using IE8, or IE9, as in most cases, this is their intended targets.

In order to test the site, I utilised the “User Agent Switcher” located within Firefox / Chrome.

The problem came when the evasiveness of the module was found

The Module avoids detection by doing the following:

• -Rendering the iframe, and then adding the users IP to a blacklist for 15 – 30 minutes afterwards
• -Blacklisting any user which has logged into the server recently
• -Blacklisting the local user
• -Blacklisting any type of searchengine, and their IP’s.

 
A few methods of locating modules are included below

Check for unknown modules within /etc/httpd/modules

Generally, apache modules are added in the modules directory of httpd to begin with, and as you can see the two below modules are very out of place and were located with “dlEngine” strings within them.

root@ns1 [/etc/httpd/modules]# ls -lah

-rwxr-xr-x.  1 root root  43K Jul  3  2012 mod_view_version.so

Unfortunately, after removing these two modules, it wasn’t all which was required, and further investigation had to be continued with.

Output Apache Modules list

root@ns1 [/etc/httpd/conf/includes]# httpd -t -D DUMP_MODULES > /root/mods2

It’s generally good to get a configuration from a different server running a similar environment, to see what is loaded.

For example, see below

root@ns1 [/etc/httpd]# diff /root/mods1 /root/mods2

>  passenger_module (shared)

Apon investigating the /etc/httpd/conf/includes, a matching include for pool_mime_module was located within /lib64

root@ns1 [/lib64]# grep pool_mime -i *

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 15 Jan 15 03:47 mod_pool_mime.so -> libpcproas.so.1

 
This blog post is related to http://blog.unmaskparasites.com/2012/09/10/malicious-apache-module-injects-iframes/
 

This guide is to show you how to install VMware tools in ESXi 5.1 on Ubuntu Servers. To install VMWare Tools you need to mount the LINUX.ISO from the vmimages folder in the datastore. Once mounted, ensure your Virtual Machine has access to the internet. If you have installed the VMXNET2 or VMXNET3 network adapter you will need to remove and add the supported E1000 network adapter until we run through this update at which point you can remove the E1000 , and select VMXNET3 which will give you 10Gbps between your VM’s and network if it supports it.

1. Ensure you have network connectivity before continuing

2. Get all updates for the server

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

3. Create the mount point for the CDROM

sudo mkdir -p /media/cdrom

4. Mount the ISO to the folder we created

sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

5. Change the Directory

cd /media/cdrom

6. Copy the tar file from your mounted CDROM/ISO to your /tmp directory

sudo cp VM*.tar.gz /tmp    (Sample Filename: VMwareTools-8.6.0-425873.tar.gz)

7. Install all these dependencies & build tools

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-server build-essential

8. Change the Directory

cd /tmp

9. Unmount the ISO we mounted earlier

sudo umount /media/cdrom

10. Expand the tar

sudo tar -zxvf VM*.tar.gz

11. Change Directory

cd vmware-tools-distrib

12. Create a special directory

sudo mkdir /usr/lib64

13. Run the Install Script

sudo ./vmware-install.pl

14. Reboot

sudo reboot

Last month, a revolutionary method of storing information was introduced. When I say this, I mean it in its full right, it was truly revolutionary. You may have an inclining as to what it was, but if you don’t know, it’s a crazy (and to be honest very weird if you think about it) concept. DNA storage.

To starts, let me give you some raw information. 5.5 petabits, was stored on one gram of DNA. This is approximately 700 terabytes of information, on ONE gram of matter. Let’s think, one gram of DNA is a lot of DNA due to the fact that DNA itself is so small. But relative to storage mediums today, one gram of a HDD holds almost nothing compared to DNA.

700 terabytes is a lot of information, if a DVD holds roughly 4.5GB, then on a single gram of DNA, you would be able to hold around 160 000 DVD’s. According to IMDb (Internet Movie Database), they have 277 662 feature films released in the past or in production listed between the years 1880 and 2019. So in theory, with 2 grams of DNA, you would be able to store each one of these movies. So yeah, that’s a lot of storage space.

So how does it work?
You start by sequencing and embedding short fragments of chemically synthesised DNA on the surface of a very small glass chip. DNA information is stored into a four letter alphabet system of As, Cs, Gs and Ts. For this reason, the researchers divide the information into small blocks and convert typical binary into this four letter system. T and G convert to represent 1, while A and C convert to represent 0. Each DNA fragment also contains a digital reference of its original location in the file, as to piece the file together. After this when reading the data, you need a DNA sequencer and computer to reassemble the fragments in the correct order and convert it back to a digital format.

Don’t expect this to take over your current storage devices just yet, currently the cost to do all of this is too high for the worth. But who knows where things might go in the future?

Sources

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/17/dna-storage-genetics-textbook-encoded_n_1799291.html

About the Author:

Alex Burgess is our in house writer for the blog. He is predominantly into marketing and graphic design, however has experience with technical features of the computer industry. He is into photography, film and media, with a new found passion for writing.

Dedicated Servers Specialists – About Us

The next stage of ethernet cables is predicted to handle between 400 gigabits per second and 1 terabit per second. Currently, you would be getting maybe a hundred megabits per second, and if you’re lucky maybe even a gigabit per second. This is of course if your laptop has an ethernet port (newer ultrabooks are tending to not have them and rely on wireless instead). These speeds will generally suffice for home uses due to the fact bottlenecking occurs, mainly that being internet download speed, but there is still a need for more bandwidth for some people.

The higher speeds are needed for the big companies. I mean real big ones. Can you image what would happen to Google if their connection speeds were too slow? These companies are growing, and data usage is skyrocketing. Engineers from IEEE concluded that it seems to be that bandwidth associated with core networking is doubling every 18 months.

IEEE have decided to form a new group to look into this new need for raised bandwidths. Part of what this group will be doing is working out which is more of a  viable option for businesses, 400Gbps or 1Tbps.

Currently, people agree that 400Gbps is technically feasible, as well as economically, however they are not sure about the terabit option. Obviously, the more bandwidth the better, however the technicalities and economics behind the terabit ethernet are questionable. Whatever direction people choose to go, it is most likely that they will end up bundling the connections together to allow for more bandwidth, however there are costs involved in doing this.

The other issue is that of copper connections. Copper cables are much thicker than fibre optic, and they don’t allow the distance of fibre either (5m maximum for 100Gbps with copper). The cables can get so thick in fact that some supercomputer centres have apparently had to reinforce the centres because the copper gets incredibly heavy! Cables at 2 inches thick is getting ridiculously thick and expensive, whereas a fibre cable can have a much smaller diameter and allow for the same bandwidth and transmit information further.

This new group looking into the feasibility are going to try to work out what speed the next gen of ethernet will be. The fact of the matter is that terabit would be nice, but it comes down to what you are willing to pay for it.

Dedicated Servers Specialists – About Us

Chairs. Every office needs them, right? Personally if I am to be in front of a PC all day I know I want one. So why blog about chairs you might ask, and that’s a fair enough question. Well the answer is simple; they continue to come up in discussion at the office. Broken chairs, stolen chairs, missing chairs, borrowed chairs, old breaking chairs, assembling chairs…  Chair problems! They just don’t go away!

In our office we have a range of chairs. We have the good old fashioned wooden stationary chair that is typically seen with an outdated dining table with the highly fashionable cross hatching vintage pattern on the material, we have the modern pink ergonomic chairs that are broken and tilting to the side (the most annoying thing to sit on in my opinion – not to mention its pink!) and we have the 5 year old typical computer chairs that tear the carpet up underneath them. There is also the modern, comfy cushioned chair that for some reason only has one wheel out of the five it is meant to. Where are the missing wheels? I can guarantee no answer to that question would surprise me.

My chair isn’t too bad, the pleather is wearing away big time, and the thing doesn’t even go up or down, but these things don’t worry me as I wear pants to avoid the itchy underlying material and it’s broken on my ideal height for the most comfortable PC usage. Win!

So apart from the fact almost every chair is broken in some form or another, the next issue is the fact people in the office seem to have the urge to take a broken chair if no one is sitting on it. Even if the owner had been sitting on it for the past 5 hours and they get up for a split second, you have a high chance of losing your seating rights. The fix for this (because whoever took it will not give it back anytime soon) is to a) steal someone else’s chair and continue this cycle of chair thieving or b) stand at your desk. And I’m not standing.

It’s almost a game that you have to play. A strategical and tactical game where experience and knowledge is key. You need to know what chair to take that you like, and who you will be taking it from. Some might say buy brand new chairs for everyone, but this wouldn’t be as fun, would it?

When it comes to figuring out the size of the internet, it’s very difficult to work out. There is no universal indexing tool that has read and stored all of the information available to someone online, however Cisco puts their estimates at online browsers sifting through roughly 90 exabytes per month in the year 2011. To put things into perspective, there are roughly 1000 gigabytes in a terabyte, and approximately 1000 terabytes in a petabyte, and 1000 petabtyes in an exabyte. In short, that is a LOT of information.

The even more impressive thing is the predicted size in 2015. The predicted global IP traffic is placed somewhere near 4.8 zettabytes annually! This is 400 exabytes per month. I tried to devise a method to visually compare this amount of information browsed by the internet community to that of the amount of data stored on DVD; however I can’t think of one unless I involve comparing the height of a water bottle to the distance to the moon. All you need to know is that the 2 billion or so people who use the internet chew through a lot of data each month.

The following infographic from Cisco is a great way to visualise the scope of internet users around the globe.  http://blogs.cisco.com/news/the-internet-of-things-infographic/

An Infographic showing the connected devices to the internet.

As with everything technology based, things change rapidly. It will be interesting to see in 2015 what the actual statistics will be on this topic. We will write it down somewhere and hopefully check back in a few years to see if the predictions are accurate.

Could a programmer write a program to write programs? In effect, making programmers around the world obsolete. Someone in the office today posted this question and it got us thinking, is it possible?
Let’s take a look at the very basics of making a program to see if we can work out the logistics involved.

A program needs a purpose, generally speaking. I don’t know many (useful) programs that that don’t have a purpose and if they didn’t then they wouldn’t be useful, would they? So we need a human being to say “Hey look, I am sick to death of not being able to blah blah blah”. Once the aim of the program has been worked out, it’s time to design it.

This is probably the most complicated part of the process from a computer’s point of view. They can’t think, they are mindless drones that do whatever you tell them. If an error occurs, it’s not because it failed to add 2 and 2 together properly, it’s because in the code there was an issue with something the programmer wrote. Some could argue that with debuggers and auto fillers in programs such as Visual Studio, the computer is doing a lot of the coding. But, all this does is find an error, it doesn’t fix it. To say this will never happen would be ignorant, because I’m sure at one point in the past people looked at computers and thought they wouldn’t be able to correct spelling mistakes, but now my phone does that (this can cause very awkward situations with the iPhone’s autocorrect though Let’s not get into that though!).

So if a computer can’t think, how can it design? Well, how do WE design? What happens in our brains that allow us to think of new things, what makes us like one thing over another? My theory (from a completely non professional or scientific background about the matter) is we take what we know, and use this information to change and alter other things that we know, thus creating something new. An analogy would be looking at a nail. You know its use is to pierce wood to stick things together. You also know that hitting something makes it move, well, the force is transferred to the object. With this knowledge, you can put these two pieces of information together to assume you can hit the nail and pierce the wood. Bam, you invented the concept of a hammer. So in theory, this could be applied to programs too, but don’t ask me exactly how to do this.

If a program were to build other programs, there would have to be mass amounts of information drilled into it to know what to make. Similar to outsourcing work to someone else, you need to transfer your knowledge to someone else completely, or accept whatever they produce.

The amount of information needed to be transferred to a computer for it to know what to make is unknown to me. I don’t even know if it is known to anyone. However, after time this amount of information could be reduced if the computer can learn from past experiences.

For the sake of programmers, I don’t think they would want to be out of a job. So the person who programs this would be shooting themselves in the foot. However, I am not a programmer, so there is no current need for me to worry. It’s only when a computer chooses to make a program to take over the world that I will start to panic.

So what do you all think? Is it possible, and do you like the idea of it (especially if you are a programmer yourself)?

Most people know a cloud as a build up of precipitation in the sky. However, in the computer world the cloud is a relatively old concept that is really just being named and hyped up today. As technology increases, the uses for this computing concept are growing rapidly.
If done well, the cloud can seamlessly integrate to our everyday, personal lives without a hitch. Let’s take a look and see how the cloud is used in our everyday lives.

After you wake up, you have your breakfast and leave to go to work. You get a notification from your work calendar updating the meeting time you had today. After getting to work you forgot to record your favourite show on TV. This is no issue though, you simply go online, log in to your television provider account and then tell it to record the show you want. After doing some work you go on Facebook and view the dinner photos from the night before and you and your friends comment on them and chat online about it. You proceed to go to lunch but have no cash, however after some fast online banking on your phone, you pay with eftpos and make the transaction with your card. While at lunch, you get a text with a link to a funny cat video on YouTube. You view it and the post the link on your blog for others to view and enjoy. After this you…

And it goes on and on after this. We can see about ten distinct instances of something happening online where information is stored ‘somewhere else’ that, without the internet, would not be possible. This external hosting of information is in short what the cloud is, a giant, integrated network making everyone’s lives easier and more connected.

Pros

The cloud is internet based, meaning you can access the information virtually anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. It even allows mobiles to get in on the action with uses such as emails, calendars, social networks etc.
People are able to use different machines and still have access to the same information on them all. Say you work on your Google Docs document at work, you can simply close the window, go home, login there and finish it from where you left off.
Social networking – imagine life without Facebook, Twitter or Google + and imagine not having the instant communication with your friends.
Businesses can reduce costs by not needing their own data centre or staff to maintain the hardware needed. One company is able to run a large data centre and do this work for you.

Cons

There are plenty of upsides, nevertheless there are also downsides. The information you post online is now there presumably for a long time. The internet is an archive, remember. This isn’t always a bad thing, but you don’t want those drunken photos of you when you were a teenager to be on Facebook forever, do you?
Due to the information not being hosted on your own hardware, there is a security risk involved. This opens up the doors for people to hack information, however this is rare due to these large companies having very secure networks to prevent the unauthorised access to your information.
Your dependency on the cloud will run your life. If you suddenly lose internet access and don’t have any of it backed up offline, it’s hard to do anything about it except try to get the internet connection back.
If data is held overseas, it may be subject to different privacy and legal laws. How this impacts someone will change based on the location of the information, but it could be an issue.

Overall, the cloud allows interaction between many people and organisations with great ease, however I think people need to appreciate offline information storage in case their internet connection is ever lost.

Everybody loves cake, right? It was recently Jared’s birthday (our MD), and following the unwritten law of ‘always celebrating a birthday’, we threw him a staff party in our conference room with an amazing cake! After scrounging around for some old computer hardware lying around the office we built a Dedi-cake-ed Server! (talk about bad puns there… lol!).

We fitted the cake with old Xeon CPUs, laptop RAM, a USB stick and more. It was a big success with everyone racing to take a component. We made sure to wash the parts in the dishwasher first to ensure the cake was OK to eat, then we all got suck in!

We think this was a suitable way to celebrate the Boss’ birthday. Three cheers for Jared!