Server Management

If your company is to maintain its competitive edge, you have to reduce server operational expenses, increase server availability, improve data protection and enhance flexibility. Your servers have to become more agile and responsive to changes in the marketplace, and they have to be operating at peak efficiency.

And that means at peak all the time, not just when you're IT organization can pencil you in. That means your IT should be telling you how your servers are doing, how your firewalls are doing, and how your internet is doing.

And do it 365/24/7.

When you have a problem, does your IT organization notify you? Or, do you notify them? And hope they have a technician available to address your problem?

Black Horse incorporates remote monitoring and proactive management to ensure that you maintain your competitive edge, increases your server availability, and helps keep you agile and responsive to changes in your marketplace.

Disaster Recovery

For businesses that understand the need for more detailed disaster recovery planning yet have neither the time nor the resources for a long term engagement, Black Horse can help you find a cost-effective business continuity consulting solution.

Black Horse can assist you with any of the following: Criticality Analysis, Business Continuity Planning, Crisis Management, Emergency Preparedness.

Information Security

A study by McAfee estimates that more than $1 trillion were lost due to cybercrimes last year. Anyone connected to the Internet today faces serious information security threats ranging from blunt but still dangerous attacks such as worms, viruses and botnets to sophisticated, targeted attacks that are financially motivated and often undetected.

Black Horse offers a full line of managed and professional network security solutions, including vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, incident response and customized services to help our clients identify, understand, and effectively deal with security issues before and after they occur.

Hacking: Delta Airlines Sued

The executive director of The Coalition for an Airline Passenger's Bill of Rights alleges in a federal lawsuit that Delta Airlines obtained hacked emails and sabotaged her organization's efforts to support pro-consumer legislation in Congress, according to The Gibson Law Firm. Kate Hanni, the executive director and founder of the coalition, which is also known as FlyersRights.org, sued the airline and Metron Aviation, Inc., of Dulles, Virginia, after her emails and those of at least two reported, including one from USA Today, were obtained by the defendants.

Hanni said she learned from America Online that her personal email files were redirected to an unknown location, along with donor lists, spreadsheets and other data. The lawsuit alleges that the email hacking began in 2008 and continued this year while Hanni was communicationg with an airline industry consultant who analyzed airline delays for the federal government. For more information, visit The Gibson Law Firm. This post is excerpted from the Travel Pulse article, Flyer's Rights Advocate Sues Delta Over Hacked Emails, October 14th, 2009.

ODIN Off To Slow Start

A year ago, the U.S. military promised to bring a lethal network of drones and helicopters and intelligence analysts to Afghanistan, to stop the rise of improvised bombs there. That network, Task Force ODIN-Afghanistan, is now up - but only barely so. The U.S. Army unit has just two Predator-like drones flying at a time. And “so far, the unmanned assets of Task Force ODIN-Afghanistan have only brought lethal fire to bear on one target — successfully eliminating three insurgents in an engagement in August,” Paul McLeary reports for Aviation Week.

From February 2007 to January 2008, the original ODIN, based in Iraq, helped take out more than 2,400 enemy bombers. Many credit the group with being one of the decisive forces in drastically reducing what had been a horrific roadside explosive campaign in Iraq. ODIN brought together IT gurus, image analysts, and drone pilots with attack helicopter forces charged. The networked operation was able to spot bomb planters, transmit the coordinates quickly, and strike.

So expectations were high, when ODIN-Afghanistan was announced last year. But for now, at least ODIN hasn’t yet become a major push in Afghanistan - despite a huge uptick in the number of improvised bombs. Last month, the jury-rigged weapons killed 36 coalition troops.

This post comes from the Wired article, Bomb-stopping drone team off to slow start in Afghanistan, by Noah Shactman, October 13th, 2009. To find out more visit The Danger Room.

Online Crime: Up 600%

Bogus security software applications are among the types of electronic crimes that grew 585 percent over the first half of this year, according to a new study.

The Anti Phishing Working Group's (APWG) latest report shows that rogue anti-malware programs, infected computers and crimeware broke new records in the first half of 2009. The report shows that criminals are innovative and have "apparently unchecked ambition" with crimeware designed to target financial institutions' customers.

Most disturbing for financial institutions are the attacks against corporate bank accounts, says APWG's Chairman Dave Jevans. "These attacks target the CFOs and then attempt, sometimes successfully, to take over the corporation's online banking credentials to make corporate wire transfers."

This attack trend has grown to the level that industry associations, including the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) and NACHA along with banking regulators, sent out alerts to their financial services members this summer.

"Before this, phishers targeted individual users, not corporate accounts," Jevans says.

The report also shows:

• The number of unique phishing websites detected in June rose to 49,084 -- the highest since April, 2007's record of 55,643, and the second-highest recorded since APWG began reporting this measurement.


• The number of hijacked brands ascended to an all-time high of 310 in March and remained at an elevated level to the close of the half in June.


• The total number of infected computers rose more than 66 percent to 11,937,944 - now more than 54 percent of the total sample of scanned computers.


• Payment Services became phishing's most targeted sector, displacing Financial Services. Jevans notes that institutions' customers still are a primary target of electronic criminals.

"The Internet has never been more dangerous," Jevans says. "In the first half of 2009, phishing escalated to some of the highest levels we've ever seen."

Of even greater concern is the skyrocketing sophistication and proliferation of malicious software designed to steal online passwords and user names. The number of banking trojan/password-stealing crimeware infections detected increased more than 186 percent. "New malicious software such as the Zeus trojan exhibit a level of sophistication that would make the best software programmers envious," he says.

This post is excerpted from the BankInfoSecurity article, Online crime up nearly 600% in '09, by Linda McGlasson, October 5th, 2009.

Lack of eHealth Standards Costing Lives

Mining electronic patient data to discover health trends and automate life-saving health alerts for patients and their doctors will be the greatest benefit of electronic medical records (EMR), but a survey released today finds a lack of standards, privacy concerns by hospitals and patients and technology limitations is holding back progress.

Hundreds of billions of gigabytes of health information are now being collected in EMRs, and three-quarters (76%) of more than 700 healthcare executives recently surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP agree that mining that information will be their organization's greatest asset over the next five years, both for saving patient lives and saving money.

The executives surveyed cited "legal implications" as their greatest concern when it came to their organizations' use of secondary data, followed by privacy implications and public relations ramifications. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of executives surveyed agreed that individual and/or identifiable data can be re-used if it is in the best interest of the patient.

When asked about the barriers to secondary use of EMR data, the majority of those surveyed cited problems surrounding data, including access to electronic health records, transparency, quality and management. Fewer than half of providers, for example, have fully implemented all but the most basic functions of electronic health record.

An insufficient level of detail and integration tied with data timeliness were cited as the next two biggest problems in using secondary data. Variability in data entry makes many stakeholders, especially doctors, question the quality of the information being generated by the IT system.

While the portability of electronic patient data is most often hyped as the greatest benefit to implementing EMR systems, mining healthcare databases to track national health trends as well as to alert physicians to a particular patient's pending health problems will not only save lives, but cut long-term costs by catching diseases and infections early. By catching them early, the impact can either be negated all together or minimized.

For example, since implementing a sepsis alert system more two years ago, about 4,000 lives have potentially been saved through the efforts at Methodist North Hospital (MNH) in Memphis. The hospital's EMR system alerts doctors and nurses to patients suffering from the sepsis an often deadly systemic infection that can be very difficult to diagnose in its early stages. Methodist Healthcare system, includes three adult-care facilities that also use the sepsis alert system.

This post is excerpted from the NetworkWorld article, Report: Lack of eHealth standards privacy concerns costing lives, by Lucas Mearian, October 2nd, 2009. To read the article in its entirety, visit NetworkWorld.