An engineering team from Perdue University may have possibly found the most complex way to inflate a balloon. Their process contains 300 unique steps and was demonstrated using a Rube Goldberg machine. Many have asked me “What is a Rube Goldberg Machine”. Good question. Wikipedia tells us that

“A Rube Goldberg machine, contraption, invention, device, or apparatus is a deliberately over-engineered or overdone machine that performs a very simple task in a very complex fashion, usually including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg (1883-1970). Over the years, the expression has expanded to mean any confusing or complicated system.”

Perdue’s contraption takes an extraordinary number of steps to accomplish a relatively simple task. In our line of work we see so many instances that this same approach is applied to business technology systems under what may be well-intentioned albeit erroneous principals . At CIT we take an engineering approach to information technology. We use data to drive our decisions, objective tools to measure and quantify technology systems, and over one hundred and seventy years of combined experience to arrive at the most efficient and cost effective business technology solutions. While credit must be given to the Perdue team for a simply amazing piece of technical wizardry – We prefer to use the most direct and efficient means to arrive at a solution to our clients technology challenges. From Virtualization to Data Storage to fully outsourced network support we take a holistic and scientific approach to solve even the most challenging technology issues.

The hacktivist organization known as Anonymous has announced its plans to disable the Internet this Saturday, March 31st. Operation Global Blackout 2012 looks to shut down the Internet by disabling its 13 core DNS servers, responsible for resolving domain names to IP address, thus making websites inaccessible.

Lawrence Cruciana, an IT Security expert from Charlotte, NC based Corporate Information Technologies, comments “Such an attack could be effective if implemented and executed properly”. Cruciana adds, “the decentralized nature of DNS systems make such an attack difficult to execute. Localized DNS outages would be relatively easy to accomplish but this on a global scale would be much more difficult to achieve”. Numerous network security watchdog groups are anxiously monitoring the outcome of Saturday’s planned attack. “If Anonymous is able to pull this off it could be a transformative day for the Global Internet” says Cruciana. We will be monitoring and reporting on the outcome of Saturday’s planned attack. Let us know via facebook or linkedin on what you experience.

The Sykipot malware used in recent, targeted attacks against defense contractors appears to have been designed, at least in part, to steal information relating to U.S. military drones and unmanned aerial vehicles. To date, “there have been a lot of different campaigns with different command-and-control servers,” said researchers at Alienvault Labs in a blog post. Notably, all of the infections associated with a particular command-and-control (C&C) server for a Sykipot variant have been tied to a phishing email that includes information about the Boeing joint unmanned combat air system X-45, as well as the Boeing X-37 orbital vehicle. Interestingly, the Alienvault researchers found that while many of the command-and-control servers involved in Sykipot appear to be based in the United States it appears that attackers “used well-known public exploits to hack into U.S.-based servers and then installed software to proxy the connections between the infected systems and the real C&C server. The evidence appears quite strong that whoever is behind Sykipot speaks Chinese, and may be based in China. Of course, whether they’re state-backed hackers or freelance operators remains unknown.

Corporate Information Technologies provides expert-level defense against similar threats through next-generation security practices. CIT routinely provides subject matter experts to consult, design, analyze, and remediate threat protection systems for organizations of all sizes.