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<\/p>\nSkype responds to rumors that a band of criminal hackers brought down its VoIP service and more security updates. Plus: the latest networking product news.<\/b><\/p>\n
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VoIP service\u00a0Skype<\/strong>\u00a0went down for a\u00a0two-day outage late last week<\/a>, knocking most of its 220 million subscribers off its network. In the absence of concrete information from the company, rumors initially flew that a band of criminal hackers had brought the service down through a massive\u00a0DDoS attack<\/a>. As it turns out, Skype said the problem was less exotic. The company claims the sheer volume of Windows systems rebooting after last week’s\u00a0Patch Tuesday<\/a>\u00a0crippled its authentication servers.<\/p>\n One DDoS attack that does not seem to be fictional: The\u00a0Storm worm<\/strong>, which creates spam botnets, has taken to counterattacking computers scanning networks it has infected by activating its zombies and launching attacks on them. Security experts are concerned that a beginning-of-the-year security scanning regimen at colleges will trigger more attacks.<\/p>\n The organization that reported the attacks, REN-ISAC, offers an interesting security service: It tracks traffic over the\u00a0Abilene network backbone<\/a>\u00a0and identifies which network\u00a0ports<\/a>\u00a0are receiving the heaviest traffic, providing\u00a0links to current exploits that target vulnerable applications listening on those ports<\/a>. If you’ve ever wondered why your firewall reports a steady stream of requests to port 139,\u00a0REN-ISAC has you covered<\/a>><\/p>\n A new Trojan called “Infostealer.Monstres<\/strong>” is targeting online job seekers and gathering information from users at such sites as Monster.com. Security researchers believe several hundred thousand users have had approximately 1.6 million pieces of data illegally harvested from Monster.com alone, with caches of data in several locations on the ‘net that suggest many more users may have had their privacy compromised. The Trojans have taken advantage of vulnerabilities in Monster.com’s Web servers to send personalized phishing messages to the site’s users along with another Trojan masquerading as bogus copy of the site’s Job Seeker Tool.<\/p>\n SMC<\/strong>\u00a0has announced the release of a number of 802.11n Draft v2.0-compliant products, including the SMC Barricade N Wireless 4-port Gigabit Broadband Router, the EZ Connect N Wireless Access Point\/Ethernet Client and the EZ Connect N Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter.<\/p>\n The Barricade N Draft 11n Gigabit Broadband Router (SMCWGBR14-N<\/a>). The router includes a 4-port 10\/100\/1000Mbps LAN switch, high speed Wireless-N (draft 802.11n) access point, NAT firewall with Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI), and a print server. The device is 802.11n draft v2.0 compliant. MSRP is $174.99.<\/p>\n The EZ Connect N Access Point\/Ethernet Client (SMCWEB-N<\/a>\u00a0can be configured as an access point or placed in Client mode to connect multiple Ethernet enabled devices such as a game consoles, digital media player or Network Attached Storage. MSRP is $114.99.<\/p>\nHardware<\/h3>\n