New PC build, UEFI, Kubuntu only, no windows

[claydoh]

But yet you're the first to see new malware. It never fails -- whenever I wake up to hear about yet another vulnerability in something I gotta take care of, my employer's support staff have already taken calls from customers in NZ and AU. I honestly don't know how anyone keeps computers running in Oceania.

It's because they are in the future, lol!
Or is it that the electrons spin backwards down there?


Sent from my cheap-assed Intel Atom iview i700 tablet

[jlittle]

But yet you're the first to see new malware. It never fails -- whenever I wake up to hear about yet another vulnerability in something I gotta take care of, my employer's support staff have already taken calls from customers in NZ and AU.

Thanks for that, I've not heard it before. I can think of two possible reasons OTS:

1. A general, trusting, gullibility to bad guy phone calls, especially in older people. Going by the number of such calls I get, it must be really worth their while.
2. Systems are relatively expensive, so there's a lot of old kit, and people skimp on mal-ware protection.

Does your firm publish any findings, that I could use to rev our local geek community?

[SteveRiley]

A lot of attacks are time-based. That is, they're set to fire at some specific HH:MM:SS. Because Australia and New Zealand are among the first major nations to see the sun each morning, they're also the first major nation to be hit by such attacks.

While a large part of my job revolves around product security, my employer (Riverbed Technology) is not a security company. The vast, overwhelming majority of security issues I have to deal with include vulnerabilities found in the various third party libraries that go into the Linux distributions we use -- mostly Scientific Linux right now. An example is the forthcoming announcement of several vulnerabilities in and patches for OpenSSL. Ugh, not again.

[jlittle]

...Because Australia and New Zealand are among the first major nations to see the sun each morning, they're also the first major nation to be hit by such attacks...

We don't often get called that... and would be parochially reluctant to admit such status to the desert continent upwind.