We have some big news to announce! As the business continues to grow and evolve it has become apparent that now was the time to move our main office to downtown San Jose. We plan to keep everything nice and efficient, but even more convenient for people flying in to San Francisco International or San Jose International airports.

Effective immediately our new offices are at  75 E. Santa Clara St. #1150, San Jose, CA 95113. Good news, our phone numbers are unchanged: +1 408 786 1050.

If you are in town give us a call and swing by to check out the new digs.

There has been recent news covering the prosecution of certain cyber criminals responsible for malware such as Mariposa. Mariposa is botnet malware that originated in Spain and has infected 13 million computers. It’s always good to put the bad guy in jail but is law enforcement of cybercrime just an electronic version of the arcade favorite Whack-A-Mole? Will there always be another mole about to pop up? The answer is yes until the punishment fits the crime.

While these criminals need to be prosecuted it is not the most efficient way to prevent further problems. Time could be better spent on efforts that prevent other criminals from taking their place such as stricter sentencing for these crimes.  Read more... (301 words, estimated 1:12 mins reading time)

If you are in possession of the Umbra Data bookmark with ID #132 you have just won a $100 Amazon Gift Card. Note, the winner must claim his/her prize within 5 business days or we will randomly select another winner.

Sorry if you did not win, but hold on to your bookmark because we will randomly select another winning bookmark number after the RSA Conference in San Francisco next week, and by the way, you do not need a fresh bookmark because every number is still eligible except previous winners!  Read more... (184 words, 1 image, estimated 44 secs reading time)

I regret to admit it, but when I see a “Keep off the Grass” sign I feel compelled to take a walk on the green side…and I am not alone since I can see the well trod path across the lawn. I’ve observed that if the natural route from point A to point B goes over the grass then that is where the path will go. The same principle applies to our online activities. The community writ large can plea for secure and exemplary online behavior, but until one can realistically comply without it being a royal pain, the likelihood of compliance is extremely low. Let’s consider together the typical model e-citizen.  Read more... (689 words, estimated 2:45 mins reading time)

If you’ve looked at our daily report of the Top 40 Botted ISP’s, you’ll see a column labeled RZS which is short for Relative Zombie Strength.  What does that mean and how is it measured?  Good questions!

Once we began accumulating data from our botnet sensor network, we wanted to share this data about zombie activity in some meaningful way.  We started to investigate how others converted their botnet data into “real” numbers.  Very few places report hard numbers in terms of a count of infected computers, count of botnet C&C’s, etc…  Those that do report hard numbers rely on some “fudge factor” to arrive at their numbers.  Read more... (421 words, estimated 1:41 mins reading time)