I have recently had to study for the Microsoft Exam 70-410 Installing and Configuring Windows Server 2012. I have been an MCSE since the NT 4.0 days and have always kept my certification up-to-date, including passing the notoriously difficult Windows 2000 Upgrade exam, which you got to sit once and either passed or failed. While taking courses in not a bad idea, it has never really been for me, I would rather get a good book or two and self study for the exam. My company is always happy to pay out for a few books, as it is a lot cheaper than... 

I have been a programmer for going on twenty years. I started with Basic, Fortran and a bit of Small Talk. Mixed in there were the more popular C and C++. Over the years I have kept up my knowledge learning C# and Visual Basic, pretty much be programming in Visual Studio for about the last decade or so. However recently I had to learn Java for a big contract I was working on. The good news? It is not dissimilar to C and the other C derivatives languages, if you have programmed in one of these languages you are on good footing to learn Java.... 

It has been a busy couple of months for a hacking collective calling themselves the “Syrian Electronic Army” (SEA). Targeting mostly media organisations Twitter accounts and websites the hacktivists have managed to claim the scalps of some high profile media companies. The Guardian, one of the victims of SEA, would have you believe that the hacktivists are funded by the Syrian government based on a speech given by Assad to Damascus university students at the end of 2011, where he praised the electronic army and embraced them as an extension... 

InfoSec is done for another year, always a huge IT Security event, not just for the UK but for Europe. As with every year there were some key themes running through the event. This year the big talking points were Advanced Persistent Threats, Cloud, BYOD and Encryption solutions. From my untrained eye the numbers seemed to be down from previous years, I attended all three days and by far Day 2 was the busiest. I was also scanned about 20 times as I went in and out of the venue across the 3 days, I did wonder how many times that would count as... 

Reports from users across the web that hotmail.com and outlook.com are down. Currently the services have been offline for around 15 minutes. This doesn’t bode well for large cloud installation, when one of the biggest, and up til now most respected services on the web goes down. Critical infrastructure failure, such as power or phone lines would normally have a regional impact, but huge cloud providers like Microsoft now impact millions of customers. The major browsers are saying you should not trust the hotmail site, as the DNS entry is... 

Video Games have had a great year! The top games have out sold every movie released this year solidifying their domination of the entertainment market. Games are no longer for the nerds of the world, but now have mass appeal. The “free to play” games have been killing it as have the social games, anchored by Facebook. But the online multiplayer games have crushed all that have come before them. So who were the winners of 2012? Below are the top twenty one! #21 – Nights in to Dreams Sega is back! Nightopia is a surreal world that you, as either,... 

Russian (?) Hacker/SpookThe Empire 1 – Hacker 0. The Georgian CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) have caught a hacker, which they believe works for the Russian Official Security Agencies, so a spook, with his hand in the cookie jar. While investigating an attack from a botnet installed on a number of sensitive servers the CERT team uploaded their own Trojan with a tempting name, “Georgian-Nato Agreement” that had the capability to control the hackers webcam and send photos of the perp back to home base. The bots were distributed by infected... 

The UK Information Commissioner Office is starting to ramp up its efforts to ensure organisations are taking the Data Protection Act seriously. In 2012 alone the ICO has issued over eighteen organisations or individuals penalties; with an average fine of over £125,000 and total fines of over £2,200,000. A significant majority of the penalties were to government organisations but included a number of individuals. Most breaches came from data in transit, for example emailed data, faxed data or data left on portal devices such as laptops or memory... 

After losing their appeal to a previously lost judgement, Apple have had to publish an apology, of sorts, to Samsung for saying they had stole their ideas, specifically they are required to publish the lost judgement on their front page. You can read the full “apology” here, in a page that is completely lacking of Apple logos or Apple branding. If you just stumbled upon the page you would have no idea that you were on the Apple site, until you checked the URL. The link to the details of judgement is down the very bottom of the UK Apple front... 

Antivirus software is a critical component in PC and server protection, but which product provides the best virus protection? That’s a tough question, McAfee reports that there were 75,000 new Malware signatures detected in the first three months of 2012, and that they currently have over 80 million malware signatures in the their Antivirus database and it is likely to hit the 100 million mark this year. If you are getting 75k new malware signatures a day, the important part of any virus protection software is its ability to keep up to date...