This month has seen some more industry heavyweights releasing new products to the market with the biggest release being Apples new iPhone 6, and even with less fanfare than the past, they still managed to achieve people camping out to ensure they were among the first to own one.

There were a couple of honourable mentions though. The first purchaser in WA who, when interviewed on TV dropped it onto the concrete before he’d even turned it on, and to Apple themselves, who seem to have produced a bendy iPhone 6+ edition, with owners already reporting issues with the phones flexing and bending.

Another emerging security breach this month has been the discovery of the “Shellshock Bug”, which has been lying dormant and unnoticed for decades, but now it has been found it is estimated that as many as 500million servers and devices worldwide are  vulnerable to this bug which could give hackers a backdoor into your systems.

The biggest concern are websites. This month we passed the billion website mark online, and ½ of those will be affected by this bug.

‘Shellshock’ is named after the vulnerable application through which hackers can gain access, the ‘Bash Shell’. The ‘Shell’ is a command line driven application found in all Linux/Unix/Mac/even NAS unit operating systems. ‘Bash’ is the actual ‘version’ of the shell that is susceptible to this bug.

You can be assured however that EtherTech is not vulnerable to this ‘Shellshock’ bug, as our clustered webservers are all windows based, which has no issues, and all other systems have already been patched.

Keeping on the topic of mobile devices, the incidence of theft of smart phones, tablets, notebooks is forever on the rise, with the black market for these devices and especially new release models on rise, what can we do to secure our devices better?

Over the last couple of months we’ve been trialling and using a couple of new smart device management technologies. The first is a free service called ‘Prey’ (preyproject.com) which is a smart device app which if your device is stolen or even misplaced you can login via the web and send an audible alert to your device to find it, or even lock the device, take photos listen to audio get GPS fix or even remotely wipe the device of all your information if its stolen. They even have a new beta version they are trialling that allows you to use a ‘googlemap’ style map to locate your device as well.

The preyproject.com app is a free service for individuals and allows you to link up to 3 devices per free account. You can also subscribe if you have more than 3 devices.

A final reminder for the month: Windows Server 2003 will reach End of Support on 14th July 2015. Now is the time to give us a call and start talking to us to plan your migration to Windows Server 2012 R2.

Finally, the MIGHTY HAWKS are have won our second AFL grand final in a row! So thank you to everyone who’s been reading our newsletter and by default is now a bonafide Hawks supporter!  I’m sure everyone will continue to join us in wishing Hawthorn all the best for our hat-trick of premierships in 2015!

Until next month….