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Monday, August 4, 2014

Über Operations earns Consulting Partner status for Amazon Web Services(AWS)

Congratulations to all my colleagues, we worked hard to achieve this goal in a short amount of time!  Kudo's to all!
To quote our press release:  
Über Operations is proud to announce that we have earned Consulting Partner status for Amazon Web Services(AWS)! AWS is a collection of remote computing services that make up a cloud computing platform. Offering these services much faster and cheaper than traditional server computing, Amazon is the Cloud Computing leader in the industry.
We at Über Operations started out as customers; our engineers spent time developing and testing small amounts of data housing and data transfer, and as we grew comfortable with the functionality, we were very impressed by the speeds and cost efficiency of the services. We are ecstatic to announce, that after 9 months of trials, implementations, and experimentation, Über Operations is now a fully functional and operational Consulting Partner of AWS. We have 9 accredited team members, including our full time integration engineers, managing partners, operations support staff, contractors, and even our technical interns. Each accredited member is a hard-working individual making up the team that is Über Operations, who has been the healthcare data integration service provider for the state of Florida for the past ten years.

This November, 4 of our team members, @eddie@frans@phil, and @jeff will be attending the AWS re:Invent 2014 conference in Las Vegas, NV to collaborate ideas and sit in on presentations about cloud computing and bootcamps on various topics like coding and Exam Preparation. The guys are excited to represent us in Sin City and rub elbows with other big shots in the business of healthcare data.
Since we earned our Consulting Partner status with AWS, we would love everyone to check out our page in the Amazon Web Services Partner Network here. There you will find the extensive list of clients, certifications, and tools that we use and have to our name. Our data exchange platform, uberXchange, runs on the AWS cloud, and clients of Über Operations and users of the uberXchange platform include the Texas Department of State Health Services (TDSHS) and the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL).
This is a very exciting time for us with growth in such a key area for the future of cloud computing and data exchange. We'll keep you posted as we continue to add services on AWS.

Friday, August 1, 2014

New Crypto-Ransomware Emerge in the Wild

More proof that you should always have anti-virus/malware software not only installed, but active and with updated definitions.  I use Sophos UTM as the first tier as well as keeping my windows machines as well as keeping Sophos Endpoint Protection installed and Up2Date.

From the story in LinkedIn: New Crypto-Ransomware Emerge in the Wild 

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Now that I know who my phone is trying to talk to, what do I do about it?

As a follow up to my previous post Do you know who your phone is talking to when you're not looking? Discovering who my phone was trying to talk to turned out to be who all the phones in my house, along with every machine with Chrome as a web browser, were trying to talk to.  The great and mysterious 1e100.net.   Seeing the massive volume of dropped packets on my new Sophos UTM Home Edition firewall, intrusion prevention, antivirus virtual (now physical) appliance led me to a few other discoveries.  Since the replacement of my Airport Extreme as my only barrier between my devices and the chaotic cesspool of infection that is "The Internet" I, along with my wife and daughter discovered that our Android (read Google) phones suddenly had less than half the battery life they did before.

Being the curious fellow I am I followed that path until I discovered that our phones were experiencing something called wlan_rx_wake and the general consensus is that it is a DHCP or 5GHz issue, or router issue.  No one has yet been able to track the root cause 100%.

If you factor in all of the above, and consider that I am using Chrome on all of my devices, which are all logged into the same google account so that I can open tabs on my phone that I left open on my laptop, etc.  And the fact that all of this information is collected and used by Google in order to make happen, it makes  perfect sense, to me at least, that this is the root cause of my problem.

I have tried turning off DHCP and going with sttic IP and switching off 5GHz which made no difference so i am left with either not using Chrome (something i don't think I can do) or figuring out how to allow all of 1e100.net into my network

So far, using Sophos UTM 9.2 I have been unable to get the firewall/NAT/Application pools correct so that these two underlying domain networks are allowed in, while sitll properly NATing my network.

This is another thing.  Within Sophos, I am masquerading my internal  IP addresses into the External IP.  How then is is possible for these inbound, net new, connections from the 1e100.net network not only gettingi dropped when I have atempted to allow it, They still show up as attempting to  communicate directly to my internal iP  enstead of connecting to The externlal IP where i hae routes defined just wating to pass the informatin aloon.

Maybe my few follower can help me out.  My new level of CDO is such that now that I know the problem is there, it must be fixed.

More to follow my friends, as I figure this thing out.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Do you know who your phone is talking to when you're not looking?

Anyone who knows me knows that I love my gadgets.  It's not enough to have a gadget.  I must know how it works from the inside out, every hidden easter egg from the developers, every possible menu item.  I have had phones that I have rooted, installed custom ROMs, I have left some completely stock.  The same goes for applications for my phone.  I tend to gravitate to android based phones, sorry Apple, no offense, I love your products too.  Over the years I have beta tested many an android app.  some good, some.. well..

All of that to prep for this.

I recently jumped on the #Sophos bandwagon due to work and my general curiosity of learning something new.  What does this mean?  Well for me, its downloading everything I can get my hands on, and Sophos offers loads of free stuff for folks to test their wares.

I installed Sophos UTM 9.2 (the free for home use virtual appliance) on my wifes mac mini since it was the closest to the router and had an extra thunderbolt connection... <She is/was not amused with this but that is a different story>

After the initial setup, turning every setting on, having fun with the kids (captured wifi portals are cool), I finally have the setup in what I would call a stable run condition.

Now we come to the title of  this post.

It became quite clear very quickly that there are WAY too many applications, networks, protocols trying to talk to devices within my network.  Come on Apple, do you *have* to have that many UDP ports to make things happen?  I remember when it was easy enough to put a rule in that said, if my laptop started the conversation, NAT the return requests and allow them through.  Well that works.  What doesn't work is when you have an app that registers you on a service, then who knows what network or port will attempt to send you a push update, or poll your device to see if you are still there.

When it comes to my android phone, I have many apps that I have grown to depend on, these apps pretty much go dormant when I am connected to my Wifi now, then wake up when I turn wifi off or go outside.  I have been going through the logs and making rules to allow the applications and protocols through that I deem worthy but then I came across a few networks that were blacklisted, based out of country, and not so savory.  Taking inventory of my phone I do not see any obvious contenders.  In fact, I recently received a new tablet from my employer and have taken great care to only install corporate-ish type apps that I would use for work purposes only.  But yet, there it is in my firewall log file, unsolicited inbound connection attempts to this device as well.

I will follow up with another post when I find out the culprit, but to all my friends, make sure you are using some kind firewall at home.  Use antivirus/antispyware on EVERY device, yes even your phone.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Obtained a new domain name

Went out today and obtained philipjmorrison.com for the sole purpose of posting my up-to-date résumé.
So if you are so inclined, take a peek.

Phil's Résumé