I’m surprised how little (if anything) I’ve heard about the iPhone being the catalyst for mobile viruses. You know the iPhone will get cheaper and with Cingular/AT&T subsidies, it may gain a very large “surface area” and that is what is attractive to virus writers: that and the notoriety of being the first (or one of) to unleash a mobile virus into the wild. Clamping down the OS will help protect (at least for a short while) the iPhone from the nefarious fate that will eventually be bestowed upon it.

I have been seeing an increase in attempts during the past month of the Sagevo Worm. It attempts to exploit Symantec Client Security and Symantec AntiVirus Elevation of Privilege issues by connecting to TCP port 2967 and pushing out about 4628 bytes to create a buffer overrun condition. Fortunately, I have this port blocked by Firestarter on my Linux firewall, but nonetheless, it is interesting to watch the activity.

Read on to see a chart of the number of attacks per day.
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I’m a big fan of Vonage and with all of the great hardware deals and cheap prices, it’s easy to say yes. Until you have a problem that is. To be fair, my first Linksys WRTP54G was defective (bad phone line port) and last night’s problem was very trying as I was on the phone with an outsourced Vonage tech support representative (whom I had a very difficult time understanding) and followed a checklist of standard troubleshooting items. This exercise was not in vain as I did find a solution as he was walking me through the laundry list.

Problem: All phone calls (received or made) had a complete loss of audio on the Vonage side. When I made a call, I had dial tone, heard the ringing and when someone answered, they could hear me but I had complete silence. When I received a call, if it worked, I would have two-way communication for up to maybe ten seconds before I lost audio (although the other party could hear me well).

Solution: Earlier in the day I added a device (wireless router) to my local network with a hard-wired IP address which just happened to be the same as my Vonage router. I usually give all my server devices static IP addresses and follow a format for numbering them. It’s odd that I did not see any conflicting IP address messages anywhere and both devices appeared to function. As soon as I removed the conflicting device (or changed its IP address), my Vonage service went back to normal.