News

In the last issue of Network Computing, the upgrading of www6 has been described in view of the application side (Ref: Upgrading www6: The Application Side). In this article, we shall look at the infrastructure aspects of the upgrade. In July 2011, the www6 system (front-end and back-end components) had gone through major hardware upgrades with new servers, storage and infrastructure, to improve the web hosting service of www6 to take up more hosting services. The service was further enhanced with the latest software technology (such as IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and MS SQL Server 2008 R2 Clustering) to ensure compatibility, reliability, security and performance.

The central web hosting service has been set up for many years to provide a consolidated, fully monitored and managed environment for hosting departmental web sites and project web sites. The hardware and the software of the central web service are maintained and supported by the Computing Services Centre (CSC) while the web page contents and applications are developed and maintained by the departments. To enhance the performance and to provide a more secure, more reliable and more efficient web hosting environment, the hardware and software of the central web servers (www6.cityu.edu.hk) and database servers (sqlcluster1.cityu.edu.hk) have been upgraded in July 2011.

Every day, a large amount of sensitive information and data are being transferred through emails or movable devices. Security threats increase as emails are uncontrollable after leaving the senders while movable devices can be lost or stolen easily. Hence, it is important to secure sensitive information and data so that undesirable consequences can be avoided even though they fall into the hands of malicious people.

 

Microsoft launched its latest web browser Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in mid-March 2011. In comparison with IE8 and IE7, IE9 is clearly faster, cleaner and safer than its predecessors. In addition, Microsoft has derived a table to show that IE9 outperforms some rival browsers in terms of performance, ease of use, security, reliability, privacy, web standards supported and compatibility, and developer tools supported (see References below).

Introduction Since the CityU Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) has rapidly become an essential requirement for the University community, the usability and stability of the WLAN service is therefore very important. In this regard, the Computing Services Centre (CSC) has decided to conduct performance tests periodically to closely monitor the quality of the service. The test results will enable us to make further improvement.

 

/* The following article is extracted from the "Information Security Newsletter" published by the JUCC IS Task Force. */ Cloud computing inherits security vulnerabilities from the Internet and makes them more significant when incorporating resource concentration and multi-tenancy sharing approach. Major cloud-specific vulnerabilities include: (1) Economic Denial of Service; (2) Compromise of Service Engine; (3) Interception and Leakage of Data in Transit

/* The following article is extracted from the "Information Security Newsletter" published by the JUCC IS Task Force. */ The benefits of cloud computing are both a friend and a foe from a security point of view. The massive concentrations of resources and shared usage pattern present a more attractive target to attackers and exposure to new security concerns. Universities should consider the risks and vulnerabilities prior to migrate to the cloud. Examples of these risks are:

/* The following article is extracted from the "Information Security Newsletter" published by the JUCC IS Task Force. */ IaaS includes the entire computing infrastructure resources stack from the facilities to the hardware platforms that reside in them. It provides limited application-like features but enormous extensibility. This generally means less integrated security capabilities and functionalities offered on the part of the cloud providers. As such, the security measures at IaaS are mainly managed and secured by the customers.

The Computing Services Centre (CSC) announced on 25 May 2011 that the university will cease the support of Windows Vista (Win Vista, SP1 and SP2) upon the termination of support for Vista SP1 by Microsoft starting August 2011 (actually, Microsoft officially terminated the support of Win Vista SP1 on 12 July 2011.) As there were many deficiencies in Win Vista and Win Vista SP2 has not been tested on campus machines, users were recommended to switch to Windows 7 (Win 7) as soon as possible instead of wasting two hours to upgrade to Win Vista SP2.

It is always recommended that a strong password should be used to resist guessing and brute-force attacks and lower the risk of security breach. An account with a weak password, such as a word in dictionary, can easily be broken by a hacker. He/She may then read, modify or delete all your files and even use your account to attack systems in the university. You may then ask: how do I know if my password is strong and good enough?