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Synology Vulnerability and Ransomware

In the early Sunday morning of August 3, 2014, a tweet by Mike Evangelist was linked on Hacker News.

Lovely. My @Synology NAS has been hacked by ransomware calling itself Synolocker. Not what I wanted to do today. pic.twitter.com/YJ1VLeKqfY

Mike Evangelist Tweet Synology Synolocker

I was somewhat scared by this news as some users at Synology forums reported that they were also victims of  SynoLocker which is a CryptoLocker malware which specifically targets Synology NAS. I am managing numbers of Synology NAS for a few small offices and homes. Granted that none of them are directly connected to the Internet, but I have to make sure none of them would be hacked and crypto-locked.

Make sure your Synology NAS is running the latest DSM Operating System.

Synology Software Update

For now, disable the QuickConnect service.

Synology Disable QuickConnect

Disable all port-forwarding if your Synology DiskStation is behind a NAT Firewall. This is a definite inconvenience; better to be safe than sorry.

More importantly, back-up the content of your Synology NAS. Should anything happen, you still have your data. My colleague has a great advice on backing up:

As always, if you have data on your Synology that you consider irreplaceable, make sure that you have it backed up to. I’d recommend using the built in Amazon S3 client. It’s cheap and fairly easy to set up, and should help you in case of a disaster.

I personally also run a backup to another hard drive locally for rapid recovery.

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Enemy Territory: Legacy

ET Legacy

Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (RTCW:ET or ET)is one of a few games that I regularly play in the past 10 years. Well, I have not been playing ET using my own account for the past 13 months because the binaries are not fully compatible with OS X Mavericks, starting with the Developer Preview 1.

Just a few weeks ago, my colleague told me that new build of Enemy Territory: Legacy is working fine on OS X Mavericks.

Enemy Territory: Legacy is:

Open-source team based FPS game compatible with Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory™

Shortly after I am now back on the game. My colleagues and I can be found at ETForever.com.

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OS X Tips: Always Display Scroll Bars

OS X Show Scroll Bars

For those who missed the scroll bar in OS X Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks (Yosemite too), fear not. Just go to System Preferences > General. Select “Always” on “Show scroll bars” option.

Well, this is one of the frequently asked questions I received from people who upgraded from OS X Snow Leopard to Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks.

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Securifi Almond, Part 1

Almond-Securifi

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Securifi Almond but I have never used one. Just this past week, I found one of the wireless router at the office need to be replaced. That is one good excuse to get one. I hesitated a little bit because we had recently upgraded the network to Gigabit Ethernet; Securifi Almond does not have Gigabit Ethernet support. The upcoming Securifi Almond+ will have Gigabit Ethernet support.

I should be getting the unit sometimes soon.