What to charge this biz monthly for services.

[0gr3]

I personally agree with @ncient geek on this one, I work for a corporate help desk with thousands of PC's remotely connecting through a VPN as well as thousands connecting in the office via a LAN and with the exception of the Confiker virus and Developer machines I think I have only seen one or two cases in my time here where a user has been infected. With properly locked down machines, firewalls and anti-virus to name a few of the measures I doubt you will see many if any intrusions of that sort.

 

[angry_geek]

Then it is unlikely that you have worked in any corporate environment. Some of the companies we work for have dozens, even hundreds of laptops in external services. All of these connect through VPN to home base.

I haven't seen an infected (business) laptop in years if it is correcxtly configured

Then I guess when conficker ran like wildfire through the various British government system and a dozen other government and education systems around the world, it was because they weren't configured properly. Granted, I'm only assuming, but I would suspect that these agencies (at least the governments) have pretty decent IT staffs, and they still got nailed.

I work on several corporate networks including hospitals and now a good sized oil company. I also work on businesses as small as one-man-ops at home and some as large as international distributors and even a couple of international charity orgs. The only machines I saw conficker on were a couple of home users that called me in a panic; none of my business clients got hit. I'd say that's a pretty good indication that I have things set up pretty well.

To say business machines (even properly configured) are immune to attack is like saying you have a hurricane, tornado, earthquake proof home. No matter how well it's built, it can come down. And to just dismiss someone out of hand without knowing anything about them by saying ". . . unlikely that you have worked in any corporate environment" is just arrogant. I'm not questioning your ability or experience. I'm just asking you to return the favor to us. This is not a pissing match to say how great or how big our companies are. It's a forum for discussion. Please don't take any offense to this.

 

[0gr3]

The only machines I saw conficker on were a couple of home users that called me in a panic; none of my business clients got hit.

I would be interested in knowing what you did to stop it - Without giving away trade secrets of course - , who I work for got raped - Pardon the vulgarity please - when it came on through. Now said company is stupid as all get out but still fairly well set up.

 

[angry_geek]

I would be interested in knowing what you did to stop it - Without giving away trade secrets of course - , who I work for got raped - Pardon the vulgarity please - when it came on through. Now said company is stupid as all get out but still fairly well set up.

We just stayed on top of updates for the several months it was running around. We also had all our firewalls and av updating daily. I did see a few of the firewalls blocking the intrusion. CNN did a good job of scaring everyone into submission, and generally got lucky.

 

[angrypug]

I'm working on setting up a retainer for a large church here in town.

I want to do them well since they are a church but I have to make a living as well. I am just writing up a contract which I work up to X amount of hours at a given price per month and anything over the agree'd upon hours is charged regular rate. If I work less than the agree'd hours, then the customer just loses those hours. Theres no rollover.

Just getting this wrote up so I will see how it turns out.

 

[angry_geek]

With churches and other npo's, I sell a block of hours at a discounted rate. It's good for the church, you make money, and you get a nice tax break.

 

[krutoi]

I would be interested in knowing what you did to stop it (conficker)

OpenDNS can cripple it and also show if your network is infected - here's their blog entry from back in February -- OpenDNS Blog

 

[PatrickB]

Sorry to be off-topic, but in reply ...

krutoi, I wonder if OpenDNS can still effectively block -- not 250 -- but 50,000 possible domains per day. I hope so since I frequently encourage the use of OpenDNS.

See "Security Now" podcast transcript of Steve Gibson on April 23.
http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-193.htm

No. Well, no. What happened was its behavior changed. It suddenly began querying, it began generating 50,000 domains, up from 250, so to 50,000, from which 500 would be randomly selected. And not only that, but whereas A, the A variant used the five most popular top level domains, and the B variant added those three more - ws, cn, and cc - the C variant uses 110 different TLDs. I mean, just about everything you can think of. And that creates a huge problem because these are TLDs literally spread globally and under the control of a phenomenal number of registrars. Beforehand, all you had to deal with was the registrars who were registrars for .com, .net, .org, .info, and .biz; and then later ws, cn, and cc. Now, if you're going to preemptively register, you've got a big problem. Not only do you have to preemptively register 50,000 domain names per day, but you've got to do them with all the registrars controlling these 110 possible top level domains.

-- Patrick B.