ZoHa Islands is turning 10!  In celebration of this wonderful achievement in Second Life, we’d like to announce our annual fall celebration with a 10 hr performance, with 10 great live performers and 10 exciting prizes (TBA).

October 27th, 2017!! Mark them calendars!

Yes that’s a whole lot of 10’s and we are sure this will be a 10 of an event as well.  We hope to see you all there!

Here is a tease preview of a little bit of what we have in store for you who make ZoHa Islands the success it is today!

1PM – 2PM SLT 

s posting some of her latest music to YouTube. Never one to settle and languish, Mimi’s shows continue to share her journey always moving forward in life and music. ~Written by Garrett Lutz~

4PM – 5PM SLT

 

Melenda Mikael’s love of singing started very young when she’d follow the sound of her grandmother’s singing throughout the house. Embarking in a life of singing from age six, Melenda started with choir, then progressed to musicals and singing competitions, where she earned the highest of praises, during her formative years. Growing up, she soaked up as much music everywhere she went. That diverse background is the reason that her shows in Second Life can run the gamut from Radiohead covers to jazz standards and Etta James. Some might characterize her as a quiet wallflower at first, and some may even find her voice to be tender as well. But make no mistake, Melenda’s voice is capable of belting out something powerful.

Continuing to sing, on and off, with several choir groups since growing up, Melenda has just recently made the leap to the live music scene here in Second Life. Currently, her shows are performed to backing tracks. But rest assured, she’s hard at work learning guitar, though she jokingly says one of the small road bumps is learning to tame an unwieldy, large guitar. She is forever grateful for the people that have helped gently push her down this path and she hopes that you enjoy the music. ~Written by Garrett Lutz~

5PM – 6PM SLT

SAMM QENDRA

Via Ms Qendrs’s Profile..such serne words.

Music is the way I speak
way i express my deepest emotions
when i sing , everything seems possible
When i sing , For once , theres only me in the universe where i can just be me
My musical Influence is LIFE
each and every bit of supports that i blessfully get in sl , is what keep me going ♥

6PM – 7PM SLT 

CRYPTIC HARMONY

8PM – 9PM SLT 

9PM – 10PM SLT 

10PM – 11PM SLT 

11PM – 12PM SLT 

GIBSON

‘Can someone find a user’s identity (name, home address, etc.) simply by having their email or IP address or while playing in a game? I’m asking because I posted to an online forum, and both my email and IP address were displayed publicly. Does that give others the ability to find my actual geographic location? Can I be tracked down in any way?’ Read on to learn the answer to this common question…

Are You Invisible Online?

It’s true that your IP address is no secret. It’s a basic part of internet communication protocols to send your IP address whenever you connect to a website, send an email, make a forum/blog post, chat, play an online game, etc. Without your IP address, the computer on the other end wouldn’t know where to send the reply. Think of it as the return address on an envelope.

But that doesn’t mean that Evildoers can find your home address if they know your IP address. Knowing your IP address does NOT give anyone the power to hack into your computer, NOR does it reveal who or where you are. Typically, each time you go online (if you have dialup) or each time you start your computer (if you have cable, fiber or dsl) you will be assigned an IP address, randomly selected from a pool of IP’s assigned to your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Finding the Physical Address for an IP Address

A person MIGHT be able to get a general idea of your geographic location, based on your IP address, by doing a lookup using a free Geo-IP database, but that will only tell them the physical location of your Internet Service Provider — not YOUR home address. Keep in mind that when you’re at work, your ISP might be your employer. (One easy way to find your current IP address is with the IP Chicken website.)

f you use a large regional or nationwide ISP, the IP lookup probably reveals nothing of interest — either the location of your ISP’s local switching facility, or a placeholder address that corresponds to the center of the town where you live. The IP address for most dialup users will be the location of the ISP’s central office. For AOL subscribers, your IP address lookup will always show the location as Dulles, Virginia — regardless of where you live. And if you’re connecting to a public wifi hotspot in an airport, library or coffee shop, the IP address will be associated with the wireless service provider – not you at all.

Bottom line: The address returned by an IP lookup *could* be within a few miles of your home, or it could be wrong by several orders of magnitude.

When The Law Comes A Knockin’

Of course there is an exception to every rule. If Joe or Jane User calls your ISP and wants to know who was using a certain IP address last Tuesday, the ISP will tell them to go away. But if an officer of the law hands your ISP a court order to reveal that information, they must do so. Your ISP’s logs will enable them to determine which customer was using a certain IP address on a certain date and time, and they must reveal that information if a court has found probable cause that a crime was committed by that person.

For the truly paranoid (or the criminally inclined) there are ways to surf the web anonymously. The Anonymizer service will act as a proxy between you and your ISP, and they claim that your information cannot be subpoenaed because they do not store it.

What About Email Addresses?

The same concepts apply to your email address. The part that follows the “@” sign is the domain name. This can be your ISP, your employer, a webmail provider, or an email forwarding service. Given the domain name, one can determine the owner’s physical location, but nothing personally identifying about the email user without a court order.

Of course, if your email address is something like Jsmith90210@acme-widgets.com, then you’re leaving little to the imagination of a determined hacker or stalker. Web-based email accounts are not truly anonymous, either. Even if you don’t provide your real name when signing up, they can capture your IP address and track you through your ISP if necessary. But again, a court order would be needed.

Other Considerations

It’s much more likely that you or your children will reveal your physical location the old fashioned way — by just blurting it out. Those who chat or play online games should be reminded often that they should never reveal any personal information, including their last name, phone number or home address. And of course, when you make an online purchase, you’re explicitly providing your home address to the merchant.

Oh, and if you have any spyware or viruses on your system, all bets are off. These things are designed to violate your privacy. If you need help with scanning your system for malware and other unwanted pests. See past article’s for details on how to protect yourself from those risks.

Thanks Bob for your insight to this article.

Have a Great Week

ZI Staff.

Zoha Islands Wants To Send Our Thoughts And Prayers To All The Victims Of Hurricane IRMA. With The Devastation Still Ongoing We Hope All Are Safe And Well….

And now on with this weeks blog.

A spammer’s database of 711 million email addresses and passwords, including email server admin credentials, Second Life information and access to your L$, has been discovered on a wide-open Web server in the Netherlands. It’s the biggest trove of stolen identities yet found. But what’s really interesting – and frightening – is how it’s being used to circumvent spam filters and infect victims with malware. Here’s what you need to know, and do…

This Spam-bot Probably

Has Your Email Credentials

The database was discovered by a Paris-based security researcher who goes by the online handle of “Benkow.” He or she has spent months analyzing the data and tracing how it has been used. Benkow says at least 100,000 email accounts have been infected with the Ursnif banking malware via the “On liner” spam-bot that compiled and uses this massive database.

Ursnif scans a victim’s system looking for bank account login credentials in particular, but it will steal anything that looks like login credentials to email, e-commerce, social media, and other accounts. Ursnif uses an unusual technique to infect victims’ systems.

Most malware spam employs a file attachment that triggers the download and execution of malware when it is opened. But many users are (finally) cautious about opening attachments, even if they appear to come from trusted contacts. So On liner embeds an invisible URL in each HTML message it sends. When the message is opened, the URL fetches a pixel-sized image from the spammer’s master server; the tiny image also goes unnoticed.

Along with the URLs request for the image, it also sends info about the target machine, including its operating system and device info. This data tells the spammer whether the target is vulnerable to the Windows-based Ursnif malware. If not, there’s no point in sending Ursnif to that target, and doing so might raise unwanted attention.

Weeks or months after sending the probing email to millions of targets, Onliner sends another email with a disguised attachment to the few thousand Windows targets it has identified. The attachment may be presented as an invoice or some other important document. If the attachment is opened, a JavaScript is triggered that downloads Ursnif malware to infect the victim.

But Wait… There’s More!

Another clever trick allows On-liner to evade email servers’ spam filters. Many filters rely, at least in part, on lists of domains known to host spammers. But with the login credentials of an email server’s administrator account, On-liner can exempt its spam from being filtered. The database Benkow discovered contains over 80 million email servers’ admin credentials.

The database includes the admin credentials of 80 million email servers, which are used to spam 630 million email accounts. Onliner has been infecting victims with credential-stealing malware, but it could switch to “botnet” malware that enslaves victims’ computers to send spam, participate in denial-of-service attacks, and other shenanigans.

Here’s another troubling aspect of this situation. If a hacker has access to a compromised email address and password, they can do what’s called credential surfing. Many people use the same login credentials for multiple online accounts. So a hacker may use your email credentials and attempt to gain access to your online banking, social media, Paypal, eBay or other popular sites.

What You Should Do

On-liner goes to unusual lengths to avoid detection by spam filters and security researchers. You cannot rely on your mail provider’s spam filters to keep you safe. You can check the Have I Been Pwned database to see if your email address was present in this spammer database. But don’t be surprised, and don’t panic if it does. In fact, you should ASSUME your email address and password have been compromised.

You, the end user of email, are still the best and last line of defense. Here’s what I recommend:

• Never click on an attachment without verifying who sent it, and why.
• Change your email password every three months at least.
• Use strong passwords, and never reuse passwords on multiple online accounts.
• Use two-factor authentication whenever possible.

Have A Great Week

Deuce Marjeta

And the Zoha Islands team