Businesses may be prompted to review the security features of their corporate VPN connection in the wake of the largest credit card theft in US history.

At the US district court in Boston, Albert Gonzalez, a 28-year-old college dropout from Florida, has just pleaded guilty on two charges of conspiracy to gain unauthorised access to payment card networks, reports AFP.

Working alongside two Russian accomplices, who remain at large, he is believed to have helped steal more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers.

Mr Gonzalez ’s extensive knowledge of different types of computer network, such as the popular VPN connection, was used to obtain details from over 250 high-profile companies including convenience store chain 7-Eleven and card payment processor Heartland Payment Systems.

Now that he has pleaded guilty, Mr Gonzalez will have to wait till March 2010 to learn his punishment.

The two judges responsible for sentencing are expected to order that he serves between 17 and 25 years in prison.

Reuters reports that US district judge Douglas Woodlock told him in court: “You face a considerable amount of time in jail as a result of your plea. All aspects of your life are to be affected.”

Last month, security specialist Tufin Technologies gave several pieces of advice concerning how to protect a corporate VPN connection.

It suggested that companies maintained a log of all failed attempts to access the VPN connection and firewall.

Moreover, businesses were encouraged to restrict access only to certain IP addresses and regularly test their systems.

The spread and accessibility of broadband VPN connections could benefit from new plans announced by the Conservatives to bring high-speed internet to the whole country by 2017.

Currently, local VPN connections are most easily accessed by users with fast broadband connections, however, there are still some areas of the country where the web speeds on offer fall below optimum standards.

Shadow Chancellor George Osborne said that speeds of up to 100Mbps would be available to everyone in the country under a new plan partly funded by the BBC license fee.

The new network of high-speed lines would make it easier than ever for people to access broadband VPN connection from locations all around the country.

At the moment, people accessing broadband VPN are at an advantage if they are in areas with well-provisioned internet access, such as city centres (although even there, they are still at the mercy of contention and web congestion).

The full usefulness of broadband VPN connections would be unleashed by the new high speed network, allowing people to access their office networks at reasonable speeds no matter whereabouts in the UK they are.

The popularity of broadband VPN use has risen in recent years as more people choose to work remotely from home and more offices implement VPN connections as a way of connecting remote locations.

The new plan has also been tipped to help the economy: “In the 21st Century let’s build the super-fast broadband network that will create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Britain,” said Mr Osborne.

Many business customers want to know how they can access company networks on their mobile.

With a virtual private network, anybody with the necessary details and a modern smartphone such as the Google Nexus One can check spreadsheets, shared folders and much more.

Here’s everything you’ll need to know about how to set up a virtual private network on your Nexus One.

The first thing you need to do is tap the ‘menu’ button and select ’settings’ from the homepage.

In the ‘wireless and networks’ folder, you’ll find an option called ‘VPN settings’ that invites you to ‘add VPN’.

The next step in the process requires a bit of background knowledge about the VPN protocol.

There’s a choice of ‘add PPTP VPN’, ‘add L2TP VPN’, ‘add L2TP/IPSec PSK VPN’ and ‘Add L2TP/IPSec CRT VPN’.

Next up, it’s time to fill in the blanks by entering the name of the VPN, choosing the VPN server and setting DNS search domains.

Once you’ve provided details about the VPN connection, you’ll need to retrace your steps through the same menus and select your newly added network.

This will trigger a dialogue box that invites you to enter your security details before at last accessing the company’s VPN.

Launched on January 5th 2010, the Nexus One is expected to become a popular choice of smartphone for the business community.

It can provide up to 6.5 hours of Wi-Fi internet access or 7 hours of talk time between charges.

As you’d expect, the phone is also set up to handle Google Apps, which currently boasts more than 2 million business clients.

Winter is the most popular time of the year for hackers to take advantage of staff holidays and a lack of emphasis on security to access and manipulate a company’s VPN, it has been claimed.

Research by US company Tufin Technologie, carried out on a group of hackers, revealed that as many as 81% of them viewed the winter period as the best time to gain access to business VPN connections.

Whether the motive is simple high jinks or something more criminally minded, many companies find that low levels of staff over the Christmas period and into the New Year prompt hackers to take advantage by breaking into VPNs, with common effects such as disrupted content and sensitive data being viewed by unauthorised people.

The research also revealed that weekday evenings are the most popular times for hackers to gain access to company VPNs. One of the biggest weaknesses highlighted by those surveyed was the firewalls, specifically installed to protect the VPN, with 86% of hackers claiming they could gain access to any system via the firewall.

To help businesses protect themselves and their VPNs over quiet staffing periods, Tufin Technologies offered some advice on measures that can be taken, which include testing the system regularly, restricting access only to certain IP addresses, logging all failed attempts to access the VPN and firewall and making sure that all updates and patches are as recent as possible.

The US Postal Service has renewed its managed VPN contract with AT&T, which provides them with one of the biggest managed VPN networks in the world.

The contract was originally won in 2003 and sees the provision of a massive managed VPN network throughout the United States, with over 5,500 US Postal Service facilities installed with managed VPN hardware and services.

The project as a whole has been named PATN, for Postal Advanced Telecommunications Network, and the managed VPN is supplied using AT&T’s Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network, alongside firewall, IP address and router management services. Also in the contract are interactive voice response, engineering and network design services.

One of the biggest challenges of this particular managed VPN contract is providing network access to thousands of retail points of sale throughout the country, and making sure they are all connected and running smoothly on a day to day basis.

The US Postal Service also provides Blackberry 8800 handsets to 5,400 of its employees, providing additional flexibility to the managed VPN.

The renewal of this contract, at a cost of $120 million for four years, means The Postal Service becomes one of AT&T’s biggest customers worldwide. This is just part of an estimated $600 million spent by the US Postal Service each year on telecommunications services, including the managed VPN, data and video services.

Such a large managed VPN will require a huge amount of resource to maintain its security and integrity and AT&T will be hoping to maintain this over the next four years.

Recent figures suggest that many school pupils are using proxy servers to bypass school VPNs to help them gain access to banned websites, such as gaming sites and social networking sites.

The research shows that use of ‘proxies’ has risen sharply in recent years with young pupils becoming ever more tech savvy and finding ways around the restrictions installed on school VPN connections.

Many schools set their VPN configuration to restrict access to certain non-educational sites but proxy server sites allow them to simply type the URL of the site they want to visit into their page and then view the site anyway. Any monitoring facility built into the school’s VPN would show the computer as viewing only one site – the proxy site – and not any further web activity.

As well as the issue of pupils using their learning time effectively, there are also security concerns, with large VPNs, such as those used in schools, being prone to attack from malicious software and viruses. Accessing banned sites through proxy servers opens the VPN up to potential software threats and even cyber criminals, who can manipulate or even damage machines or whole VPNs.

It is possible to block certain proxy servers but there are so many of them as to render a complete block impossible – M86 Security, who monitor such sites, counted just over 7,000 in 2006, a figure that has risen to around 91,000 in 2009. New innovations in VPN security are beginning to curb this trend, however, and pupils have reported that they are finding it more and more difficult to get around VPN restrictions.

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