Our man Dave Lewis has a great post on CSO Online, When Disaster Comes Calling, about the importance of making sure your disaster recovery plan actually can help you when you have, uh, a disaster. Folks don’t always remember that sometimes success is living to fight another day.
Last year we documented our thoughts on buying Endpoint Security Management offerings, which basically include patch, configuration, device control, and file integrity monitoring – increasingly bundled in suites to simplify management. We planned to dig into the evolution of endpoint security suites earlier this year but the fates intervened and we got pulled into other research initiatives. Which is just as well because these endpoint security and management offerings have consolidated more…
Windows Azure SQL Database, formely known as SQL Azure, is Microsoft’s managed database platform in Azure. While it is based on Microsoft SQL Server, it has various limitations that can impact how you secure and manage it. It also has some features that can help improve security.
I picked this one up from Slashdot (yes, I still read it sometimes):
Following a blog post by security company Secunia, VideoLAN (vendor of popular VLC media player) president Jean-Baptiste Kempf accuses Secunia of lying in a blog post titled ‘More lies from Secunia.’ It seems that Secunia and Jean-Baptiste Kempf have different views on whether a vulnerability has been patched.
Many people focus (often wrongly) on the new risks of cloud computing, but I am far more interested in leveraging cloud computing to improve security.
Before she left for camp XX1 asked me to download her iPhone photos to our computer, so she could free up some space. Evidently 16gb isn’t enough for these kids today. What would Ken Olson say about that? (Dog yummy for those catching the reference.) I happened to notice that a large portion of her pictures were these so-called selfies. Not in a creeper, micro-managing Dad way, but in a curious, so that’s what the kids are up to today way. A selfie is where you take a picture of yourself (and…
As I discussed in Black Hat Preview: Automating Cloud Security Policy Compliance, you can combine Amazon S3 and IAM roles to securely provision configuration files (or any other files) and credentials to Amazon EC2 or VPC instances. Here are the details.
Our last post described how to use Amazon EC2, S3, and IAM as a framework to securely and automatically download security policies and credentials. That’s the infrastructure side of the problem, and this post will show what you need to do to the instance to connect to this infrastructure, grab the credentials, install and configure Chef, and connect to the Chef server. The advantage of this structure is that you don’t need to embed credentials into your machine image, and you can use stock…
Malware is a pervasive problem in enterprises today. It can often be insidious as hell and difficult to ferret out. But sometimes the response to a malware outbreak defies basic common sense. The CIO for the Economic Development Administration (EDA) thought a scorched earth policy was the best approach…
Today on the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog:
Under the policy, developers will have a maximum of 180 days to submit an updated app for security vulnerabilities that are not under active attack and are rated Critical or Important according to the Microsoft Security Response Center rating system. The updated app must be submitted to the store within 180 days of the first report that reproduces the issue. Microsoft reserves the right to take swift action in all cases, which may include…