Weekly Tech Tidbit – External Vulnerability Scans

Do you know how secure you are from the outside world?  Maybe you’re new and inherited a network, or there has been so much churn over the years with servers being added and retired and software previously available in-house now being hosted?   Maybe you have just lost track of patching? Regardless of the reason, a […]

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Weekly Tech Tidbit – E-mail protection mechanisms – Employing SPF  

This tidbit is starting a series on understanding some mechanisms available to you for protecting e-mail sent from your domain.   We covered this topic in this month’s Tech Talk / SYSOP meetings but for all those that missed them or those that want a refresher I am covering this again here in this series.

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Weekly Tech Tidbit -Reboot before Updates

Another short and sweet tidbit. When you are installing software, updates, patches, etc., reboot your server.   I can’t tell you the number of times that my “updates” fail because there is a “pending restart” from a previous update. If your update fails after the reboot, it is the update that is the issue.

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Weekly Tech Tidbit – Cisco Firepower IPS Intrusion Event refresher   

This tidbit is a refresher on looking at Cisco Firepower Intrusion Event logs and daily reports. Specifically, I wanted to review for all of you again the meaning of two key columns, the Impact and Inline Result columns The Firepower Impact scale is designed to help the recipient understand where to focus scarce resources first.

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Weekly Tech Tidbit – Vendor Support Contracts

This one is short and sweet. Once in a while we encounter equipment or software that you have purchased elsewhere, but you want CSI to actively support you with it moving forward.   The reality with some of these vendors is that we are not allowed to call for technical assistance or even to place a […]

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Weekly Tech Tidbit – 4 Hour On-Site?

Often we all don’t get true clarity on the importance of certain issues until you are living them.  That is why for instance Dutchess County BOCES attempts to do a yearly, live, full DR test.  It is amazing what you find out when you actually force yourself to go production on plan B.  Documentation is […]

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Weekly Tech Tidbit – Secure your DNS

Keeping up with my theme on DNS related posts, this week I will again reprise a post from over a year ago on the importance of implementing proper control of DNS as part of your malware protection program.   It remains as valuable part of your overall all network and security management policies.

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