The US-CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) recently gave a presentation on what China has been doing to hack anything they can hack with the goal of stealing intellectual property, money and personally identifiable information. While most public sector schools and government agencies are generally not vast repositories of intellectual property, they do manage and transfer […]

We constantly harp on all of you segregating third-party vendor equipment on to vendor VLANs.   The purpose of that is to keep third-party vendor equipment completely away from your internal network.  Ideally, we don’t want these vendors to see, touch, or ask your internal network anything.

Last month on January 22nd the US Dept of Homeland Security took the unusual step of issuing Emergency Directive 19-01 to all Federal Agencies.   The directive issued steps that had to be taken by those agencies to mitigate potential DNS infrastructure tampering.

This tech tidbit is a reprise of a tidbit we sent out back in June of 2018.   You may have missed this post back then as it was the end of the school year and preparing for summer was upon all of us.  But, I wanted to bring it to all your attention again.

The FBI came to visit us last week.  No it wasn’t an investigation.  It was for CSI’s 3rd annual Security Event.  I have talked about the topic of Cyber Threats in person and on-line, but our Supervisory Special Agent had a few interesting things to say beyond the topics Bob and I have been discussing […]

This week’s Tech Tidbit is short and sweet. If you have a server or device that is internet facing, make sure you have a real, commercial SSL certificate on it.   Do not use a self-signed certificate.   I don’t really care that it is just for “internal” use and you are smart enough to bypass the […]

One of the key features of the newest firewalls and intrusion protection systems (IPS) has been the addition of something called GeoBlocking. This feature allows the administrator to shut down traffic to or from specific countries or regions of the world and your local network regardless of any other firewall permissions in place.

Trend Micro has stated many times that you have approximately 4 minutes between when a threat enters your network and the infection breaks out. But who can respond that quickly? I have often said if we leave questions on the computer up to our end users, we have failed.

At some point in your life, you probably were locked out of something – your house, your car, your office.  I am sure it was awful trying to figure out how you were going to solve that problem.   However, to add to your stress, we now have all this sensitive data online and on our […]

It is important to have accountability to the taxpayers independently proving that each school district has adequate financial controls in place and is properly managing the money it has been entrusted.  In this era of identity theft, ransomware, and electronic financial theft, it is equally important to have adequate technical controls in place to protect […]