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 […]
Weekly Tech Tidbit – Make Sure All Internet Facing Devices Use Commercial SSLs
Weekly Tech Tidbit – Where oh where is my data really going?????
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.
Weekly Tech Tidbit – While You Were Sleeping – The Importance of a Security Operations Center
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.
Weekly Tech Tidbit – I gotta new phone … oh no! The dark side of multi-factor authentication
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 […]
Weekly Tech Tidbit – I’m from the state and I’m here to help! – Surviving a technology audit
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 […]
Weekly Tech Tidbit – The growing importance of logging in your network security plan
When something goes sideways in our technical worlds some of the first questions we get asked, after “when is XXXX going to be back up”, is “what happened?” and “why did it happen?” For sure if the event in question is a security or data breach event the urgency to answer these questions ratchets up […]
Weekly Tech Tidbit – Important new notice from US-CERT – Actions required to protect your networks
**Note – Client tech directors in Dutchess County got a preview of this Tuesday so if you are in that group you may skip the rest of this note and go on to your next e-mail. For the rest of you please read on** On Tuesday, May 29th, I received an updated alert from US-CERT […]
Weekly Tech Tidbits – Baby steps to better security
We have been discussing a whole lot of security issues over this past year. Many of you are already moving forward to address many of our recommendations. However, some of you are paralyzed in figuring out how to absorb some of the new costs for the new security technologies that your district now absolutely requires […]
Weekly Tech Tidbit – If only we had…. a sharing of lessons learned from those hit with a security incident on their networks
While we can never say, all is well in the world of network security, this week I feel I can write to you about something other than a US-CERT alert. This week’s topic – an interesting Cisco Talos blog post on the top 5 recommendations the Cisco Incident Response Team, looking back over the past […]
Weekly Tech Tidbit – Warning, Warning – Danger Will Robinson – Change your passwords
As I write this, Netflix is bringing back a new version of “Lost in Space”. Hopefully, it is better than the movie and truer to the original series. Bob has been on a roll with US-Cert announcements (danger, danger Will Robinson) about threats the last few weeks.