Resources

Well, it’s time for another Tech Tidbit from me and right on cue another alert from the National Cyber Awareness system run by the good people at the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has come in that I felt really needed to be highlighted for all of you.

The other day I was sitting in one of our Tech Talk presentations and Bob discussed the importance of Internet of Things (IoT) security.  That made me think of the very real incident that happened in 2017 where a University’s soda machines, light bulbs, and other IoT devices created a denial of service (DoS) attack […]

Many of you may be on the US-Cert alert e-mail list, but I suspect many of you are not.   Since most all of you have Internet-facing devices, or even more likely cloud-based applications (Office 365 / Google Apps, at least), I wanted to make certain that all of our clients “heard” the message contained in […]

We spend huge amounts of time thinking about server and workstation patches, firewall and switch patches and software patches, but when was the last time you thought about the security of your printers? More and more schools are moving away from small classroom printers and towards more sophisticated, multi-function, copier, scanner, printers.

Back on January 29th, there was a flurry of discussion in the IT world about the announcement from Cisco of an Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Remote Code Execution and Denial of Service Vulnerability. Originally announced as only affecting the ASA and latest code versions of the Firepower Threat Defense firewalls, over the next few weeks […]

The Snort IPS engine is at the core of both the Cisco Firepower Threat Defense and Cisco Meraki IPS systems. Maintained by Cisco’s Talos Group, the Snort Engine, and its signatures are licensed to the world via the open source GPL and as such it is the most widely distributed IPS engine in the world.

One area of security we often overlook is that of the servers themselves. Most of our servers have some sort of remote access card built into them to provide remote access in case the server is hung up as well as to provide enhanced alerting of hardware errors.

Short but somewhat scary tidbit from me this week that serves as a reminder that there is a reason that the CSI team advocates: 1 – That we need multiple layers of security protection in our networks since no single tool will catch everything     2 – We need to up the sophistication of […]

You will find on our web site under Webinar recordings, Hardening Active Directory Part I and also Part II. If you haven’t watched those presentations, you should to understand the threat to your Windows networks. One basic concept you can start with is to realize that all the Group Policy security settings are found in […]

For years the best practice, and rules the most auditors hold IT departments to when it comes to secure password policies have included the following: 1 – Passwords should be at least 8 characters minimum and must contain complexity (use at least 1 number, 1 upper case character, and 1 special character)   2 – Passwords […]