One of the essential tech skills I am always on the prowl for is a way to use technology to solve a complicated problem. Of course, one of the most useful ways to do this is to learn and apply simple programming skills. PERL is one of those scripting languages that is easy to get [...]
Egress filtering is one of the most often underestimated defenses today. We continue to see organizations that have not yet deployed strong egress filtering, which is one of the most effective controls in defending against and detecting bot-nets. Without it, outbound connections are usually a mystery to the security team and identification and interception of [...]
I was so pleased with the news from my team yesterday that we are just about ready for the formal release of the HoneyPoint physical appliance. We are putting the final polish on the devices and they will be ready for release by the end of next week. The virtual appliance is now going into [...]
A new law was enacted on February 17th of this year that expands the HIPAA privacy rule to include “business associates” of health care providers. This law also sets a new requirement for notifying individuals in the event that their private health information (PHI) has been compromised and gives State Attorneys General new powers to [...]
Just as we expected, the exploit for the Web Office 0-day has been integrated into existing bot-net spread attacks. SANS and other folks began reporting that SQL injection compromises have now been tuned to include defacements with the embedded Web Office exploit. These SQL injection attacks that lead to defacement, along with the recent spate [...]
Here is a PDF of the risk assessment and review of this emerging vulnerability. Please check it out if you are working on mitigating this issue. While the corporate risk is identified as an overall medium, there is a high risk of workstation infection from this problem. Check out the document here. Vuln RA 071409 [...]
OK, so we have been aware of a couple of cracked versions of HoneyPoint Personal Edition for a while now. The older version was cracked just before the 2.00 release and made its way around the torrent sites. We did not pay much attention to it, since we believe that most people are honest and [...]
What an interesting week! South Korea and the United States experienced attacks on computers with a nasty virus that supposedly today, erased data from computers that had not been updated with anti-virus software. Korea DDOS virus mission shifts to destroying, erasing data IBM researches rolled out new technology to mask sensitive data. Their approach differs [...]
I came upon this story today, which should remind every hospital guard administrator of Pogo’s wry observation, “We have met the enemy and he is US.” On Friday the federal authorities arrested Jesse William McGraw on a charge of felony computer intrusion, saying he intended to use the botnet to launch a massive distributed denial [...]
When your worst fears become a reality and you notice there has been some breech of your data (a stolen laptop, an unlocked or unattended computer) and someone has either access to your machine or has a copy of it for themselves, is there any hope left? Although most don’t think it’s necessary, encrypting data [...]