GFI LANGuard Tutorial
SecurityDistro.com has published my tutorial on how to use GFI LANGuard to find and resolve security vulnerabilities on your network.
July 15, 2009
Latest Articles
Bruce Schneier on Certificate Authorities
“The CA system is broken, but it works because broken systems tend to be better for society, which needs fluidity in the face of complicated social constructs,” Schneier said. “Systems that are broken but work are very common in the real world: Front door locks are surprisingly pickable. Think of faxed signatures, for example. It’s […]
December 31, 2008
Well-designed security systems fail gracefully, SonicWALL does not
To quote Bruce Schneier, “well-designed security systems fail gracefully”. This means for example when the ISA firewall service fails it closes off network connectivity entirely (ie retains security) instead of opening your entire network up (ie decreases security). This week SonicWALL’s license servers suffered a glitch rendering thousands of customer units useless and leaving the […]
December 6, 2008
SharePoint Security Resources
Microsoft provides two useful resources for MOSS security: Security for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (downloadable book) Office SharePoint Server Security Account Requirements (worksheet) Link: John Westworth’s blog on Technet
November 17, 2008
Steve Riley on hypervisor attacks
You have to ask: is there malware on my system? You can be 100 per cent certain there is no malware that you can detect, but less than 100 per cent certain that there is no malware at all. Now, ladies and gentlemen, isn’t this true of every computer we already have? There is […]
September 5, 2008
White Paper: Configuring Virtual Organizations and Address List Segregation in Exchange 2007
Microsoft has released their own white paper containing guidance on configuring Exchange 2007 for Address List separation. This is something that was pretty easy in Exchange 2003, but suddenly made a lot more complicated and less obvious in Exchange 2007. A bunch of home brew solutions came about some time after Exchange 2007 was released […]
February 8, 2008
Exchange Server 2007 SP1 disables Exchange Anti-spam updates
Here is the anti-spam configuration on an Exchange Server 2007 RTM server: [PS] C:\>Get-AntispamUpdates UpdateMode : Automatic LatestContentFilterVersion : 3.3.4604.600 SpamSignatureUpdatesEnabled : True LatestSpamSignatureVersion : 3.3.4604.600 IPReputationUpdatesEnabled : True LatestIPReputationVersion : 3.3.4604.001 MicrosoftUpdate : NotConfigured And here is the same Exchange Server 2007 server immediately after upgrading to Service Pack 1: [PS] C:\>Get-AntispamUpdates UpdateMode : […]
February 6, 2008
Restricting outbound email with Exchange Server 2007 Transport Rules
In prior versions of Exchange an organisation that wished to restrict who could send outbound internet emails could apply the restriction on an SMTP connector. In this example emails sent to the * address space are rejected by default unless sent by a group listed in the “Accept messages from:” list, for example a group […]
February 5, 2008
Security Spin Cycles
Jeff Jones posted a blog entry to celebrate Red Hat fixing their 1000th unique security vulnerability. He also draws attention to a Red Hat post on their “Truth Happens” blog back in August, which itself quotes a post on Lxer.com. Jeff posts quarterly statistics on his blog that show how many vulnerabilities have been patched for various […]
October 17, 2007
Tom Shinder on “hardware” firewalls
Tom Shinder of ISAServer.org takes an amusing shot at the myth in some circles that a “hardware” firewall or “firewall appliance” offers more security than a Microsoft ISA Server firewall. I was drawn to a particular quote in his article about the relative security of ISA Server to other popular firewalls in the context of […]
August 31, 2007
Microsoft Exam 70-350: Implementing Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004
This morning I sat the Microsoft certification exam 70-350 for ISA Server 2004. I’d been putting this one off for a while, having already worked through the Microsoft Press training guide, a lot of whitepapers, and worked with the product for a lot of different customers over the last couple of years. I passed the […]
July 5, 2007
The Security Alert That Wasn’t There
I logged onto my laptop this evening to check something for work and noticed that Vista was showing a security alert in my system tray. I double-clicked the icon to open Security Center and find out what was wrong, and it informs me that my Windows Defender (the anti-spyware/malware built in to Windows Vista) is […]
May 13, 2007