Entries Categorized as 'Microsoft Security'
by Neil MacDonald | October 24, 2011 | 1 Comment
Last week I attended Gartner’s US Symposium conference in Orlando. With 8,000+ attendees (25% of which were CIOs) and at least 1,000 more analysts, vendors and support staff, you can imagine it was quite a scene. In addition to three presentations, I had more than 30 fantastic one on ones with attendees over the four [...]
Category: Application Security Beyond Anti-Virus Cloud Cloud Security Information Security Microsoft Security Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Virtualization Security Tags: Adaptive Security Infrastucture, Beyond Anti-Virus, Cloud Security, Context-aware Security, DC-Summit-NA, Endpoint Protection Platform, Information Security, Microsoft Security, symposium, Virtualization Security
by Neil MacDonald | September 28, 2011 | 1 Comment
I’ve been out the past two weeks visiting with clients and have been meaning to summarize my impression of the upcoming Windows 8 (expected mid 2012) from a security point of view. I attended Microsoft’s recent BUILD conference for developers where Windows 8 made its first official appearance. You can see my real-time tweets and [...]
Category: Beyond Anti-Virus Information Security Microsoft Security Windows 7 Tags: Apple, Beyond Anti-Virus, Defense-in-Depth, Information Security, Microsoft, Microsoft Security, Whitelisting, Windows
by Neil MacDonald | August 23, 2011 | 2 Comments
Run more of your Windows users without administrator rights. I’ve talked about this several times before – including here, here and here. While it may not be feasible to remove administrator rights from all users, it is an absolutely achievable goal to continue to improve the percentage of Windows users running without administrator rights year [...]
Category: Beyond Anti-Virus Endpoint Protection Platform Microsoft Security Windows 7 Tags: Best Practices, Beyond Anti-Virus, Endpoint Protection Platform, Lockdown, Microsoft Security, Security No-Brainer, Windows
by Neil MacDonald | August 4, 2011 | Comments Off
Licensing changes for Microsoft’s enterprise endpoint antimalware protection solution that were announced in March at Microsoft’s MMS conference take affect this month. If you are licensed under Microsoft’s Core Client Access License program, it now includes CALs for Forefront Endpoint Protection. For many organizations that are already licensed under Core CAL, this means that FEP [...]
Category: Endpoint Protection Platform Microsoft Microsoft Security Windows 7 Tags: Apple, Endpoint Protection Platform, Microsoft, Microsoft Security, Windows
by Neil MacDonald | May 4, 2011 | Comments Off
In discussions with clients, I still run into some confusion on whether or not removal of administrator rights constitutes “lockdown”. Perhaps this was the case a few years ago with older Windows applications and Windows XP, but this is not the case today with Windows 7. For example: Standard users can install and execute well-written [...]
Category: Beyond Anti-Virus Endpoint Protection Platform Microsoft Security Windows 7 Tags: Apple, Beyond Anti-Virus, Endpoint Protection Platform, Lockdown, Microsoft Security, Security-Summit-NA, Whitelisting, Windows
by Neil MacDonald | May 2, 2011 | 3 Comments
Rapid adoption rates, three hundred and fifty thousand apps, but not much malware. What gives? 1) The power of whitelisting. Call it what you may, but having Apple act as the steward of all applications via its App Store is a form of whitelisting (where the list of approved applications [whitelist] is defined by those [...]
Category: Beyond Anti-Virus Endpoint Protection Platform Information Security Microsoft Security Windows 7 Tags: Apple, Beyond Anti-Virus, Defense-in-Depth, Endpoint Protection Platform, Lockdown, Security-Summit-NA, Windows
by Neil MacDonald | April 8, 2011 | Comments Off
One of the top recommendations I made to increase your security “bang for the buck” in 2011 was to increase the percentage of users that run without administrative access. For clients, we’ve recently published a research note that details the best practices for removing administrator rights from Windows users. One of the best practices is [...]
Category: Microsoft Security Windows 7 Tags: Beyond Anti-Virus, Lockdown, Microsoft Security, Windows
by Neil MacDonald | March 22, 2011 | Comments Off
I’ve spent the past day and a half attending Microsoft’s Management Summit in Las Vegas. From my perspective the announcement that will affect the most enterprises from a security perspective was a change in licensing related to Forefront. Some history — in 2010, Microsoft reorganized the Server and Tools Business Unit placing the Forefront Endpoint [...]
Category: Cloud Cloud Security Endpoint Protection Platform Microsoft Microsoft Security Next-generation Data Center Virtualization Virtualization Security Tags: Cloud Security, Endpoint Protection Platform, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Microsoft Security, Next-generation Data Center, Virtualization, Virtualization Security, Windows
by Neil MacDonald | March 15, 2011 | Comments Off
The conventional wisdom is that a user who is configured with “standard user” privileges (the least possible in Windows 7) cannot install software (or malware for that matter). This is incorrect. Software that writes to the user’s data directory, and that doesn’t write to protected portions of the registry, can install correctly as a standard [...]
Category: Endpoint Protection Platform Microsoft Security Windows 7 Tags: Best Practices, Defense-in-Depth, Endpoint Protection Platform, Lockdown, Microsoft Security, Reducing Cost, Whitelisting, Windows
by Neil MacDonald | March 7, 2011 | 4 Comments
I was performing some background research on the number and severity of vulnerabilities produced by Apple, Microsoft and other vendors when I ran across something quite interesting. (BTW – I was researching the issue addressed in this research note for clients — whether or not antimalware software is recommended for enterprise Apple Macintosh endpoints.) Microsoft, like [...]
Category: Application Security Information Security Microsoft Security Windows 7 Tags: Apple, Application Security, application security testing tools, Browser Security, Microsoft, Windows
