Entries Tagged as 'Best Practices'
by Neil MacDonald | February 3, 2012 | 1 Comment
I’ve blogged before about advanced threats that easily bypass our traditional protection mechanisms and reside undetected for extended periods of time on our systems. On one of the panels I moderated on APTs, Dave Merkel from Mandiant put it best. “You are compromised, get over it”. Others in the US Government have come to the [...]
Category: Application Security Beyond Anti-Virus Cloud Cloud Security Next-generation Security Infrastructure Security Intelligence Tags: Adaptive Security Infrastucture, Application Security, Best Practices, Beyond Anti-Virus, Cloud Security, Context-aware Security, DC-Summit-NA, Defense-in-Depth, DevOpsSec, Next-generation Security Infrastructure
by Neil MacDonald | January 9, 2012 | 6 Comments
I called this a “security no brainer” years ago and the advice is absolutely still relevant today. In Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) solutions for clients, one of the evaluation criteria we looked at was whether or not the vulnerability knowledge of the DAST solution could be exported and used [...]
Category: Application Security Security Intelligence Tags: Application Security, application security testing tools, Best Practices, Security No-Brainer
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 5, 2011 | 1 Comment
I had a discussion with a client today looking to protect sensitive intellectual property in their source code. I discussed two primary areas of risk: 1) that the developers (some of which were offshored) might take the code and 2) once the code was distributed to customers, it might be reverse engineered or copied Addressing [...]
Category: Application Security Applications Information Security Tags: Application Security, Best Practices, Defense-in-Depth, Information Security
by Neil MacDonald | June 9, 2011 | 1 Comment
On 3 June 2011, RSA, the Security Division of EMC, confirmed that Lockheed Martin had proof that hackers attacked its network partly by using data stolen in a March 2011 attack on RSA. Subsequently, on 6 June 2011, RSA announced a program to replace customers’ RSA SecurID one-time password (OTP) authentication product tokens We’ve updated [...]
Category: Application Security Endpoint Protection Platform Information Security Tags: Best Practices, Defense-in-Depth, Endpoint Protection Platform, Information Security, Security-Summit-NA
by Neil MacDonald | May 23, 2011 | 2 Comments
There’s been a bunch of highly publicized attacks recently. Each one has a major lesson for information security. 1) Barracuda’s breach Major lesson: Test all of your web-enabled applications for vulnerabilities as a part of the ongoing application development and change process. This was the root cause of the breach. Minor lesson: Web application firewalls [...]
Category: Application Security Cloud Cloud Security Information Security Tags: application security testing tools, Best Practices, Cloud Security, Defense-in-Depth, Information Security, Security-Summit-NA
by Neil MacDonald | April 4, 2011 | Comments Off
I recently had the opportunity to kick off a summit in Washington DC on the topic of Advanced Persistent Threats along with a number of other speakers representing different technologies and services that could be used to prevent or identify advanced intrusions. Here are my observations from the summit: 1) APT is first and foremost [...]
Category: Beyond Anti-Virus Information Security Next-generation Security Infrastructure Tags: Adaptive Security Infrastucture, Best Practices, Beyond Anti-Virus, Defense-in-Depth, Information Security, Whitelisting
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 11, 2011 | Comments Off
Google’s Android has made the news a couple of times already in 2011: Here, with a credit card snooping exploit proof of concept and most recently, with malware that had gotten into the Google application store. The latter was particularly serious as it involved a privilege escalation attack that broke out of the Android sandbox. [...]
Category: Application Security Beyond Anti-Virus Endpoint Protection Platform Tags: Apple, Application Security, application security testing tools, Best Practices, Beyond Anti-Virus, Endpoint Protection Platform, Whitelisting
by Neil MacDonald | March 4, 2011 | Comments Off
I’ve had several calls recently where clients are looking to switch their endpoint protection platform vendor from one provider to another because they’ve gotten infected and they believe that switching vendors will provide them better protection. The scenario is usually goes something like this: they are using vendor X, got infected, scanned the machine with [...]
Category: Beyond Anti-Virus Endpoint Protection Platform Information Security Tags: Best Practices, Beyond Anti-Virus, Defense-in-Depth, Endpoint Protection Platform, Information Security
