Why does everyone in security keep saying they get all their news off Twitter?   Am I just old school for wanting my RSS feeds and podcasts? Read more

Ever need access to your home network, but you are somewhat locked into the Cisco AnyConnect client for some reason?  OpenConnect Server is a great alternative to OpenVPN for these situations, and the OpenConnect client is commonly used on Linux distros to connect to Cisco AnyConnect servers.  In my case, I use a combination of Windows, Mac, and Linux some of which are rather locked down. Read more

Isn’t it funny how most crises don’t arise from just one bad event happening? Most crises arise from a long history of small, seemingly good decisions which weaken what used to be a resilient system. While all of those people walk around congratulating each other on cost and time savings, a small few are trying desperately to raise alarms. Those small few become cast as neigh sayers, the enemies of progress. Or, as with my personal situation, specifically ask to no longer be responsible for the resulting mess. Read more

As I sit here in blustery Boston taking a break from SecureWorld for a bit, I’m actually brought back to some of the talks given at other conferences this year. I’ve been going over some of the recent talks at RSA and Shmoocon covering ICS security and frankly, I’m not as impressed as I thought. Sitting where I do in the industry, I see plenty of cyber and physical risks to the electric utility industry that should be addressed. Waving them off as being less important than squirrels isn’t doing the industry any favors. Now every utility and generation executive gets to wave that article around in the faces of their security team as an excuse to cut their desperately needed budget. Read more

Rolling out new Ubuntu servers in a heavily MS infrastructure is always a pain. PowerBroker Identity Services from Beyond Trust makes like a bit easier by allowing Active Directory-based authentication in a straightforward package. Read more

2016 has been a year full of breaches and a year full of passwords I’ve had to change.  One resolution I’ve made in 2017 is to get away from using any multi-account passwords combinations, which means I’ve got to go full tilt into a password manager. Read more

If the guys a Red Tiger Security wanted to kick my brain into black hat mode – they succeeded!  I’ve just gotten back from a 5-day ‘boot camp’ style SCADA security class hosted by SANS in Houston, TX. Read more

Here’s a quick fix when RIS tells you “the computer does not have enough disk space on the selected partition. Read more

I’ve got a couple of remote users who report not having any new email since sometime in 2005. These guys don’t sign on to the computers all that often, so I suspect Outlook didn’t automagically change their mailbox settings when I moved them to our new Exchange server back in 2005. Typically, I would do a remote assistance session with the users while logged in. However, these guys aren’t in the office very much and when they are I’m never at my desk. So I decided to try a new trick – and hopefully it works. Read more

While I love OWA, I despise the IISADMPWD utilities used for password management in IIS and OWA. While we’ve had problems with some of our mail-only users changing their password in OWA for months, it hasn’t been a priority to get it fixed. Read more