When Legacy Apps Dictate Desktop User Privilege Access
In an enterprise Windows’ desktop environment, whether a company has 100 or 10,000 seats, the challenge of managing access is fraught with difficulty. Even if an IT administrator can work out how to circumnavigate Windows User Access Controls or how to set a Group Policy for every application, there will invariably still be a legacy…
eEye @ N-Able Partner Summit
Marc and I just returned from the N-able 2010 Partner Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. While there, we took part in the announcement of N-able’s Remote Audit Manager, a collaboration between eEye Digital Security and N-able. Remote Audit Manager utilizes eEye’s award winning Retina Network Security Scanner to allow MSPs to provide vulnerability assessment, configuration compliance…
4 Things You Should Know About Microsoft UAC
Microsoft User Access Controls (UAC) has been touted as the next great thing in desktop security, but does it really satisfy all you need in order to ensure security, compliance and productivity?
DEP Down Part 2: Why is DEP failing?
In the first part of the series “DEP Down”, we discussed how DEP (Data Execution Prevention) is not always enabled on the application targeted by attackers. When it is enabled, it can be defeated in a number of ways: Return-to-libc attacks These attacks, while normally limited to simple system commands, will always evade DEP as…
Stopping Good People From Doing Bad Things With Admin Rights
Let’s face it – organizations cannot simply build walls to protect vital information anymore. However, in the process of adapting to this new virtual collaborative environment comes the enormous challenge of ensuring that privileged access to critical information is not misused. Walls that may have worked a decade ago are now practically irrelevant as users…
Indirect Misuse of Privilege Lessons from Google
Last week we posted on the three forms of misuse of privilege, followed by a recent example of malicious abuse, where a stock trader used his IT skills to circumvent the system.
Indirect Misuse of Privilege Is a Malware Imperative
Indirect misuse of privileges is when one or more attack types are launched from a third party computer which has been taken over remotely. A startling statistic revealed by Gartner is that 67% of all malware detections ever made were detected in 2008. Gartner also estimates managed desktops, or users who run without admin rights,…
Retina Helps Identify Weak Certificates
Microsoft has released a Security Advisory for the upcoming patch to increase minimum bit levels of certificates to 1024 bit security advisory 2661254. The expected release date for this patch is Oct 9th at which time the update will be available through Windows Update.
Accidental Misuse of Privilege Lessons from ASU
A common fear of all Chief Security Officers and Chief Information Officers is that their organization winds up in the press for some breach of privacy or data theft.
