Preparing for an Unknown Cyber Threat

September 24, 2015 Mike Lewis Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

It seems that the cyber security conversation is never-ending. Topics, ideas, insights or just about any other constructive thinking inside your organization, has cyber security sprinkled into it. As they should, security teams are watching the warning networks, requesting tools to better secure data, patching and praying, as well as trying to imagine what’s next.
Unfortunately all of the confidence scores around stopping the next cyber attack or closing the next security breech assume the next one will be of the same type or kind as prior attacks. But what if it is not? What if the next security attack is of a totally different kind? What if the prior 37 attacks and cleanups have all left little pieces of code in places you may not think of, such as router cache, and the next attack will assemble those 37 bits of code into a completely new thing? Is your organization ready for that? How do you know? If not, how do you prepare?

Why You Should Use Multi-Step Authentication

September 18, 2013 James Michael Stewart Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Authentication is one of the essential components of security. It is one part of the concept known as authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA). AAA stands for authentication, authorization, and accounting. Authentication is the process of claiming an identity then proving that you are that claimed identity. Authorization is the mechanism to control what you can access or do. Accounting is the recording of events into a log in order to review the activities against the rules and policies in order to detect violations or confirm compliance. All three of these should be addressed when constructing a system in order to have a reasonable foundation for reliable security.

Securely Exchange Data Over the Internet — Method Two

July 31, 2013 James Michael Stewart Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Encrypting files locally before sending them across the Internet can be a hassle. However, the only means by which reasonable assurance of confidentiality and privacy in regards to Internet communications is via encryption. Fortunately, there are other options.

Securely Exchange Data Over the Internet — Method One

July 17, 2013 James Michael Stewart Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

The most common means of exchanging files or data with someone are insecure. This includes e-mail attachments, file-transfer web services, FTP sites, and even USB drives. However, security can be implemented so safe data exchange can still occur even if you are using an otherwise insecure transfer process.

Vulnerability Assessment Tools

June 28, 2013 Michael Gregg Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Recently, Microsoft released security updates for a total of 23 vulnerabilities for Microsoft products. While this may seem like a lot, these situations do occur. This points to the speed at which new exploits are created and the fact that vendors must rush to patch these vulnerabilities. Some of the most common vulnerabilities businesses face today are unpatched systems and applications. This is one of the primary reasons why vulnerability assessment tools have become so important. These tools can find and identify needed patches, insecure settings, buffer overflows, and a whole host of other security issues. Luckily, there are many vulnerability assessment tools that can be used to find these problems and fix them before they are exploited.