• 30Apr
    Author: trent Categories: Security Comments: 0

    I was speaking with a respected colleague today about the security of Blackberries vs. other mobile devices.  The conventional wisdom of the business community, apparently, is that the Blackberry is some form of superhero-grade magical device, impervious to all forms of cybersecurity attack, and hence suitable for handling all levels of sensitive communication (and soon suitable for President Obama).

    It’s true that RIM (Research in Motion), Blackberry’s maker, has an excellent marketing department (and, as excellent marketing departments are hard to come by, I at least give them kudos for that).  They have spun a fantastic tale about how, by simply installing their superduper-secure Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) product, you have created a secure channel between the enterprise network and a user’s eyes/ears.  As far wireless communications channels go, they have an “ok” solution for securing transport to the Blackberry device itself.  The highest security risk of using a Blackberry is NOT that your data is compromised while being transmitted wirelessly.  Instead, there really are two high risk scenarios when using a Blackberry in an enterprise:

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  • 27Feb
    Author: ned Categories: Security Comments: 0

    WordPress versionsWe run WordPress for our blog and like it.  I have been debating whether to upgrade our the barkingseal.com WordPress installation – we were at version 2.6.5 and it didn’t look like there were any important security issues fixed in 2.7 and 2.7.1.  Patching is all about balance – the risk of security vulnerabilities versus the risk and effort of applying the upgrade.   Plus, in this case, I sure don’t want to be too far behind the Web 2.0 curve (a little bit of sarcasm).  

    For a little guidance, I looked to the “big dogs” – how up-to-date are the most well-known WordPress sites?  Yesterday, I ran a quick scan of all 354 sites listed in the WordPress Showcase to see how we compared.  Sadly, not only are many sites not running WordPress 2.7+, but almost half (44%) are running a version older that 2.6.5.  2.6.5 was released in November, 2008 and did fix important security problems.  Wow… four months later and 44% of these leading WordPress sites still haven’t updated!

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  • 29Nov
    Author: admin Categories: IT Management Comments: 0

    WEP is dead.  Even your mother knows not to encrypt her Linksys wireless router with WEP.  For all of us that have played around with the aircrack-ng tool set (on our own networks of course :-) ), we know that by using aircrack in conjunction with packet injection/replay attacks WEP keys can be cracked within a couple minutes [EDIT: According to German researchers, WEP can now be cracked in an average of 20 seconds on an 802.11g network].

    Well, we should use WPA/WPA2 PSK then right?  Well yes, but with a couple constraints… Read more »