On December 18, 2015, the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) approved HTTP Status Code Error 451 “Unavailable For Legal Reasons”. This code is a more specific version of the existing 403 “Forbidden” code. The new 451 code is intended to be displayed when accessing a web page that is blocked by government or ISP. In…
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With Windows Server 2008, Microsoft introduced Fine-Grained Password policies which utilizes a new Active Directory object called Password Settings Object (PSO). These objects allow you to more easily create and assign password policies to subsets of users, albeit with a bit of an unpolished implementation method compared to the old method via group policy (GPO). If…
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Are you tempted to click on a shortened link in your Twitter feed or a discussion forum, but you are unsure of the trustworthiness of the person who posted it? Usually when that happens, I simply move on. I’ve got more important things to do anyway, so I might as well avoid landing on a…
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A few weeks ago, David K. Sutton posted his thoughts on passwords on this blog, and since I had coincidentally just finished trying to hack a password around that same time, I thought I might add and/or elaborate a little on what he said, and offer some real world context and numbers. WORKPLACE CRACK Someone…
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To stay on top of security you need to regularly review your server configurations. It’s helpful to build a checklist to be used as part of an internal security audit review. Below is just such a checklist, specifically tailored to audit a SQL 2008 Server running on Windows Server 2008. Most of what’s in this…
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The Account Lockout Policy in Active Directory is not what it seems. Oh sure, at first glance it appears simple enough. Set a threshold, set a counter, and when that threshold is tripped in the allotted time, account locked out. What could be simpler right? Well, as with most things in IT, what should be simple isn’t….
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As part of an internal security review, I put together the following best practices guideline to secure SQL servers. This is just an example, and is not meant to be a comprehensive list of SQL server security parameters. DATABASE CREATION AND CHANGES New databases must be requested using a SQL database request form with proper…
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A guide for LAN Administrators who want to secure their systems without a user revolt. GOLDEN RULE OF PASSWORD CREATION: length + the uniqueness of your brain More on that in a moment. But first, if only we could trust our fellow human beings, there would be no need to secure our sensitive data. No need…
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