“The sky is falling.” This is how one security writer described the initial panic experienced by the IT world early this year. Two unprecedented vulnerabilities named Meltdown and Spectre were reported on January 3, 2018. These two vulnerabilities were and are a big deal because they are hardware vulnerabilities affecting any device with a silicon chip. This includes microprocessors on workstations and servers, mobile phones, tablets, cloud services, and other platforms. There were several matters which made these vulnerabilities seem scarier than other vulnerabilities.

What is the Internet of Things (IoT)? For the purposes of this article, you can think of the IoT as the global network of “things” that are connected to the internet. This includes the obvious things (e.g., smartphones, computers, wearables, etc.) and the less obvious (e.g., A.I. devices, office automation, coffeepots, smart TVs, etc.).

At the beginning of 2018, news broke regarding "Meltdown" and "Spectre"; two vulnerabilities that took advantage of speculative execution in Intel CPUs to retrieve sensitive information. This quickly expanded some from the initial report as OS vendors would release patches for their respective systems, but the basic vulnerability remained the same.

I installed a new Synology NAS with two folder shares with encryption enabled.  The Synology is configured to check for updates, but not install them.  This is so we can control that this is performed when there is no backup activity going on. After installing the updates the NAS is automatically rebooted.

Occasionally, I have the need to open a Visio diagram but don't have a need to create or modify them. So, the Visio viewer seemed to be an ideal option. However, after installing the viewer (I tried this with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions), I was still unable to open a Visio file.

Brocade (now owned by Ruckus) switches have two versions of code loaded by default to two different partitions. The primary partition contains a layer 2 image, while the secondary partition contains a layer 3 image. For the ICX-6610 switches, the layer 2 image is named FCXSxxxxx.bin and the layer 3 image is named FCXRxxxxx.bin. Notice the S and R to notate layer 2 (switching) and layer 3 (routing), respectively. In order to enable layer 3 features on an ICX-6610 switch, you must switch to the layer 3 image by updating the boot record. You can see the following link for more information: https://community.brocade.com/t5/Ethernet-Switches-Routers/FastIron-image-files-and-choosing-Layer-2-or-Layer-3-code/ta-p/2887

Recently, quiesce snapshot jobs for some customers kept showing up as failed in Veeam with the error "msg.snapshot.error-quiescingerror". After exhausting several research options I called VMware Support and we began sifting through event log files on the server as well as looking at the VSS writers and how VMware Tools was installed.

You have probably heard this before now, but the greatest threat to an organization’s information security is the people. Attackers are aware of the human element, and they create schemes to exploit us. The best way to combat this weakness is to train and test employees.

I was working with a customer who called in a disk space issue. I ran SpaceSniffer and discovered  there were 92GB of files in a temp folder and nearly all were cab files. My research discovered that on Windows 7 64bit and Server 2008 R2 the makecab.exe utility breaks whenever a log file is over 2GB. The problem is that the cabinet file format cannot store files larger than 2GB and it breaks the compression process as a result. Consequently all new logs created afterwards never get created properly and C:\Windows\Temp fills up with corrupt cabinet files; as much as 200MB+ a day. 

Recently, I built a brand new Server 2016 system for one of our customer domains. This was the first Server 2016 server in this domain, but not the first one I had built – the procedures should have been fairly straightforward and similar to other build-outs in the past.