The Equifax data breach announced yesterday potentially affects 143 million U.S. consumers and is one of the largest breaches of personal information. The following steps can be taken by consumers to help protect against fraud and identity theft: Additional details:

It seems that every week a news story appears detailing new hacking activity originating from organized groups with interesting names such as Energetic Bear, Rocket Kitten, Crouching Yeti, Night Dragon and Sad Panda. While these names are colorful, the groups they are associated with are deadly serious. One might think that these groups are interested only in government or military secrets. However, businesses from all sectors are subject to attack. Successful compromises have been detected in areas such as power and water utilities, communications, and in business holding personal identifying information. The motivations behind these attack groups are tied to political, commercial, and security needs. When considering this, it becomes obvious that all businesses and many individuals have information that would be valuable to the groups. Making the problem more complex, many organizations do not realize they are compromised until they are notified by an external source, usually law enforcement.

Beginning with ASA OS v9.7, the 5506-X has a new default configuration that allows the ports to be used as switchports, similar to how the 5505 models worked. The default configuration includes a Bridge Virtual Interface (BVI) that has ports G1/2 - G1/7 (6 ports) as members of the BVI. This will apply to models that ship with 9.7 code. However, if you upgrade a device to 9.7, you will have to manually create the BVI group (the upgrade itself does not do this).

There was a time, seemingly not so long ago, where business cell phones had clunky keyboards, terrible screens, and limited every-day functionality outside of making calls and checking emails. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 changed all of that, combining not only the abilities listed above but also a music player to drown out the cubicle noise in the office, simple games to keep a person distracted from actual productivity, and a decent digital camera which enabled users to fill their storage with photos of their food, children, grandchildren, and pets. While these new features were great for the average consumer and led to an increased adoption of smart phones, they created an additional headache for businesses with regard to balancing device security and user data on small, easily lost, and often personally-owned devices. Users began wanting access to their business email on these smart phones yet still have control over the devices themselves. This issue persists to this day, on phones as well as tablets, and it is imperative that controls are in place to ensure company data is kept safe.

Since 2009, tandem Business Continuity Plan (BCP) has provided financial institutions with an online platform for building and maintaining a compliant and disaster-ready business continuity plan. Now, the tandem App delivers the ability to access the BCP from any mobile device. The app provides easy access to download the full plan and any pertinent emergency checklists and instruction manuals designed by the institution. In addition to the downloadable documents, the app provides quick access to employee and vendor contact information right on the screen. The app also expands capabilities for emergency alerts as administrators can initiate alerts to contact employees via email, phone call, text, or a mobile notification within the app.

CoNetrix Technology, a division of CoNetrix, LLC, announced today the launch of a new managed security service: Network Threat Protection. This new service brings multiple layers of enterprise security into a cost-effective solution to provide broad protection for the IT environment. Network Threat Protection includes the following security layers:

After upgrading a customer to vCenter to 6.0, VMs that were being replicated with Veeam from one site to another started to issue an alarm for a "VM MAC Conflict". However, when I compared the MACs of the replicated VM and the original VM, they were unique. I had not upgraded the hosts at this point, only vCenter. Nothing had changed with Veeam, so this was a new issue as a result of the vCenter upgrade.

I was recently doing a maintenance window for a customer and had an issue with several of their servers giving me an Error Code 80243004 – Windows Update encountered an unknow error when I was trying to install updates.  After researching, I came across an article with a very simple and weird fix for the issue. 

I received several new Cisco 2960x switches to configure and one of them would not boot up stating that the image failed digital signature verification.  These switches have USB interfaces on the front and can be used for file transfer, however more modern USB flashdrives would not work for me.  I had a few older USB flashdrives that worked, so hold on to your flashdrives!

Recently I was deploying Cylance for a customer. The first approach I took to deployment was to create a group policy that ran a batch script at logon. I set up the policy and then restarted one of the test PCs I was working with. The group policy was being applied, but the software was not installing.

As we’ve been working through migrating email delivery from Barracuda ESS to Proofpoint, one of the issues that pop up would be in regards to SPF records. I figured I’d give a quick overview about how SPF records work and why this could be an important issue.