Well, maybe it used to be the question, but it is no longer a question to be asked. Scanning your network is an essential part of your security protocol to ensure that customer information is secured. So, since I need to scan my systems for vulnerabilities, where do I start?

Tandem announces the release of Tandem Incident Management, a new software product for creating an incident response plan and tracking incidents as they occur. "With the current cyber climate, our customers are facing significant operational and reputational risks," said Brady Cook, General Manager for Tandem. "Our goal with the release of Tandem Incident Management is to give our customers the tools they need to prepare for the inevitable and effectively manage incidents."

The title for Best IT/Technology Company in Lubbock, Texas goes to CoNetrix for the third consecutive year. Multiple companies around the Lubbock area vied for KCBD's Best of the West designation. Viewers of KCBD News Channel 11 cast their votes through kcbd.com, selecting their favorite company in each Best of the West category.

CoNetrix has been selected as the best large employer to work for in Lubbock, TX. Other notable finalists for the award included Tyler Technologies and the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center. CoNetrix was also selected for the 3rd year in a row as the Best Business Computer Technology Company and the Best Computer/IT Services company.  

CoNetrix, a leading provider of information security and technology services, announces its participation in National Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2020. By becoming a champion, CoNetrix joins the national campaign to help businesses stay safer and more secure online.

We all love our mobile devices. If you look around in any restaurant, walking down the street, even while driving (not a safe idea), you will see people glued to their mobile phones.  In the past few years, the line has blurred between our personal mobile devices and business devices.  Especially now, as a large part of the workforce is working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, personal mobile device use is the norm for millions of people. We must be prepared that many employees may want to continue using their personal mobile devices as they transition back to the workplace.

I recently worked with an admin user from one of our clients. Her account kept locking out each Friday @ 6 PM. I checked Netwrix and found the server that was locking the account. This was also in the event viewer on the domain controller. I checked the credential manager on that server for any cached accounts and found none. I checked the task scheduler and there were no scheduled tasks. I checked the event viewer to verify the lock out, and found the account was trying to connect to a CIFS share. The fix was to run this command as an administrator on that server: 'rundll32 keymgr.dll,KRShowKeyMgr'.This will open a "Store User Names and Passwords" window. In that window, I found the user ID that was locking and removed it.

For most customer networks, file servers turn into a mess over the years. This is usually due to a few things. First, users have access to make folders at high levels and then place data in those folders that should have access restricted. Second, users try to solve the first problem by securing those folders, but end up breaking access to administrator accounts. Third, most lack a logical structure or any guidance as to where certain documents should be stored, so documents end up in multiple folders.I have been working with a customer who had all of these issues, along with the need to merge two file structures into a single structure after the merger of their two companies. My suggestion to the customer was to come up with a structure for five to ten top level folders that would be the shared folders. Their primary focus for the top level folders was by department (HR, Finance, Legal, etc.) We then tightly controlled the second to fifth levels, depending on the granularity needed of the specific folder. At the controlled levels, we did not allow users to make new folders or files and also prevented them from changing the permissions for these folders. We used a combination of list, read, and read/write access to all of these folders. We created an Active Directory group for each folder and the level(s) of access necessary for that folder. We then created additional groups in Active Directory based on job role and made these groups members of the Active Directory groups used for setting permissions on each folder.After setting all of the folder permissions, I found that the Owner of the file or folder had Full Control even if they should not have this level of control based on the NTFS permissions. This can be fixed by setting OWNER RIGHTS to none, which will cause the permissions explicitly defined to be enforce and not be circumvented by OWNER RIGHTS.The partial folder tree shown in the screenshots below is as follows:

There you are, working diligently at your computer when you receive the dreaded email.  You are invited (required) to attend the upcoming annual Employee Security Awareness Training session.  Oh no, has it already been a year?  Please, please don't make me sit through that long, boring training and waste an hour or more of my day, AGAIN.  Sound familiar?

We had a customer create a task for a handful of users not being able to access the company's file server while working from home. The IT Director at this company used to work for aa different customer and had just recently moved to this company and inherited this network. After talking to him about this server, he said the IP address of the file server was 192.168.1.1. There were also a few other servers some people had trouble accessing at times, but the file server was the main server they needed. The issue was obvious in that the file server has the same IP address as many home routers.The customer has a Cisco ASA, so I tired to setup AnyConnect to NAT the traffic across AnyConnect. I setup a twice NAT across the AnyConnect VPN tunnel, but when the DNS server replied with the IP addresses, the replies were not NAT'd. The solution to this is DNS Doctoring, but DNS Doctoring only works with object NAT so this did not work. We could have setup these users to connect to a different IP address when offsite so DNS Doctoring was not needed, but this did not seem like a good solution.

I've run into this issue a few times over the past few months and the fix has been roughly the same each time. Typically, what will happen is that a user account is created in Azure AD with a specific username/UPN. Later on, an account will be synced from the on-premise Active Directory environment with the same username/UPN. Azure tries to automatically reconcile this during the sync by renaming the synced account and appending numbers to the end.Naturally, this is a problem if you need the on-premise AD account to be the authoritative copy. The first thing to be resolved is whatever is causing the conflict in the first place. Once that is resolved, Azure won't automatically rename everything back. Not to mention that once the account is already synced, it won't auto update the account as the source has not been changed since the original sync.Since deleting and re-creating the on-premise account isn't always the best option, your solution is fairly simple – update the attribute on the source side to some bogus value, force a delta sync, update the attribute back, and force a delta sync again.For example, if the email address of your on-premise user is tuser@domain.com and the Azure AD account shows the SMTP attribute is listed as tuser5589@domain.com, update the primary SMTP value in the proxyAddresses attribute to tuser1@domain.com and force a delta sync. Azure AD should then show tuser1 as the primary SMTP value with tuser5589 no longer listed. Once you see that, change it back to tuser@domain.com and force another delta sync.I've had to run through similar steps with the proxyAddresses and the UPN attributes for the conflicting objects.