Security Journal

We have previously provided a Quickstart guide to standing up Rackspace cloud servers (and have one for Amazon servers as well). These are very low cost ways of building reliable, production ready capabilities for enterprise use (commercial and government).  And Bryan Halfpap has provided a Quickstart guide which shows you how to build a Hadoop Cluster (leveraging Cloudera’s CDH3).  Using Bryan’s guide you can have a Hadoop Cluster up and running in under 20 minutes. With this post we would like to provide you with some additional tips that flow from these other posts. We will show you how to build clusters even faster using another common tool in community use, Whirr. What is Whirr? Apache Whirr is a set of libraries for running cloud services. Here is more from http://whirr.apache.org/  Whirr provides: A cloud-neutral way to run services. You don’t have to worry a... (more)

Gaining Access to a Check Point Appliance

Gaining Access to a Check Point Appliance – Physical Access Trumps All by Tom Kopchak Recently, one of my co-workers and I were tasked with reconfiguring a Check Point Appliance for use as the main firewall in a lab environment we are building for some internal testing. Because we both are recent hires (and thus, the low men on the totem pole), we were not given passwords to the devices or any other useful information regarding their previous configuration. We were expected to learn how to manage the devices, reload the Check Point software, and configure the equipment entirely fr... (more)

F5 Friday: Goodbye Defense in Depth. Hello Defense in Breadth.

#adcfw #infosec F5 is changing the game on security by unifying it at the application and service delivery layer. Over the past few years we’ve seen firewalls fail repeatedly. We’ve seen business disrupted, security thwarted, and reputations damaged by the failure of the very devices meant to prevent such catastrophes from happening. These failures have been caused by a change in tactics from invaders who seek no longer to find away through or over the walls, but who simply batter it down instead. A combination of traditional attacks – network-layer – and modern attacks – applic... (more)

Network Security 101: Automating for Continuous Compliance

Managing access to confidential information and application resources via firewalls is the foundation of network security, and firewall audits are central to any mature network security process. However, relying on security and network experts to review rules across multiple firewall zones and different firewall products is proving to be costly and ineffective. Few will dispute that when it comes to network security, automating best practices to reduce operating costs, complexity, human error, and streamline processes is a good thing. However, in what we call the age of Continuou... (more)

Catbird’s vSecurity 5.0

While virtualization offers many benefits to enterprise such as lower costs and greater flexibility, it also creates new challenges. One of the greatest concerns with switching over to virtualized infrastructure, espeically in government, is security and compliance in a complex and dynamic environment which legacy software can no longer handle. Catbird offers automated security solutions tailored to virtualized data centers and has recently unveilled the next generation of its vSecurity software, vSecurity 5.0. By integrating with the hypervisor, which manages all of the virtual ... (more)