Just like a great piece of cake, PIM (Privileged Identity Management) has its proper ingredients too. Without the flour, is your cake really cake? Without understanding which accounts in your environment are actually privileged, are you really managing privileged identities? Certainly this is a matter of opinion, as we shouldn’t allow ourselves to operate in […]

There are many sources of motivation for hackers and bad actors to do what they do, but ransomware attacks are driven by two primary motives; money and destruction. However, even though there are dozens of ransomware variants with new mutations being discovered weekly, they all exhibit the same common behavior; large volumes of file modifications […]

I spent part of my Father’s Day weekend as a quintessential dad: lying on the couch watching “300”, the fictional portrayal of the Battle of Thermopylae, where – in the movie – a force of 300 elite Spartan warriors held off a massive Persian army by forcing the Persians to pass through a narrow canyon […]

I’ve been a sports fan all my life. If you’re into sports tactics at all, you know a common offensive scheme in virtually any sport is to spatially spread out the opposing team’s defense. Why? It creates space to maneuver, opening up options for attack that just aren’t there when everyone is bunched up in […]

When a user logs on to their workstation in the morning, Active Directory authenticates them and authorizes their access. When they access a network file share or SharePoint site, RDC to another system, log into CRM, open up Outlook, or do any number of things where access is involved, AD handles the request and approves […]

Shutting down an attack before it’s too late Practically every device on the network produces logs of activity and these logs contain records of authentications, changes, software installs, etc. Companies have invested in technologies like SIEM to help digest these logs and raise alerts. So, why are we seeing these breaches on the rise? Data […]

It’s no secret that we live in a time where the standard is for people to be connected 24/7. As more and more businesses embrace the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), this standard of perpetual connectivity is only being reinforced. I’ll save commentary on the health of such a standard for another time, […]

From the vantage point that most people have, even technical folks, Active Directory (AD) seems like it’s doing pretty well. How often can you not log in when you sit down at your PC? How often do you fail to find someone in the corporate directory in Outlook? How many times have you heard of […]

Got some exciting news from STEALTHbits’ Product Management team last week about our new Data Activity Tracking product line, which offers customers the ability to monitor file access events on their Windows and NAS devices, including recently added support for EMC Isilon devices. I asked them, “Why is this being treated as a new product? […]

Every year Verizon produces the Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). It’s bad form on a blog to say “stop reading my content and go read this other content,” but I’ll start by saying that if you’ve never used this report as an asset in your security planning you should absolutely drop everything and go read […]