INSIDER THREAT SECURITY BLOG

The last post, we started discussing the importance of protecting Active Directory and your unstructured data. Today, we’ll continue our discussion with the next three data security best practices to ensure the security of your data. Pragmatic Data Security Best Practice #2: Monitor Activity Monitoring activity is an essential capability, but be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. The best way to make effective use of your monitoring efforts is to focus on specific scenarios…

Data security is a major issue for any company that has valuable information to protect. Breaches of that data can cost an organization dearly in the form of business disruption, loss of revenue, fines, lawsuits, and perhaps worst of all, the loss of trust between the organization and its customers and partners. But the challenge of securing all that data is daunting. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that some small changes can have a major impact. Just as a journey of a thousand miles sta…

In my last blog post, we took a look at the Data Discovery & Classification features within the Advanced Data Security (ADS) offering for Azure SQL. In this blog post, we will take a deep dive into the Vulnerability assessment. The SQL Vulnerability assessment provides administrators with a streamlined approach to identify and even remediate potential security misconfigurations or vulnerabilities within their Azure SQL databases. The Vulnerability Assessment is a scanning service that…

Overview In this post, I will be looking at a new exploit that leverages a weakness in Microsoft Windows Text Services Framework to launch a child process that allows for the escalation of privileges. I will give a brief overview of what the Text Services Framework service does, what the exploit is, and how it could be used. Then, I will go into more detail about how to run the exploit and different methods that can be used for detection and mitigation of the exploit. What is the Text S…

What’s The Problem? Today, with the Internet, social media, personal computers, online banking and everything else that exists, end-users need to create and maintain a large number of usernames and passwords for all of the accounts they have. This begins to create a problem. The many accounts we need to remember leads us to want to share passwords between different platforms, potentially including our work accounts. This is just one of the few contributors to the many password problems tha…

Higher education is tough, and not just for the students attending and sleeping through early morning classes. Most people do not and never will know about the underlying challenges institutions must tackle in the face of compliance. On top of having to deal with thousands of young, rowdy, and generally inebriated students on a daily basis, they also must comply with the many government standards that are put before them, or be forced to take the brunt of costly monetary penalties and probabl…