New! Stealthbits Access Library – Flexible Access Auditing Across Any Platform
Historically most organizations would attempt to standardize on one platform internally for unstructured data and another for structured data. This meant separating off the unstructured data to a singular admin (or team), and the structured off to a different admin (or team) and the business remained divided in that manner. These could take many forms – SharePoint, File Servers, SQL Server, Oracle, OpenText, etc., yet the concept remained the same across all those platforms. With one for eac…
Securing Structured Data
Editor’s Note: Read this related blog:“The Structured Future of Data Access Governance“.
There are generally two kinds of data: structured and unstructured. An oversimplification shown in Figure 1 below is essentially correct. When we say, “structured data”, we usually mean traditional data that possess organized layouts with somewhat predictable growth characteristics. In fact, for relational databases, we would further assume that means spreadsheet-like tables having rows and columns (a….
Have I Been Pwned Database: Here’s What We Can Learn
Recently, I was doing some research on password security using breached password databases to understand the value they bring when trying to improve overall password security. One very good database is the “Have I been pwned” database.
I’ve Been Pwned
Have I Been Pwned Database
For those of you who have not used this excellent public resource,
it’s a collection of over 551 million unique breached password hashes.
The website allows you to see if your username or password has
been…
How to Backup and Recover Group Policy Objects (GPOs)
Editor’s note: This is the 5th and final blog series around Active Directory (AD) backup and recovery using Stealthbits, StealthRECOVER. Read the 1st blog An Introduction to Active Directory Backup and Recovery, the 2nd blog Active Directory Object Recovery, the 3rd blog Active Directory Recover (Recycle Bin), and the 4th blog How to Rollback and Recover Active Directory Object Attributes.
Welcome to the final post in this Active Directory Backup and Recovery blog series, which will discus…
The Structured Future of Data Access Governance
When Data Access Governance (DAG) was first conceived, the logical place to implement such access control was on unstructured data such as shared file systems, collaborative platforms (e.g. SharePoint), and email systems. These massive unstructured data repositories seemingly contained the bulk of the corporate data, often quoted as representing well over 80% of all corporate data. Moreover, these data repositories appeared to be growing exponentially and therefore were the logical choice as …
Office 365 Security and Compliance: Admin Guide to Creating Labels and DLP Policies
Data loss is defined as data that gets misplaced, removed without authorization, leaked outside of the organization or otherwise corrupted perhaps due to malware. Failure to prevent data from being ‘lost’ can result in hefty fines, especially for organizations that have to comply with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) where they can be fined up to 20 million Euros, or 4% of annual, worldwide turnover.
In this guide, I will show you how you can leverage Microsoft Office 365 Sec…
How to Defend against AdminSDHolder Attacks
In this blog post, we’ll be discussing the topic of the AdminSDHolder object in Active Directory and how it can be utilized in Active Directory attacks. Finally, we will discuss how to use StealthDEFEND to detect and respond to this type of attack.
Introduction to the “AdminSDHolder”
The AdminSDHolder is an Active Directory object that is basically a container to essentially act as a security descriptor template for protected accounts and groups in an Active Directory domain
A securi…
How to Rollback and Recover Active Directory Object Attributes
Editors note: This is the 4th in a series of blogs around Active Directory (AD) backup and recovery using STEALTHbits, StealthRECOVER. Read the 1st blog, An Introduction to Active Directory Backup and Recovery, the 2nd blog, Active Directory Object Recovery, and the 3rd blog Active Directory Recover (Recycle Bin).
The previous two posts in this series focused on Active
Directory deleted object recovery. This post will explore a different type of
Active Directory recovery. C…
ProTip – Utilizing Stealthbits to Move Away from Relying on Native File System Logging
If you have been following our 4 part blog series, “Challenges with Relying on Native File System Logging” you have seen some of the many challenges of auditing and collecting file activity natively. The blog series is also going to be followed by an awesome webinar. If you haven’t seen any of the blog posts be sure to check them out:
NetApp File Activity MonitoringWindows File Activity Monitoring Challenges with Native File System Access AuditingEMC File Activity Monitoring
In this mon…
What is Unstructured Data?
Data is what drives business, and businesses are generating and consuming more data all of the time. The explosion of collaboration tools and big data analytics has only accelerated the desire for more employees to share more data across the enterprise. So it’s no surprise to IT teams that we are being asked to retain more data, of all types, make it freely available to employees in different departments and with outside business partners and, oh yeah, secure it all, without any more budget. …
