From the rumor mill: features for BoKS 6.x and 7.x

2010-09-16 00:00:00

A few weeks ago we met with two of FoxT's VPs who'd come over from the US to Amsterdam. During our two hour meeting we were told of many awesome features to be expected in future versions of BoKS (or "FoxT Access Control" :) ).

• Auto-discovery mode. BoKS will include a "learning mode" which can make an inventory of all transactions taking place on BoKS clients. The access control itself will be turned off during this learning mode, all the while giving you a big list of users and their registered actions. Based on this inventory you will then be able to work towards black/white lists and finally towards a proper BoKS configuration.
• External reporting. BoKS will include a neater way of hooking into various logging and SEIM tools. In addition to BoKS Reporting Manager, you will be free to use anything you like through a Syslog-ng feed. BoKS will also include plugins for ArcSight and RSA Envision.
• Improved reporting panels. The aforementioned Reporting Manager will be expandable with compliance dashboards for things like SOX and HIPAA. These dashboards will need to be licensed separately.
• A proper licensing engine. For the past fifteen years BoKS has been licensed on the "trust based" model, i.e. FoxT trusts their customers to report the right amount of licenses and then delivers the software without any blocks. The downside to this is that there has never been a proper demo version of BoKS. This will change in a future version of BoKS. FoxT tells us that it will not be an intrusive engine and that your BoKS infrastructure will NOT die the minute your licenses expire.
• New licensing model. Speaking of licensing, supposedly the current tiered licensing model will go out the window to be replaced with a more intuitive model. The per-client cost will be drastically reduced, while the per-server cost will go up a bit. But all in all there are potential savings on the horizon!

The future looks bright! I for one can't wait to get my hands on 6.6.x to start testing and learning! :)

kilala.nl tags: boks, sysadmin,

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Security problems: password entropy versus reuse

2010-09-14 22:24:00

Comic continues here

As a security guy this comic makes 100% sense and it is in fact a very likely scenario. It is also the one reason why we (Marli and I) never use the same password twice, either between accounts or when rotating them semi-frequently.

kilala.nl tags: work, sysadmin,

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I spent a week in boot camp

2010-09-10 22:43:00

You may recall that I started studying for my CISSP certification sometime in June. Since then I spent two months reading the 1200 page course book cover-to-cover, learning a lot of new things about the field of IT security. It was a chore getting through the book, but it's been very educational!

Last week I finally finished the last chapter, just in time for this week's "boot camp" week. Instead of using the five days of class learning things from scratch, I came prepared and only used the class to pinpoint any weak points in my knowledge and experience. Five days, forty hours of dry theory and many discussions later I now have a list of roughly 50 "TODO" items to tend to before my examination.

The exam is slated for the 13th of November and will take all of six hours. I'm actually a bit afraid that the remaining two months will be too long for me. I'll need a few weeks to kill all the "TODO" items, which will then leave me with a few more weeks before the exam. I could keep on cramming, I could get started on my next certs/studies, I could get some programming done, or I could simply unwind. I don't know... I'm afraid of letting all the info I've gathered slip from my head either way.

kilala.nl tags: sysadmin, work,

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