by Jesper Kråkhede, Sweden
Posted in Security Architecture, Technology on Apr 25th, 2021
A short one this time. Over the weekend the world passed one billion vaccine doses given against covid. It is impressive, even if the doses are very unevenly spread and most countries still have a long way to go. It made me think. Wouldn´t it be nice if we could vaccinate our computers the same […]
Posted in Business, Security Architecture on Mar 24th, 2021
Following up on my short post, let´s talk about the money side of patching. Patching costs. It needs people, tools, test environments and maintenance windows when systems are down. For some legacy systems it means paying for extended support or rebuilding applications. I understand why it is tempting to postpone. But look at the other […]
Posted in Business, Security Architecture on Dec 24th, 2020
A last business post for this year, about patching. It is the least exciting topic in security and one of the most important. This year we have seen VPN gateways, remote desktop servers and old drivers used to get into companies. In almost every case the patch already existed. Sometimes for months, sometimes for years. […]
Posted in Business, Methodology, Security Architecture on Dec 14th, 2020
In my previous post I wrote about attackers using old vulnerable drivers to switch off security products. Let me continue on the same theme from a patching perspective. Most companies are fairly good at patching Windows by now. Some are good at patching applications. Very few patch drivers and firmware. They come from a long […]
Posted in Security Architecture, Technology on Mar 19th, 2020
This week the Swedish Public Health Agency recommended everyone in the Stockholm area who can to work from home. Many other countries have gone much further and closed down completely. Overnight the VPN went from a tool for travelling sales people to being the main entrance to the company. That makes the VPN gateway one […]
Posted in Security Architecture, Technology on Dec 23rd, 2019
On the 17th of December Citrix released an advisory for a critical vulnerability in Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway, formerly known as NetScaler. An attacker without credentials can execute code on the device. There is no patch yet, only a configuration change that mitigates it. Think about where these devices sit. At the edge of […]
Posted in Technology on Dec 19th, 2019
In July I wrote that BlueKeep was a matter of time. On the 2nd of November security researcher Kevin Beaumont saw his honeypots crash, and it turned out that someone was using BlueKeep to install cryptocurrency miners on exposed RDP servers. The good news is that this was not the big worm everyone feared. It […]
Posted in Security Architecture on Aug 15th, 2019
Two months have passed since Microsoft released the patch for BlueKeep, the RDP vulnerability in Windows 7, Server 2008 and 2008 R2. It was so serious that Microsoft even released patches for Windows XP and Server 2003, and that doesn´t happen every day. So I have spent some time asking customers a simple question: Are […]