It is quite apparent that burnout is one of the highest priority risks facing security professionals today, by threat impact, and by threat likelihood. This can be clearly observed on Twitter, and in conversations with professional regardless of company. However, when security professionals talk about mitigating risk in their lives, their threat model rarely includes …
I recently looked at four different aspects of the security posture of a number of US banks. I’d like to explain in detail what these security controls are and why they’re important. In this post I’ll explain what two factor authentication is and why you should be using it everywhere you can. To start off, …
Two Factor Authentication – Bank Security Explained (1 of 4) Read More »
I have had an account with the same bank for a really long time. Perhaps the time has come to switch to a new bank. After all in 2016 my bank still doesn’t offer two factor authentication, EMV cards, and several other modern features that I see from other banks. I’d like a bank that …
Recently, Mark Stanislav gave a talk on holistic authentication security for companies who have implemented two-factor authentication. He developed a scoring system, MASSACRE, which quantifies the presence of several different security features on a web site; cookie flags, response headers, etc.. This inspired me to see if I could get our Jasig CAS server with Duo 2FA …
HTTP offers several headers that can help protect website visitors. OWASP has a great description of them here. Based on that I’d like to quickly share a few configuration changes I make to Apache web servers.
We recently had trouble replacing an older CAS server with a new system. The new server would not forward to the requested service after authenticating and the service could not verify the service ticket. We decided to use HAProxy for the front-end so we could switch back-end services seamlessly.
With POODLE being in the news recently, I decided it would be a good idea to look at my overall SSL configuration while closing the door to this issue. What better way to do that than by arbitrarily assigning a letter grade to my servers with the Qualys SSL Labs tool. Looking at an Apache Tomcat …
Digital storage of electronic protected health information is a treacherous path for a small company to walk. The health insurance portability and accountability act enforces a number of requirements on the security controls required for the storage of such sensitive data. Unfortunately, the language used in not crystal clear, and I have been able to …
Earlier this week content distribution provider CloudFlare announced that they would be providing free SSL certificates for all of their accounts, both paid and free.
I have had trouble getting two-factor authentication with Duo Security working on our Jasig CAS server in the past. However, with a new package from Unicon I was able to do it. Below I will outline the steps I took to install CAS with Duo on a clean install of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.3. Download the latest …
