Hurricane Labs

Why You DO Need a Firewall By: Tom Kopchak This week, our office came across an article by Roger A. Grimes entitled “Why you don’t need a firewall”. As a security professional working for a company whose responsibilities include firewall management, I found the article to be extremely shortsighted, and borderline offensive. Normally, I’d encourage you to read the article in question, but your time is most certainly better spent doing nearly anything else. I would highly recommend learning home dentistry as a suitable alternative activity. Grimes argues that firewalls are becoming increasingly less relevant, due to their inability to protect against attacks, the difficulty associated with managing the devices, and the availability of more effective defenses and solutions. The sheer number of logical fallacies spawning hasty generalizations in the article leads me to ... (more)

No Firewall, No Problem?

No Firewall, No Problem? By: Matt Yonchak In one of the more short-sighted, narrow-minded, and just downright inane articles that I’ve read in quite sometime Roger Grimes told us all about “Why you don’t need a firewall.“ His premise is that exploits and attacks are developing at a level as to surpass the capabilities of a conventional firewall and that firewalls aren’t used properly so why bother. We’ve all heard that before and I won’t even get into the muddled waters of the next-generation firewall concept, though I could. The worse part about the idea of the firewall being ... (more)

Beacon Podcast Episode 025

Hurricane Labs Beacon Podcast Episode Number: .025 – New Studio Edition Hosts: Matt Yonchak (@mattyonchak), Patrick Sayler (@psayler), Ian Gillespie, Tom Kopchak Amazon Studios - Create a television series - Amazon will fund and produce IT Security Basics - Matt isn’t buying it - People have been saying this for years - Matt and Tom debate Apple Legacy FileVault Hole - OSX 10.7.3 shipped with a debug flag - Passwords stored in plaintext in secure.log - Fixed in 10.7.4 Google vs Oracle - Google made their own Java clone for Android - Jury ruled Google infringed on copyrights - Google cal... (more)

Slow Down and Make Yourself Faster

Slow Down and Make Yourself Faster – Tips for the Terminal By: Aaron Croyle I spend most of my day typing arcane things into black windows with green text, as such I spend some time looking for ways to eliminate keystrokes. I’ve been using bash and vim for more that 10 years and I continue to learn more features that I can use on a daily basis. I’ll give you some tips at the end, but the moral of the story is learn how to make better use of your tools. How to Get Better 1) Anytime you’re typing the same thing more than once, ask yourself if there’s a better way to do it. If you d... (more)

Review of Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge

By Bill Mathews Recently (well, last night) I had the opportunity to take the Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge exam and just wanted to put out some of my thoughts while they were fresh in my head. I always like to take a random sampling of certifications. It’s fun to challenge myself (some are more challenging than others) and it gives me a good idea of what sorts of training and certificates I’d like my guys to have (if any). I’ve never been the biggest fan of some of the bigger ones out there, but we’ll save that for another post. The bulk of the CCSK covers the Cloud ... (more)