Your Password Is Obsolete

I thought I would pass on this graphic I found at backgroudcheck.org!

Integrating Quest Defender with Dell SonicWall for 2FA

I’ve been pretty busy over the last few months since the Dell acquisition. One of the things I’ve been wrapped up on is mapping out all of the potential Dell/Quest integrations across the identity & access management line of products and that leads to today’s blog post…

We’ve done some work with the Dell SonicWall team to integrate Quest’s two-factor authentication product (Quest Defender) with the SonicWall firewall/VPN appliance. As we expected, it wasn’t a difficult task and we’ve published the steps in a knowledge base article on our support site. You can access the doc by clicking here.

Now Dell SonicWall customers can leverage two-factor authentication and one-time passwords to protect their VPN connections now. In this day and age of enhanced security this integration enables that extra bit of assurance for our customers.

Happy New Year everyone!!!

Samba 4.0 released - The First Free Software Active Directory Compatible Server is now available! …So what?

I’ve just read two articles over at ZDNet about the Samba 4.0 release:

Samba 4 released, brings Free alternative to Active Directory

Samba 4 is now slated for release on November 27

…and my reaction was literally: So what?

Samba has been around for years and they’ve been integrating with Windows from the beginning. So now they’ve just announced that they’ve landed on the moon but of our eyes are pretty much focused on Mars at the moment. It’s truly an amazing engineering feat ladies and gentlemen.

What do I mean? Well, having an Active Directory, plug compatible, non-Windows server might have been interesting 5-7 years ago but today it’s not. I’m not sure if anyone’s heard but many companies are extending to the cloud and that includes to Office 365. The reliance and need for Samba’s 4 “free alternative to Active Directory” is way too late to the party.

And, while I am on free I can just imagine the laughter coming from Microsoft’s support centers when some customer calls in with a problem they have with Samba 4’s Active Directory behavior. You get what you pay for ladies and gentlemen.

Oh, a small business might be interested in it? You’re kidding, right? A small business would be far more interested in using Office 365 or using Google than having the expertise to stand up a Samba 4 server.

Who cares?

Is seven USC’s lucky number or will they crap out?

USC just had their sixth data breach since 2006 according to this report. This one exposed confidential information of 34,000 people in the College of Education.

No evidence has been found that the hackers have accessed or used any information on the server, but USC has sent notifications to everyone in the database to place fraud alerts on their credit files, school officials said.

One would have thought that after perhaps the second or third breach at USC they’d figure out they needed some serious help and serious introspection. Will their be a seventh? If there’s a seventh and heads don’t roll you can be assured that someone came up lucky.

There’s not enough detail to even guess at what the security issue or problem may have been. During the same month there was another security breach related to credit card data at USC cafeterias and dining halls. I’m not sure why both weren’t reported at the same time since they both happened the same month.

This kind of reminds me of all the scams that people fall for and they’d say that they’d get calls from all kinds of scammers after they fell for one or two scams. I wonder if USC has become a target of Internet scammers because they aren’t doing enough to secure their systems and now appear like an easy target?

Let’s hope there isn’t a seventh report in the making. Remember, seven is only lucky on your first roll in craps – every other roll and a seven craps you out…