Database Security Platforms are incredibly versatile – offering benefits for security, compliance, and even operations. The following are some classic use cases and ways we often see them used:
As much as we enjoy being the masters of the obvious, we don’t really need to discuss the move to cloud computing. It’s happening. It’s disruptive. Blah blah blah. People love to quibble about the details but it’s obvious to everyone. And of course, when the computation and storage behind your essential IT services might not reside in a facility under your control, things change a bit. The idea of a privileged user morphs in the cloud context, by adding another layer of abstraction via the…
Happy Friday the 13th!
I was thinking about superstition and science today, so I was particularly amused to notice that it’s Friday the 13th. Rich and I are both scientists of sorts; we both eschew superstition, but we occasionally argue about science. What’s real and what’s not. What’s science, what’s pseudoscience, and what’s just plain myth. It’s interesting to discuss root causes and what forces actually alter our surroundings. Do we have enough data to make an assertion about something, or…
I figured an afternoon flight to the midwest would be reasonably peaceful. I was wrong. Things started on the wrong foot when I got an email notification from Delta that the flight was delayed, even though it wasn’t. The resulting OJ sprint through the terminal to make the flight was agitating. Then the tons of screaming kids on the flight didn’t help matters. I’m thankful for noise isolating headphones, that’s for sure.
Mary Ann Davidson’s recent post Pain Comes Instantly has been generating a lot of press. It’s being miscast by some of the media outlets as trashing PCI Data Security Standard, but it’s really about the rules for vendors who want to certify commercial payment software and related products. The debate is worth considering, so I recommend giving it a read. It’s a long post, but I encourage you to read it all the way through before forming opinions, as she makes many arguments and provides some…
It’s funny to contrast this April to last April, at least as an NFL fan. Last year the lockout was in force, the negotiations stalled, and fans wondered how billionaires could argue with millionaires when the economy was in the crapper. Between the Peyton Manning lottery, the upcoming draft, and the Saints Bounty situation, there hasn’t been a dull moment for pro football fans since the Super Bowl ended.
I still consider myself a relative newcomer to the Mac community. Despite being the Security Editor at TidBITS and an occasional contributor to Macworld (print and online), and having spoken at Macworld Expo a couple times, I only really switched to Macs back in 2005. To keep this in perspective, TidBITS has been published electronically since 1990.
Over at TidBITS today I published a non-security-geek oriented article on how to tell if your cloud provider can read your data. Since many of you are security geeks, here’s the short version (mostly cut and paste) and some more technical info.
Today’s post focuses on the administering Database Security Platforms. Conceptually DSP is pretty simple: collect data from databases, analyze it according to established rules, and react when a rule has been violated. The administrative component of every DSP platform follows these three basic tasks: data management, policy management, and workflow management. In addition to these three basic functions, we also need to administer the platform itself, as we do with any other application…
In our last Vulnerability Management Evolution post we discussed scanning infrastructure, which remains an important part of vulnerability management. But we recognize that most attacks target applications directly, so we can no longer just scan the infrastructure and be done with it. We need to climb the stack and pay attention to the application layer, looking for vulnerabilities in application as well as the supporting components. But that requires us to define an ‘application’, which is…