Cameron Sturdevant

Monday is book review day at Permit/Deny. I spent the weekend with a copy of Security Monitoring with Cisco Security MARS, by Gary Halleen and Greg Kellogg. The book was published in June 2007 by Cisco Press. To give a little bit more perspective on the book, it’s helpful to know that at the end […]

Mi5 Networks came into the Lab on Friday, July 13 to talk about an all-in-one Web security appliance that sits at the gateway to provide URL filtering, anti-spyware, anti-virus and botnet detection. The appliance, a standard Intel-based two-processor system uses Mi5’s software to quickly—according to the company—block bad stuff from coming onto the network. Without […]

In May 2007, while at Interop Las Vegas I came across Mistletoe Technologies showing off a very small, very fast firewall appliance. The company also makes DDoS (distributed denial of service) prevention, encryption and flow monitoring appliances in this tiny form factor. The 3 by 6 ¾ by 1 ¼ inch devices use only 15W […]

Yesterday, July 10, Microsoft released six security bulletins in the July 2007 patch release. One critical update is a hefty 30MB in size. The question and answer period of the July 11 Microsoft patch discussion Webcast drilled in on the .Net focused bulletin, MS07-040. The primary attack vector, according to Microsoft personnel, is via the […]

In January 2007, Provilla publicly launched LeakProof; a data leak prevention tool with a claim that it can quickly evaluate sensitive data to ensure that it isn’t copied off to a removable drive or e-mailed out of the organization. Currently, the product creates a 1KB fingerprint of protected documents–regardless of document size. Plans discussed with […]

Penetration testing, which involves probing applications, operating systems and device configurations with the goal of gaining access to protected data, is a good way to determine what weaknesses may be present in an organizations infrastructure. This is among the first steps an organization can take to systematically eliminate risky configurations before attackers can exploit these […]

WebEx WebOffice delivers top-notch group calendaring along with basic database, discussion and document management functions. WebOffice is especially suited for smaller organizations with five to 100 users with little or no IT infrastructure staff and with workers in multiple locations. WebOffice will likely appeal most to organizations that must share calendar events and documents without […]

With major it players such as Cisco Systems and Google hard at work building productivity application beachheads on the Web, now is a good time for enterprises to evaluate the benefits of and drawbacks to deploying hosted office tools such as e-mail, instant messaging, calendars, documents, spreadsheets and databases in their infrastructure. Cisco, which picked […]

On its own, Google Apps is a simple, hosted on-demand offering that requires no additional hardware or software beyond a PC with a Web browser. Enabling Google Apps for SSO (single sign-on) via SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) definitely ups the ante in terms of IT resources that must be available to an organization. However, […]

Google Apps Premier Edition is a hosted collaboration and productivity application platform that combines a customizable start page with chat, e-mail, calendaring, word processing, a spreadsheet and a simple Web page builder into a package that Google sells for $50 per user per year—even though most of these modules are still labeled “beta.” While the […]