Blog

As more and more security policies demand the use of multi-factor authentication the number of times a day you use a multi-factor token will increase. Hopefully that number will not increase to a level that throws the balance of security and convenience towards the annoyingly secure side of the scale. But, if that ever does happen hopefully you can use an Yubikey as your token. There are various sizes and styles of Yubikey to suit your need but the Yubikey of choice with myself and my co-workers seems to be the FIDO U2F ready Yubikey Nano 4. ...

Apple has introduced a new security feature in Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11) called System Integrity Protection (sometimes referred to as rootless). What is System Integrity Protection? According to Apple’s documentation: A new security policy that applies to every running process, including privileged code and code that runs out of the sandbox. The policy extends additional protections to components on disk and at run-time, only allowing system binaries to be modified by the system installer and software updates. Code injection and runtime attachments to system binaries are no longer permitted. ...

If you have not heard, the phenomenal cloud base SaaS password manager, LastPass has agreed to be acquired be the not so customer friendly LogMeIn. The IT world immediately panned the anti-idea as anti-consumer and the security world agreed and raised all sorts of red flags as well. People dislike LogMeIn for a variety of reasons but the main one is that they pulled the rugs out from under a lot of folks who were using LogMeIn to help administer remote computers (I was one of these people). LogMeIn rapidly increased pricing on their services making their product go from consumer to “prosumer” to full blown enterprise pricing very quickly. Some people didn’t have time to get something else installed on the systems they were administering with LogMeIn before their service was cut. ...

I had some Apple Keychain issues after upgrading to Mac OS X El Capitan yesterday. Apple provided a reasonable resolution (blow away the login Apple Keychain and re-create it). As it turns out, my issues weren’t limited to just the El Capitan upgrade. The Juniper Networks’ VPN client, Junos Pulse, has some pretty awful issues. The behavior went something like this: Save a password for a VPN connection in Junos Pulse VPN client The first use of the VPN connection will be fine Disconnect VPN connection Close Junos Pulse VPN client Open VPN client Attempt to connect to recently created VPN (with saved password) All hell breaks loose; Apple Keychain issues galore. Literally every Apple Keychain becomes unusable to some extent and a reboot is required to resolve the issue. ...

I was reading through Wired magazine and saw a Windows 10 ad. If you’ve turned on a TV the past month you’ve seen the ad I’m referring to, this is just the print edition of the TV ad. She won’t have to remember passwords. Or obsess about security. To her, every screen is meant to be touched. And so on… (here’s the full ad if you really want to see it). But, there is one big thing wrong with this marketing approach and Microsoft actually says it right on the ad: ...