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A few weeks ago a co-worker and I were discussing some things we really enjoyed about our work environment. It reminded me of a few key questions I ask (or things that I look for) during an interview that typically indicate whether or not a job is going to be a good fit or not. What do you use for e-mail? It is a simple question but the answer tells you a lot about a company. It should be a two part answer for technical positions. On the desktop side, the answer should be a SaaS or Cloud based solution (Google, Office 365, etc.). On the server or infrastructure side, the response should be “a vendor” or “a third party”. ...

Badlock might not be bad for all. If you are using Ansible you can patch your systems with a single playbook (or ad hoc command). For RPM based OS users Badlock (samba) patching is as easy as: ansible -m shell -a "yum update *samba*" all Or you can be very granular and use an Ansible Playbook to audit and patch samba packages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 --- - hosts: all tasks: - name: Check if samba packages are installed shell: "yum list installed *samba* | awk '!/^Loaded|^Installed/' | cut -d ' ' -f 1" register: yum_samba - name: Update samba if installed yum: name={{ item }} state=latest when: yum_samba.stdout != "" with_items: '{{yum_samba.stdout_lines}}' A similar Ansible Playbook for a Debian based system would look something like this: ...

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. ...