Applied Trust has been producing The Barking Seal for our clients, supporters, and friends since 2003.
One of the greatest features of being consulting IT infrastructure engineers is that we have the opportunity to see, touch, and experience a wide variety of technologies and their successful (and sometimes, not so successful) application. We have the opportunity to solve problems that have never been solved before. And, every once in awhile, we make mistakes that provide good lessons. It's our hope that sharing some of these experiences will better our community as a whole. We hope you enjoy it!!
Nov 23, 2008
One of the most common queries I get from friends in the IT space is "Hey Trent, do you know someone that can help my organization with _______." The subject varies, but the goal is the same: to get a referral for a vendor that had a proven track record, is inexpensive, reliable, and will generally make the people...
continue reading Nov 19, 2008
The Lone Sysadmin, Bob Plankers, comments on the lack of vendor commitment to virtualization, and I fully concur. I see it especially with smaller, proprietary niche vendors. They'll threaten to pull support entirely if their software is hosted on a virtual system.
The core problem, in my view, is that they just don't...
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Nov 19, 2008
I'm excited to report that Applied Trust is sponsoring the 10 for Change Challenge in Boulder, and that I'll be participating in tonight's panel at the St. Julien. The Challenge, to cut energy use by 10% in 2009, is open to Boulder businesses and will include regular meetings throughout the year. Tonight's meeting...
continue reading Nov 16, 2008
Recently, I've been doing a lot of application security assessments for clients of Applied Trust, the majority of them being black box or grey box testing, all dealing with some form of web application. The most common problems I find deal with developers not or inadequately sanitizing user supplied input.
Any time...
continue reading Nov 12, 2008
I occasionally need to pull mailbox data in PST format from Exchange, sometimes for archival, other times for legal review, or perhaps for some other reason altogether. This process has changed to use Export/Import with Exchange 2007, removing the 2GB file size limit and including a slew of other features, but some of...
continue reading Nov 06, 2008
It's kooky that some organizations are still using FTP for exchanging sensitive files. Almost every security standard (and plain common sense) requires using encrypted data transfer, and with a great free solution in OpenSSH and WinSCP, there really is no excuse for FTP.
This solution provides the following important...
continue reading Nov 02, 2008
Today, November 2, 2008, is the 20th anniversary of "Black Thursday" - a significant, defining moment in Internet and information security history. On this day in 1988, the Robert Morris Jr. worm was unleashed on the Internet. Sometimes called the Great Worm, this was the first time that the world had proof of what...
continue reading Oct 31, 2008
At Applied Trust, we’re often known as the company with the cool outdoorsy schwag. Has your Applied Trust schwag traveled to exciting and unique places with you, or does it otherwise have an interesting story to tell? If so, we’d love to hear about it!
Send your “schwag brag” ideas (with photos) to schwagbrag@atrust....
continue reading Oct 22, 2008
When we think about (or google) application security, most often we're thinking about the common web application attack vectors - cross site scripting, injection vulnerabilities, and session management. With the prominence of the web as a new delivery platform, and the corresponding security standards and regulations...
continue reading Oct 11, 2008
In his post On the difficulties of event correlation, Ben talks about how hard event correlation is - and I couldn't agree with him more. In addition, I am often surprised about how many organizations blindly run down the path to adding more event collection to their environment before they understand the ones they...
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