All blogs are grouped into logical categories, so you can quickly skim the entire document and find the most relevant information which is important to you.

You can find the February posting here:

http://blogs.technet.com/blogms/archive/2009/03/02/blogms-monthly-articles-published-in-february-2009.aspx

Monthly Report – 214 Microsoft Team blogs searched, 876 new articles found in 152 blogs between the 1^st February 2009 and 28^th February 2009.

Get some good scoop at BlogMS!

Thanks for reading & let’s continue to be good network citizens.

What other professional development and/or tracking tools do you use in your job?  Please leave some feedback and let me know what you use or if this Printable CEO made a difference in your job.

LoveMyTool

There are presentations on this site like the Wireshark IO Graph for Response Time Analysis (by Ray Tompkins).This should be a great online learning experience. You will find contributors like Sake Blok, a Wireshark Core Developer and Denny K Miu of StartupforLess.org – A Survival Guide for Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs

Speaking of looking back, I was recently reading the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. This is a easy to read business management book with some very good nuggets. It was written in 2001 and focuses on several companies and what it took for them to exceed the general market and become what the researchers considered great companies. Some of the companies mentioned include Abbott, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Kimberly-Clark…

Wait, did I just say Fannie Mae? Isn’t that one of the companies that is being bailed out by the US government? Why yes it is! Interesting… before 2001 Fannie Mae was considered a great company according to Mr. Collins and team. You are wondering how I am relating this to IT or technology. Well, one of the chapters in the book is titled “Technology Accelerators”. This chapter focuses on how do “good-to-great organizations think differently about technology?” The book says that Fannie Mae:

“Pioneered application of sophisticated algorithms and computer analysis to more accurately assess mortgage risk, thereby increasing economic denominator of profit per risk level. “Smarter” system of risk analysis increases access to home mortgages for lower-income groups, linking to passion for democratizing home ownership”

As we have seen, something must have changed since 2001. Fannie Mae is no longer considered a great company since it is in need of so much taxpayer help due to poor risk management. What did the company do with the technology that made them so great before 2001? Did they just modify some Excel spreadsheet and change the threshold so some cells that were red are now yellow or even green? Did they ignore the idea of managing mortgage risk to ensure that people could have the “dream come true” of home ownership?

I cannot answer that since I am not part of Fannie Mae or any financial institution. I just ponder what if they had continued to use technology effectively in addition to making less risky decisions if they would still be considered a great company.

One thought I want to leave you with is one of the unexpected findings by Mr. Collins and his research team about technology accelerators:

“The idea that technological change is the principle cause in the decline of once-great companies (or the perpetual mediocrity of others) is not supported by the evidence. Certainly, a company can’t remain a laggard and hope to be great, but technology by itself is never a primary root cause of either greatness or decline.”

In the old facility some of the users were required to use a kiosk or standalone computer to access customer extranets using VPN. We wanted to make this easier in the new facility and get rid of the standalone computers and internet connections. As we approach each instance of VPN access, we have to ask the standard questions of what is the destination IP address and what ports need to be opened on the firewall for this service. I recently came across a customer technology staff member at another organization who was responsible for the remote access service but could not answer these standard application questions. The answer I was given was just open any-to-any ports for their destination IP (at least he knew their IP address for this service). I don’t think this was a junior staff member either answering the question. This is the person responsible for interfacing with suppliers!

Well, after walking around and burning off some frustration, I took some steps to try to identify how the application works and make firewall changes according to what I discovered. Working with my managed security partner I went through the following steps:

1. Configure a private client machine and designate as single source of traffic.

2. Define firewall rule to permit any traffic from this client to the destination IP.

3. Run VPN application  and capture details about TCP/UDP ports during the conversation.

4. Close the any-to-any rule and open ports discovered in step #3.

Well, things did work pretty well but apparently there are some other ports needed to be opened, so once again I am asking this customer to help us as their supplier to gain access to their network. We will see if I have to get someone else involved in his organization even though I was told he manages this by himself.

hmmmm… so have you ever had to train someone at another organization that you deal with how to do their job?

Who is paying for all of this for NYC? Is this really where the city should be spending its dollars on risk mitigation? Maybe someone should share my thoughts on managing risk & vulnerability.

Thanks for your time. Let’s be good network citizens together & practice safe networking!

This issue has recently come to light with some of the Black Hat presentations. The actual presentation can be found here. This example actually refers to SSL VPN attacks but consider what would happen if an attacker was able to create a man-in-the-middle SSL proxy using a typosquatting domain name. For example, what if you typed https://www.mybnak.com/myaccount into your browser. The actual address should be https://www.mybank.com/myaccount. This is just a simple typographical error right? Hmmmmm… maybe not!

Consider if an attacker purchased the domain name mybnak.com. They then were able to get an SSL certificate or create a self-signed one that to an uneducated user looked ok. Have you ever seen a message like the following?

How many of you (come on, admit it now) have clicked on this or know someone who would click on this without thinking a second time? Say you did click on Yes and proceeded. The website you go to looks exactly like the one where you intended to go! This is because the address you mistyped into your browser actually goes to an SSL proxy and you just said you trusted the website. You have now fallen into the man-in-the-middle attack.

This looks like the following picture:

This attacker now takes all the traffic you send it, reads it, saves what it wants, repackages it, sends it to your intended destination and returns information back to you (keeping copies of what information is returned) without you knowing that someone is between you and your intended bank. Phishers do use a similar mechanism although a savvy consumer might actually see that the address in the address bar does not match their intended destination at all. In my example, YOU mistyped the address!

Well if this does not scare you into making sure you can type addresses or keep accurate bookmarks then read some of the following and make up your own mind:

Mozilla SSL Policy Considered Bad for the Web

SSL VPN might not be as secure as you think

Black Hat 2008 Aftermath

But, on the other side of this argument consider this story about how a MITM attack saved Columbian hostages.

The internet is not a place to be ignorant about your surroundings. Users must be vigilent and savvy about its use. Maybe there should be internet driver testing and licences?

Thanks for your time. Let’s be good network citizens together & practice safe networking!

Have you had to deal with a troll? What were your challenges and how did it end up? What are your suggestions for handling this global issue?

It is quite amazing if you take a minute to think about it how the global internet provides a whole new environment for crime and abuse. There is no single legal body that can deal with this environment. There are no borders (although countries like China try to control what information crosses theirs).

I do want to commend ITKE for seeming to keeping the trolls away from this useful internet resource. I know it is a challenging job but the TechTarget folks are doing a great job! Let’s thank them for all their hard work by keeping up the knowledge sharing.

Thanks for your time. Let’s be good network citizens together & practice safe networking!