If your enterprise is running Microsoft XP with Service Pack 2, then I’ve got news for you: It’s now reached its end of support as of July 13, 2010.What does this actually mean? If you require a critical patch for your systems that are running XP SP2, you won’t be able to obtain one.
I just received an e-mail from my best friend with an embedded link. The link seems meaningless and not something my friend would send. However, it comes from a trusted source which is my friend’s e-mail account. The link must be safe or else my buddy would not send it … wrong … you are letting your alter ego prevail.
As you’re probably well aware, there has been a lot of news over the past month regarding a new Malware that is impacting Siemens WinCC SCADA systems. The Malware is known as Stuxnet. Looking closer at this Malware, there are really three key vulnerabilities that are exposed.
In Part I, I provided some background information on the OSI layer, some of the protocols and on security. In Part II, I’ll be discussing the different network security protocols: IPsec, TLS/SSL and SSH.
As an IT security professional, one of the areas where I gained a significant amount of knowledge and experience in is network security. Working for a telecommunications company, it’s pretty much a given that if you are working in security, you are dealing with network security protocols such as IPsec, SSL/TLS and SSH. I started off primarily working with IPsec and eventually was exposed to TLS and finally, SSH. One of the real issues that I first encountered was differentiating between these network security protocols. It took me time to be able to understand and explain the following:
“What is the difference between these network security protocols?”
“Which one shall I use?”