Rob Juncker

Well, this is new.  Yesterday, Lulz Security and Anonymous, two of the premiere hacking groups, have announced that they are teaming up in an effort they are calling “Operation:  Anti-Security” or “AntiSec” for short.  (For all of you that follow news on twitter the hashtag #AntiSec will be the one of note).

To quote yesterday’s release by LulzSec (http://pastebin.com/9KyA0E5v):

Welcome to Operation Anti-Security (#AntiSec) – we encourage any vessel, large or small, to open fire on any government or agency that crosses their path. We fully endorse the flaunting of the word “AntiSec” on any government website defacement or …

Let’s say for a moment that I was a hacker and I wanted to gain access to information about a large corporation’s customer base.  The path that lies in front of me is relatively clear, I want to find the easiest way to gain access to the information without arousing suspicion and try to penetrate the security around it in a manner that doesn’t implicate me if the breach should be identified.  Simple enough, isn’t it?

Now that I’ve plotted my “how” I want to get the information and defined my “what” I want to get, I now turn my attention …

The other day, I was speaking with a customer who described this last Patch Tuesday which turned into a week of patching as a “lovely Holiday gift,” and he can’t wait to see what’s in store for next week’s Patch Tuesday. – I got a good laugh out of it even though I realized the pain that this gentleman had been put through.  Over the weekend, I had a moment of creativity where I decided to let his comment shape my blog for the week.  I know, I know… it’s May, but the holiday comment brought me back to the holiday …

For a while now, Shavlik has been the trusted partner for patch management for organizations worldwide.  Through the years, our customers have pushed our organization to extend our offering to cover a broader spectrum of their IT needs.  Time and time again, we’ve rose to the occasion starting with the addition of asset management to our solution and over the years have grown to the leaders of integrated patch, asset, power, antivirus, and now virtualization management solutions.

Last week, I had the pleasure of hosting a webinar with Randy Franklin Smith from Ultimate Windows Security discussing the challenges facing our IT …

In any company, market or industry the general path of evolution goes in three stages which consist of

Specialization
Integration
Consolidation

In IT, the path is no different.  If you chart the path of IT organizations, they start by putting systems into place for a specific purpose of delivering a piece of functionality that can be easily controlled and manipulated by them.  As the systems continues to mature, the need to have a specialized server for that purpose begins to diminish and the organization begins to integrate their systems.  Ultimately, multiple applications (which probably have some overlap) get consolidated into an optimized environment.

In the …

I love the new site that Microsoft put up (www.ie6countdown.com).  It’s been ten years since Internet Explorer 6 was created and technology has changed significantly over time.  Today, with the new versions of Javascript and the speed of the internet, more and more companies are creating end-to-end applications that run in the cloud.  These applications tax old browsers, but also pose serious security risks to attacks.

Internet Explorer 6.0 was a great browser for its time, but since then, the security risks simply show that IE6 must go.  If you think back to some of the major hacks, …

This week, in my hotel in New York, I flipped on the television to see an advertisement from Microsoft around “To the Cloud” and shortly after that commercial, up popped another commercial with someone clicking away on their iPad to access their documents in the cloud.  If that wasn’t enough, I fired up my laptop to read one of my favorite industry blogs, and who is on the side ad? – Salesforce.com.  Two minutes later, I clicked out to another blog, and Symantec.Cloud popped up.  It was enough to make me go crazy.

How many of us remember the early days …

There is a difference in regards to how people implement security.  This couldn’t be any more evident than the manner in which the United States implements airline security.  A reactive approach is what we currently employ where countless TSA agents carefully screen bags as we pass through metal detectors to attempt to control security at an instant in time.  Is this where security begins?  Absolutely not.  Security should begin the instant I buy my ticket on the airline as psychology teaches us we can more readily identify the sources of terrorism by knowing who purchased that ticket, not knowing what …

A long time ago, I used to get a shiny new computer almost every year.  It was awesome because I got to say goodbye to all the heavy-weight applications that I had installed over the course of the year and with the greatest new investments in processors from AMD and Intel, my new machine would start-up and behaved like rocket. — Gone are those days.

Now more than ever, IT administrators seek to cope with the post dot-com bubble where IT spending continues to decline and IT personnel are shrinking at an alarming rate.  Most people are taking up arms against …

Wow.  The last few days have seen some amazing events that I never thought I’d see in my lifetime.  First off, my prayers go out to everyone in Egypt for safety.  It’s truly scary the events that have happened over there, but first and foremost I hope for peace in the country and safety to all individuals that are in the middle of the political and social events that are occuring.

On Friday, I had a reporter call in to speak with me about the events and some of the things that had transpired.  For those of you that might not …