Resources

Article

How To Maintain Your Data Integrity

File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) helps ensure that your critical and sensitive data is viewed and changed only by authorized personnel through approved channels. Candidates for FIM include application files containing sensitive data, such as personnel or financial data, and server configuration files.
Guide

Controlling SSH for Security and Compliance

SSH is nearly ubiquitous in today’s enterprises, and is the predominant tool for managing unix and linux servers, and the applications and data that they host. Poor practices around the deployment and management of the SSH infrastructure could easily leave your enterprise vulnerable to a breach. Are you in control? SSH, Secure Shell protocol, is now nineteen years old and broadly deployed across...
Article

Sudo or SuDon't: Manage Your Privileged Command Execution and Sudo Policies

System admins need root level authority at all times, system operations staff needs periodic database and application account authority, and security admins needing to protect the environment are some of the few of the challenges of managing privilege in the enterprise server infrastructure. Read this article to learn more about Sudo alternatives.
Article

Managing IT Access Privileges

THE UNSOLVED PROBLEM Secure, private, effective use of computers by a company (including hosted, cloud and other services as well as the company’s own systems) relies on managing access privileges. The problem isn’t unique to computers. Office buildings, hotels, apartments and college dorms, for example, typically have “master keys” (or smart ID badges) that can open many-toall of the locks in the...
Article

Solving Healthcare Security Concerns

According to a recent KPMG report, four-fifths of executives at healthcare providers and payers say their information technology has been compromised by cyberattacks. That same report presents how the increased risk to healthcare organizations relates to the richness and uniqueness of the information that health plans, doctors and hospitals handle. Apart from typical financial fraud, there is also...
Article

New Approaches to the SWIFT and PCI-DSS Framework

THE WORLD OF COMPLIANCE At the official start of summertime 2016 in Britain we are starting to consume the labour of last autumn, five gallons of alcoholic homemade cider (yum!) made from eight apple varieties grown in mine and my neighbors’ gardens. I’m very VERY careful sterilizing glassware, containers, and buckets: there was this unfortunate incident three years ago (no, you don’t want to hear...
Article

Pros and Cons for Puppet's Configuration Management & Security

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY I was at the Red Hat Summit in Boston at the end of June. We had a lot of activity at our exhibitor stand, and a lot of discussions being passed on to me by our sales team I continued to have the same conversation again and again over the three days. This seems to be the year people have finished bedding down Puppet in their server/VM infrastructure, and are looking...
Blog

The DDoS Deception You Need to Know About

A denial-of-service attack is any attempt to interrupt or inflict downtime upon IT systems, but a basic DoS threat is smaller in scale than its DDoS counterpart. With the former, the influx of traffic may come from a single source, while in a DDoS attack, traffic comes from numerous sources – making it more difficult to deal with.
Blog

How “Smash and Grab” Compromises IBM i

During an audit a few years ago, I revealed to the client’s security team that corporate payroll information on every employee, including the CEO, was being archived in an output queue (called PAYROLL) for weeks at a time. Due to poor configuration, this information was accessible to every employee.
Blog

What is the Value of SIEM?

As is often the case in the technology industry, the details surrounding security information and event management can be a little unclear. While vendors may offer solutions of varying complexity, there is still a basic idea behind most SIEM products…
On-Demand Webinar

An Introduction to PCI Compliance on IBM Power Systems

Complying with the PCI standard is a normal part of doing business in today’s credit-centric world. But, PCI applies to multiple platforms. The challenge becomes how to map the general PCI requirements to a specific platform, such as IBM i. And, more importantly, how can you maintain—and prove—compliance?
Article

Monitor, Capture, and Send Log Events With Powertech SIEM Agent for IBM i

In recent years, regulatory initiatives like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI, and GLBA have placed increased emphasis on the need to monitor and secure sensitive information. For example, The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard dictates one of the most stringent requirements of all—logs must be reviewed daily, and a minimum of three months of logs must be available for analysis.
Guide

Download “How IT Professionals Can Navigate PCI DSS Compliance” Guide

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) applies to every organization that processes credit or debit card information. This includes merchants and third-party service providers that store, process, or transmit credit card data. The launch of PCI DSS helped expose serious security shortcomings, failures to follow security best practices, and a general lack of awareness of the...
Case Study

Powertech Helps the Seneca Nation Play the Security Game

The SGC has a fairly large IBM i presence, including multiple production, development, test, and training systems, in a High Availability (HA) environment. They rely heavily on their IBM i servers to run their distributed properties, including casinos, hotels, resorts, retail outlets...