Security

Providing fast access to applications and data while protecting digital assets are the two biggest challenges faced by network administrators. Performance and security represent the two-pronged mission that administrators find themselves facing every day.

As IT pros already know, when we speak of ports, we mean the 16-bit virtual ports used when interconnecting systems i.e. during communication over protocols such as TCP or UDP and not physical connections on the system such as USB, HDMI etc. See the OSI model and list of port numbers and their assigned function if not an IT pro. Port 80 is commonly used for HTTP activity, for example, and many applications communicate using assigned default ports.

Despite being an essential piece of the Sysadmin toolbox, Network performance management (NPM) can be a bit of a mystery for many IT professionals.

Over the past week, news broke about a rogue device that had gone unnoticed on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) IT network. The fact that a Raspberry Pi went unnoticed for almost 10 months is a clear signal of network management issues and lackluster security policies in place within NASA, and other government agencies for that matter.

Improper configuration changes to a network—or even just one server on a network—can cause huge issues. They can degrade network performance, shut down key services, and even result in noncompliance with regulatory standards like SOX, PCI, HIPAA and FISMA. And they can compromise network security.

The World Wide Web’s 30^th birthday came and went this week, and though there was much to celebrate—just look how far we’ve gone since the days of America Online CDs and Yahoo! chat rooms— it also seems like the problems the Internet causes are beginning to outweigh the problems it solves.

The following is an excerpt from our Network Monitoring blog at whatsupgold.com/blog.

For most IT organizations, network monitoring is an essential tool. Network monitoring tools play an important role in letting IT pros get complete visibility into the status of network devices, systems, and applications, keeping the IT team aware of problems with services, networks, application performance, and more.

It’s certainly clear that IT teams that utilize a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution are better positioned to protect the digital assets of their companies. SIEM aggregates vital data from multiple sources and provides alerts that enable IT to detect, prevent, isolate and mitigate security threats.

Every device, OS and application in your IT environment generates a record of activities in the form of log files. These audit trails of activity provide valuable information when investigating security breaches and when submitting regulation compliance reports.

For most IT organizations, network monitoring is an essential tool. Network monitoring tools play an important role in letting IT pros get complete visibility into the status of network devices, systems, and applications, keeping the IT team aware of problems with services, networks, application performance, and more.

For most IT organizations, the network monitoring tool is an essential, even central part of the IT toolkit. Network monitoring tools play an important role in letting IT pros know where issues exist before helpdesk tickets start coming in, keeping the IT team aware of problems with service, networks, application performance, and more.

Monitoring traffic on the dark web is the kind of thing that IT administrators worry about, but they can't do anything about. Now IT can pinpoint who and what is accessing the dark web from corporate networks with WhatsUp Gold. 

For years, there have been concerns of the Chinese government building backdoors and spying capabilities in to phones and hardware built on their soil, and now it seems those concerns are coming to head with a recent Bloomberg story that alleges that Chinese government agents installed thousands of spy chips into servers used by Amazon, Apple, and the US government. How true are these allegations, are our servers safe? In this article, we’ll attempt to figure out what—if anything—happened, and how IT pros should react.

According to the SANS Institute, Port Scanning is one of the most popular techniques attackers use to discover services that they can exploit to break into systems. Although Port Scanning isn’t inherently hostile, it is often the first step of reconnaissance used by hackers when trying to infiltrate a network or steal/destroy sensitive data. In this article, we will discuss some best practices you can employ to defend against attackers and prevent potential network breaches.

Detecting attacks on network environments has become an unfortunate necessity of modern IT.

If you hadn’t heard, there is a fatal clock flaw that is effecting Cisco and Juniper routers and switches with the Intel Atom C2000 chip. Cisco has recently released a statement on the issue:

The computer security world uses a lot of military language and concepts. This is not just because it "sounds good" but because there are many useful analogies to be found.

Let's cut right to the chase here, the life of an IT pro is hard. With endless to-do lists stuffed with infrastructure maintenance, security management and support, it's always a new adventure. Unfortunately for us, it doesn't look like things are getting any easier. Technological trends such as BYOD have made many aspects of modern business more efficient, but they've also increased the complexity of IT environments and made processes such as endpoint security management a real thorn in the side of many an IT pro.

With the advent of BYOD, it seems like just yesterday that a new mobile movement was making waves through enterprise organizations across the globe. BYOD offers new opportunities for increased productivity, but it also raises a slew of difficult security questions. While many IT pros are still wading through the repercussions of this mobile onslaught, a fresh, new user revolution is creating similar buzz (and similar problems).

If you do any security monitoring, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of events you need to track. You can start by doing longer hours, but eventually you'll end up in a swamp — sucked in to the point that workflow comes to a standstill.