Cues from OMB Zero Trust Architecture memo

Towards the end of January 2022, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its memorandum on moving government agencies to a zero-trust model. Enterprises that align themselves to industries regulated by the federal agencies can take a cue from it to improve their security posture. The memo considers the recent ransomware attacks on various… Continue reading Cues from OMB Zero Trust Architecture memo

Disk Overwrite or Wipeout Best Practice

An online search shows majority of tools available for wiping out data on a disk points to a practice of 7 wipes. They believe that it is a US DoD requirement. Some of them support the Gutmann method of 35 wipes. However, I could not find any documentation on US government website that indicates seven… Continue reading Disk Overwrite or Wipeout Best Practice

Protecting Clear Text Password

Passwords are the basic type of authentication in a system. They are easy to implement and also easy to attack. However, there are situations where you need to use a password to protect access to a resource. Its fine if an end user of system is providing the password directly to the system. Sometimes you need to store the password in a configuration file of a system. That’s where the dilemma starts. You have a scheduled SFTP process that needs a password to start. Do you keep the password in clear text or do you encrypt it? If you encrypt it, then how do you protect the key to encrypt and decrypt the password?

Production Data as Test Data

In order to maintain high quality of code, a company needs to use production quality source data for development, unit test and QA functional test purposes. There could be situations when the company uses unscrambled production source data, which potentially exposes customer sensitive data. Customer sensitive data must be protected. Given that there is a correlation between the quality of test data and the quality of code delivered to production, all efforts should be made to minimize the disruption/distortion of test data, while satisfying the privacy concerns.