Category: Security

Jack Vamvas does a thing I wish we could do innately in SQL Server Management Studio:

I  am logged onto my desktop with my primary Active Directory ID.  I need to log onto a SQL Server with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) with another Active Directory ID – the alternative ID has   valid  SQL Server security privileges on the target SQL Server. 

How can I log onto the target SQL Server with the alternative login  , remain on my desktop and use the alternative Active Directory ID ?

By the way, if you need to connect to a remote domain but your machine isn’t a member of that domain, add the /netonly flag to Jack’s answer. I’ve had to do this before when VPN’d into a network with a laptop not registered on that domain. Another tip is that, if you do this a lot, you might want to create a Windows shortcut which includes the full command.

Jonathan Greig reports on a data breach:

Nevada Restaurant Services (NRS), the owner of popular slot machine parlor chain Dotty’s, has disclosed a data breach that exposed a significant amount of personal and financial information. 

In a statement, the company confirmed that “certain customers” were affected by the breach and explained that the information includes Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers or state ID numbers, passport numbers, financial account and routing numbers, health insurance information, treatment information, biometric data, medical records, taxpayer identification numbers and credit card numbers and expiration dates.

I don’t normally link to data breaches too often because if I did, this site would be renamed to Curated Data Breaches given how frequently they occur. But what I want to know is, why in the world does a slot machine company have passport numbers, health insurance information, and medical records? What are they doing with that information? Slot machines are pretty simple: put quarter in, watch the screen light up and speakers make a bunch of happy noises, repeat until you run out of quarters. Unless there’s some sort of business arrangement where they put slot machines in the Nevada hospitals…

Also, the fact that credit card numbers and expiration dates were lost makes me wonder if they were actually PCI compliant.

Craig Porteous wants us thinking about roles and permissions:

There are a great number of factors that contribute to an organisation’s data maturity, both technical and non-technical. The non-technical factors often have the biggest impact however. Such as how open to change the business’s upper management is, how much data is embraced by department and team leaders, and the training and support provided to utilise new technologies. All of these factors set the expectation and appetite for change within the business much more than the role out of a new product or technology.

Data Personas are one such area that contribute greatly towards Data Maturity as they define responsibility and access beyond the roles and job titles of team members. Individual team members may fit multiple personas or none at all. There are five core Data Personas that need to be established within an organisation for effective data governance and management with some additional personas on the periphery that can map a bit more to specific technical roles. The number of personas will vary depending on the maturity of the organisation’s data platform and their use of data but the core personas are relevant to all organisations.

Click through for an example set of personas and what kinds of rights they would need, broken down in a matrix of environment and data layer.

Scott Contini explains some problems with popular encryption code snippets on Stack Overflow:

I’m not doing this to shame those who have made mistakes: Instead, I want to do my part to help fix the problem. As an AppSec specialist, I get really tired of having the same discussions over and over. I try real hard to make it easy for people to do the right thing: I point them to code that is safe to use, such as Luke Park’s Secure Compatible Encryption Examples. Despite this, there are the occasional teams who just continue to resist, even before the code has made it to production which is the best time to fix it. This makes everybody’s lives more difficult: it wastes my time to have to explain to them why their code is wrong, and it forces the teams to have to do a lot more work later because once the bad cryptography is in production, they need a migration plan to fix it.

Read on for a great explanation of common problems in encryption code.