Category: Security

Microsoft Research has a new project:

Incubated at Microsoft Research, Project Freta is a roadmap toward trusted sensing for the cloud that can allow enterprises to engage in regular, complete discovery sweeps for undetected malware. The project’s namesake, Warsaw’s Freta Street, was the birthplace of Marie Curie, a pioneer of battlefield imaging. While snapshot-based memory forensics is a field now in its second decade, no commercial cloud has yet provided customers the ability to perform full memory audits of thousands of virtual machines (VMs) without intrusive capture mechanisms and a priori forensic readiness. Just as yesteryear’s film cameras and today’s smartphones have similar megapixels but vastly different ease of use and availability, Project Freta intends to automate and democratize VM forensics to a point where every user and every enterprise can sweep volatile memory for unknown malware with the push of a button—no setup required.

There’s a prototype currently available, as well as information on where they’re taking the project. I wish them the best of luck there.

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Eitan Blumin takes us through some ways of protecting an instance of SQL Server:

After reading up on a bunch of SQL Server penetration testing articles, I found that the steps of a common penetration test are as follows:

1. Discovery
2. Gaining Access
3. Elevating Permissions
4. Attacking (Loot / Destruction)

Logically, these steps mimic the steps taken by a common would-be hacker (except, of course, they try not to actually damage anything).

I’ll briefly describe each step from the point of view of a hacker or penetration tester, the common methodologies of each step, and offer recommendations that we can follow to protect our database systems at every level.

Click through for information on each step.

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