Lori MacVittie

Security Journal on Ulitzer How many times have you seen an employee wave on by a customer when the “security device enclosed” in some item – be it DVD, CD, or clothing – sets off the alarm at the doors? Just a few weeks ago I heard one young lady explain the alarm away with “it must have be the CD I bought at the last place I was at…” This apparently satisfied the young man at the doors who nodded and turned back to whatever he’d been doing. All the data the security guy needed to make a determination was there; he had all the context necessary in which to analyze the situation and make a determination based upon that information. But he ignored it all. He failed to leverage all the tools at his disposal and potentially allowed dollars to walk out the door. In doing so... (more)

Google SPDY Protocol Would Require Mass Change in Infrastructure

Google’s desire to speed up the web via a new protocol is laudable, but the SPDY protocol would require massive changes across networks to support ArsTechnica had an interesting article on one of Google’s latest projects, a new web protocol designed to replace HTTP called SPDY. SPDY uses a single SSL-encrypted session between a browser and a client, and then compresses all the request/resp... (more)

Data as a Service Could Drastically Impact Success of SQL Injection Attacks

One of the biggest threats to data integrity is the introduction of malicious content via SQLi (SQL Injection) attacks. Traditional database access methods don’t provide a lot in the way of validating requests and like HTML the vagaries of SQL allow for myriad ways in which a statement can be constructed – and thus exploited. These vagaries, of course, are one factor in the reason why SQL... (more)

Maybe Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Makes Cloud Computing Too Easy

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer With just a few clicks you, too, can create a cloud computing environment. But if you’re like a lot of organizations, you may not know what to do with it after that. The latest version of Ubuntu Server (9.10) includes the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), which is actually powered by Eucalyptus. The ability to deploy a “cloud” on any server running Ubuntu is reall... (more)

WILS: Three Ways To Better Utilize Resources In Any Data Center

Cloud computing is, at its core, about using resources in the most operational and financially efficient manner possible. It’s about spreading resources around and sharing them to achieve greater scalability with fewer investments in hardware and software. But what if you aren’t moving to cloud? Or virtualization? Or perhaps you are, but the benefits won’t be really seen until you actual... (more)