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Tuesday, March 28, 2017

MegaplanIT Supports PCI SSC North America Community Meeting with Platinum Sponsorship

I've worked with the group over at MegaplanIT for quite some time and have nothing but great things to say about them and their company. They're professionalism, technical ability and business acumen have always impressed me. Which is why when I heard they were sponsoring the PCI SSC North America Community as a Platinum sponsor I wanted to give them the recognition they deserve. Over the years MegaplanIT has grown to become a trusted partner in the security and compliance space and it's great seeing good people succeed. I would highly recommend reaching out to them for any PCI related services. Below is their new press release - Kudos, guys!




MegaplanIT Supports PCI SSC North America Community Meeting with Platinum Sponsorship

MegaplanIT, LLC, is the Platinum sponsor for the PCI SSC North America Community Meeting being held in Orlando, Florida, in September, 2017.

Scottsdale, Arizona – March 2017

MegaplanIT, LLC, a PCI QSC and premier provider of security and compliance solutions, has announced that it would be participating in the PCI SSC North America Community event this September, as a Platinum sponsor. The event, which takes place September 12-14, in Orlando Florida, is a principal conference bringing together stakeholders from the payment card industry to participate in discussions on the latest standards, technologies, and strategic initiatives shared by the PCI Council.

“We are excited for the opportunity to partner with the PCI Council as a Platinum sponsor in this year’s PCI SSC North America Community Meeting.  By sponsoring the event, we hope to display MegaplanIT’s continued commitment to, and appreciation of, the PCI Council’s hard work and guidance”, says Managing Partner of MegaplanIT, Michael Vitolo. He goes on to share, “with this support of the Council, we’re continually looking to develop strong relationships and work with other organizations to become a trusted partner within the payment card industry, while offering the best services available to our customers.”

By promoting the Platinum sponsorship, MegaplanIT believes that showcasing their brand during this PCI community event demonstrates their level of commitment and dedication to their clients in need of PCI and security related services. 

For further details please contact:

Jerry Abowd
Principal Account Manager
MegaPlanIT, LLC
800-891-1634 ext 105

Thursday, March 23, 2017

10 Must Read Infosec Books

I was recently asked to participate in selecting one information security book to add to a round-up of recommended reading for infosec pros. The round-up includes ten selections from different people and was published by Tripwire here.

There are many great books out there I wanted to recommended, but since I only had one spot on the list I wanted to make it count. My selection, even though it's an older book, was: Extrusion Detection: Security Monitoring for Internal Intrusions by Richard Bejtlich.

The technology in this book might have changed, but the concepts are still the same. In order to defend the confidential data within your network, there needs to be proper extrusion detection in place to detect intruders who have comprised your internal systems and are attempting to siphon sensitive data our of your network. There's been a huge emphasis on preventing threats in the past but we have to gain a mindset on expecting that we're already breached and how to deal with it. This book gives you some serious food for thought on how it can be applied and was eye-opening for me when I read it almost a decade ago.

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Update - Remediating the NTP Daemon DoS Vulnerability

There were multiple vulnerabilities recently discovered in the Network Time Protocol (NTP) daemon, along with a patch to remediate them. A patch for this specific vulnerability -- named NTP 4.2.8p9 -- was released by the Network Time Foundation Project (NTFP).

A researcher named Magnus Stubman discovered the vulnerability and, instead of going public, took the mature route and privately informed the community of his findings. The remediation was part of the NTP 4.2.8p9 release. Stubman has written that the vulnerability he discovered could allow unauthenticated users to crash NTPF with a single malformed UDP packet, which will cause a null point dereference (you can read more about the technical details of the exploit of the NTP daemon from Stubman on his personal website). This means that an attacker could be able to craft a UDP packet towards the service, resulting in an exception bypass that can cause the process to crash.

This denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the NTP daemon is dangerous because all systems rely on synchronizing their time within milliseconds of each other to properly operate, keep authentication protocols working smoothly, timestamp for compliance, correlate security logs and so on. Without the NTP daemon working properly in an environment, errors could cascade quickly throughout the network. The threat to the environment is real, and if it's not patched, an attacker could take advantage of this vulnerability. Read the rest of my article at the link below:

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/answer/How-can-enterprises-fix-the-NTP-daemon-vulnerability-to-DoS-attacks