Encryption of data at rest is becoming more and more crucial in today’s world. This tip is aimed to help businesses that do not have the budgets or resources to purchase hardware encryption tools or to upgrade to SQL 2008. It basically illustrates how to achive transparent file encryption with SQL 2005 or SQL 2000.  Read more...

Would you like to have only SQL Server Authentication on your instances? That's the subject of this Friday's poll.  Read more...

Would you like to have only SQL Server Authentication on your instances? That's the subject of this Friday's poll.  Read more...

Would you like to have only SQL Server Authentication on your instances? That's the subject of this Friday's poll.  Read more...

If your company needs to go through a SOX (Sarbanes–Oxley) audit or any security audit, the DBA has to provide security information to them. If you have purchased third party tools to provide this information that is great. If you don't have third party tools and need to go through many servers to provide this information it can be a hassle and very time consuming. So I put together a script to generate a report that I could just review. The script generates a report of all elevated level accounts and any possible security holes.  Read more...

Would you like to have only SQL Server Authentication on your instances? That's the subject of this Friday's poll.  Read more...

Every so often I see a post in a forum or on Twitter about the use of xp_cmdshell. Usually it is someone looking for...  Read more...

It seems that the ownership of jobs is something that is often overlooked when articles explain   Read more...

In your development environment if you have locked down permissions for developers, but still need them to execute stored procedures you will need to grant execute rights each time a new stored procedure is generated. In this tip I will show you a way of doing this automatically each time a new stored procedure is created without granting your developers additional permissions.  Read more...

If you need to connect to a SQL server and don't have the 'sa' password plus the builtin\administrators account has been removed then Rudy Panigas shows us what you need to know.   Read more...

Welcome back to our last class this term on security in SQL Server here at SQL University. According to the syllabus,...  Read more...

An open letter asks Google to change their default protocol to be more secure. Are there things that we might want to do inside SQL Server to make it more secure by default? Any low hanging fruit that would help the platform?  Read more...

An open letter asks Google to change their default protocol to be more secure. Are there things that we might want to do inside SQL Server to make it more secure by default? Any low hanging fruit that would help the platform?  Read more...

An open letter asks Google to change their default protocol to be more secure. Are there things that we might want to do inside SQL Server to make it more secure by default? Any low hanging fruit that would help the platform?  Read more...

An open letter asks Google to change their default protocol to be more secure. Are there things that we might want to do inside SQL Server to make it more secure by default? Any low hanging fruit that would help the platform?  Read more...

Businesses are always looking to collect data on their customers. However when they are fgiven this data, there is a level of trust from the consumer that is expected of the business. Guest editor John Magnabosco talks about the need for database professionals to take care that we are honoring this trust.   Read more...

By now, hopefully everyone has heard of the security breach where accounts and passwords were found on a public site listed the account usernames and passwords of some 10,000 users. Initially it was just reported to be Hotmail/Live.com/MSN, but it turns  Read more...

Marcin Policht continues his discussion of implementing Reporting Services on SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, focusing in particular on security-related topics. This article continues this subject by describing other technologies that assist with data protection, their corresponding configuration settings, and a few authentication and authorization caveat  Read more...

Are IT administrators focusing on the wrong attacks when securing their systems? Should we as DBAs and developers care? Steve Jones argues that we want to be aware of these issues.  Read more...

Are IT administrators focusing on the wrong attacks when securing their systems? Should we as DBAs and developers care? Steve Jones argues that we want to be aware of these issues.  Read more...

If you need to connect to a SQL server and don't have the 'sa' password plus the builtin\administrators account has been removed then Rudy Panigas shows us what you need to know.   Read more...

SQL Server MVP Brian Kelley brings us a great new article that solves a problem that might help your security. In this short piece, we learn how we can use logon triggers to block users based on their IP address.  Read more...

It seems that the ownership of jobs is something that is often overlooked when articles explain   Read more...