I have the privilege of being able to give a webinar next Thursday, November 3, at 11 AM EDT. It will be through Quest's Experts' Perspective series. You can register here:

Experts' Perspective Webcast: Building a Bulletproof Security Strategy for SQL Server

In this webinar I'll be discussing how to… Read more

Welcome back to both our Kerberos coverage and to another topic for SQL University's Security and Auditing Week. In today's lesson we're going to cast some light on what is likely the most used tool in managing Service Principal Names (SPNs) for Kerberos: SETSPN. If you're not familiar with… Read more

Welcome to Security week at SQL University. I apologize for the late start. However, if you want to do some related reading from last week, take a look at the Kerberos series I started:

• Understanding Kerberos, Part I
• Understanding Kerberos, Part II

The reason I point out the Kerberos… Read more

The majority of the time, the problems I see with Kerberos are due to a bad SPN (Service Principal Name) configuration. So in this post we'll talk about what an SPN contains and how it should look. An SPN contains several pieces of information:

• The service identifier (this is MSSQLSvc…

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A get a lot of questions where I work about Kerberos and how it works for SQL Server, whether we're talking about the database engine or Reporting Services. I also see it quite a bit on Twitter. This is a series of posts that looks to explain Kerberos in more… Read more

On Tuesday, October 18, 2011, I will be speaking at the Carolina Technology Conference in Columbia, SC. I'm scheduled for the 3:30-4:20 PM slot, meaning about a 40-45 minute presentation on database security. While I will focus primarily on Microsoft SQL Server security, I will approach database and data security… Read more

If you're not familiar with Chotto matte kudasai, it means "A moment, please," in Japanese. The cloud is big news. It is big news at the PASS Summit. It has been big news for quite some time. Folks are pushing hard to get you into the cloud. However, there… Read more

It is understandable that nations may undertake operations against other nations. This is believed to be the origin of StuxNet after all. What is more disturbing is when a government will use malware against its own citizens, as discoveredin the last couple of weeks in Germany. What is especially disturbing… Read more

If you don't get the reference, it was a set of skits on the old Muppet Show and it starred these guys and Miss Piggy. It was always a riot, full of great puns, and one of my favorite skit sets of all time. However, Red Gate's latest… Read more

I used to work with a guy who was adamant that before you asked him for help, you had done the following:

• Looked at the help on the computer (we were dealing primarily with Windows operating systems).
• Searched on Microsoft TechNet.
• Performed a search on the Internet with your issue.

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Previously, when I had attended conferences, I had used them to attend as many seminars or talks as I could physically get to. Then one simple book laid out the problems with such an approach. The big thing to remember is that there are only going to be a few… Read more

In a blog post from last year, Richard Bejtlich (blog | twitter) talked about a concept called an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). His discussion then centered on the Aurora attacks on Google and other firms. In a recent post, Richard covered a bit about his experience at a… Read more

When trying to detect whether updates have been installed or not, there were several places we investigated:

• HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
• HKLM\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\HotFix
• HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Updates

Some updates still write to these locations to enable detection and they should be looked for. For instance, SQL Server 2005 SP4 for the database engine will be found at:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\KB246332_SQL9 Read more

Recently I've started following the public work of Mikko Hypponen (blog | twitter), the Chief Research Officer of F-Secure. I've known about and kept up with the announcements put out by F-Secure for a long time, but never focused in much on any one individual. That was… Read more