Review: NGSSquirrel

NGS Software is in the security business and have been very successful in finding vulnerabilities in many products, notable SQL Server. They have used their expertise to build products to help you better secure your systems. Dale Corey looks at one of those products, NGSSquirrel, which does vulnerability assessment.

Save Your Password

Storing passwords in SQL Server for authentication by your application is a common practice. But not always a good one. Someone with access could easily see all passwords and perhaps cause mischief inside your application. Imagine the office gossip getting access to your HR application as the HR director! Not a good thing. Dinesh Asanka has written a short piece on how you can use a built in function in SQL Server to encrypt these passwords and use them with a minimum of effort.

What is the minimum permissions you would need...

You would like to grant all access on...

You suspect that a hacker is trying to...

To execute sp_change_users_login procedure with all the three...

Bill's company recently purchased another company and he...

Yukon Passwords

Some good info on password changes in Yukon (SQL 2005). Based on the beta, but worth taking a look at.

On your production SQL Server 2000, you have...

How to Make Sure You Have Good Passwords

As Robin points out there is no built in way to make sure users have strong passwords when using SQL authentication. There are a couple changes you can make (with appropriate warnings!) that will allow you to do this. Read on to find out why and how.