System Uptime

I made these screenshots about a year ago and posted them on my "old blog". I decided to post about this again on my "new blog".

About two years ago I set up Microsoft Virtual Server for one of my customers. To get the idea about the environment, this customer has more than 600 client computers on the network on more than 10 remote sites.

Unfortunately, for privacy reasons, I can’t say more about the customer. For same reason, I had to blank out some data in the screenshots.

This Virtual Server was at that time responsible for running few business critical services (e.g. RSA Server, Exchange Front-End server, domain controller, etc). All in all, this turned out to be a very busy Virtual Server.

Host server was running without any interruption for 510 days – which can be seen on the screenshots. In my opinion this is quite impressive. Unfortunately we had to take the server down after 510 days for hardware upgrade.

Larger image

I know, I know, these servers were not patched for more than 500 days. I will get into this in one of my future posts. ;-)

Social Engineering: Getting to the network… (Part 1)

Social engineering is always a fun subject to talk about. It is always interesting to watch companies trying to protect their data from being taken out of the company (e.g. paper copies, physical hard drives or even whole computer). Unfortunately I am still yet to see a company that tries to protect their network from people who bring the equipment into the network – this could be employees, visitors, maintenance workers etc.

Imagine someone bringing a Wi-Fi Access Point and connecting it to your network and hiding it. You can use your imagination on hiding the access point. Access points come in almost any shape and sizes.

Such access point will in most cases allow the "owner" a full access to the network it is connected to, at any time from outside of physical perimeter of the company. In other words, the attacker can sit in a coffee shop across your office on a Sunday afternoon drinking their favorite choice of caffeine-rich drink while data is being copied from your network.

My main question here is – how long will it take for an average company to find such access point?