BumpInTheWire.com

I attended the Kansas City Enterprise Security Solutions Summit today. Overall it was a great event. I spent the morning in vendor specific breakout sessions and the afternoon was reserved for the Keynote speaker. The three breakout sessions I sat in on were: “Securing and Managing Privileged Account Passwords” by Cyber-Ark, “Check Point Software: Putting it all together” by Check Point (obviously!) and “Evolving Compliance Strategies in Retail, Healthcare and Finance” by Tumbleweed. The Cyber-Ark presentation was about a solution to replace the trusty old excel spread sheet that contains all of your passwords and automated local password changes. Check Point was about their solutions from the end point to the edge and I really only sat in on that as we use Check Point in our environment. Tumbleweed gave a more general presentation about compliance (mainly PCI) but did manage to plug their solution in a little.

The Keynote was the climax of the day in my opinion. The speaker was Jeffrey Wheatman from Gartner and he gave a very good presentation about 10 audit points and technologies to deal with them. I’m usually not one for Keynotes (in fact I’ve been known to skip them at an event or two…don’t tell the boss!) but this was a good one. Some of the topics made me feel good about the way we are going about things and some of the things shined light on where we could do better. Luckily there was not a single one that we were completely ignoring. Beings we go through a couple of audits a year it would be pretty hard to ignore audit points. After the event there was a cocktail hour and myself and the boss had the opportunity to enjoy a couple of adult beverages with Mr. Wheatman. It was the first time I had ever spoke with a Gartner Analyst in person so I thought it was pretty cool. A very friendly guy who has some great stories…both personal and work.

Over at Security Uncorked JJ referenced a post of mine about a bad cable and Layer 1 of the OSI Model. Funny she wrote that because dumb me had something similar bite me in the ass just yesterday when I was troubleshooting a VRRP issue on a newly configured interface on one of our firewalls. When I had first done the work I connected the interfaces with the first two cables I could find just to make sure they worked. Before I put anything in production I wanted to swap the cables out with the proper length cables. When I did the cable swap I plugged one into the wrong port on the switch. Doh! I only spent about an hour troubleshooting this before I realized what was happening…thank goodness.

This was my 100th post! In celebration I offer a short clip from one of my favorite movies: Dazed and Confused.