SECTION 9 Cyber Security

This is our 100th episode. Hard to believe we’ve made it this far. For this episode Dorothy and I want to answer what might seam to be a simple question. It isn’t. We also talk about the things we want to learn, future plans and how they relate to cyber security.

As the title says, LastPass and Backblaze rock, but they’re not set and forget. We’re in the operate and optimize phases of the Cisco Network Life-cycle. There are a few gotchas with LastPass and Backblaze. This has nothing to do with the software or the service. This is all about how you use them. Dorothy and I have several unanswered questions to deal with.

It’s a good thing we’re doing this now. Most IT departments never have this conversation. Or they talk about this after they’ve lost something in a disaster.

We managed to take a couple of small steps in the right direction. I managed to document and clean up the network. Dorothy got my new workstation moved over to her desk.

We couldn’t have done it without Wireshark. It helped us track down an IP address for our Palo Alto Firewall.

While we did manage to get a few things done, we still have a lot of work to do.

Dorothy and I had to get some last minute projects done. We had to finish testing PlexTrac, management software for security assessments. This testing required us to install and test Nessus Pro. Not only did we get these projects done, but Dorothy was able to do some work on my new workstation.

Time to go back to some unfinished projects. Dorothy is working on my new workstation. Something she bought for me a while ago. I’m in the process of finding a new switch for our network. Something I should have done a long time ago.

We’re using the Cisco network lifecycle for this process. We’re also using Monday.com and a few other solutions to help manage our projects. This seems to be working for us.

We have a baseline for our Windows 10 systems. One that maps to the first 4 critical security controls. This is a big step in the right direction.

We did a quick test of Sumo. We tested the free and pro versions. We looked at the pros and cons. So far, Sumo seems like a good solution. The downside, we have to manually install applications. As a tiny organization we don’t have a lot of options.

Dorothy and I do a quick review of Bitdefender GravityZone & Sumo. We’re on the hunt for solutions that meat one or more of the first 6 Critical Security Controls. The first 6 controls are our road map to a security program for Section 9. This was an interesting project

Instead of 20 Critical Security Controls, we’re going to talk about the Essential 8. These are 8 things you can do to keep your organization secure. This list comes from the Australian Cyber Security Center.

In this episode we take a look at two factor authentication with Duo Security and LastPass. We tried to use the Yubikey for 2FA, but that didn’t work out for us. In our case, Duo security might be a better option. Now that we have a good 2FA solution, we can focus on a better password management process.