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MS SQL Server is Microsoft’s relational database management system with a large number of features and services. With this coverage, there is a large surface area for attack and vulnerabilities. Fortunately, there are a number of security benchmarks and good practice documents available. This article gives an introduction to the security guidelines available and an overview on what key areas to audit and lock down. Continue reading

There are many third-party tools in the security industry that can perform a security audit of your Windows system. Some are standalone executable, some are frameworks, some are free and some you have to shell out money for. But what if you these tools are not available to you, you are stuck with a Windows servers and essentially what Windows has given you. This article will look at executable programs under Windows that can be use audit services. Continue reading

Windows system objects are one of the interesting areas of binary application assessments that are often ignored or misunderstood. Many people don’t realise that abstract Windows application programming concepts such as mutexes, events, semaphores, shared memory sections, and jobs all come together under the purview of the Windows Object Manager. These objects, like those in the filesystem and registry namespaces, have all sorts of interesting security impacts when not properly managed. Continue reading

Inspired by GRSecurity‘s analysis of the Linux capabilities model, I thought I’d take a quick look at how Windows fares. The following is a brief analysis of the threats associated with each Se* privilege. Continue reading

Of all the conferences I’ve been to, Securi-Tay has always been a favourite. I don’t know whether it’s the mix of security professionals and students, the relaxed atmosphere, or the balance between technical and non-technical talks, but it’s always a great time. For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, Securi-Tay is a student organised and lead conference, held annually by the Abertay Ethical Hacking Society at the University of Abertay, Dundee. This year’s event, held on January 15th (last week, at time of writing), marked the third instance of the conference. Continue reading

The previous post about session management was about how to improve the security of web sessions. An aspect which was not addressed in that post is how to identify that a session is not in active use any more but where the user has manually logged out. For example, a user who was using a banking application and closed the tab without logging out the application. Continue reading