Ugh. Passwords. The concept has been around as long as civilization itself. But are they the best way to protect account access in the digital age? How do you insure that people use “strong” passwords? What is a “strong” password, anyway? And when is a password – regardless of its strength – not enough?
The difficulty from an administrative perspective is that the restrictions we impose on our users in an attempt to force them to create strong passwords are often counterproductive. If the password must be at least 8 characters long, must contain both upper- and lower-case characters and at least one numeric and one “special” character, and cannot be a word that’s in the dictionary and must be changed every 90 days and cannot be a password that you’ve used before, you’ve almost guaranteed that it’s going to be written down somewhere because it will be nearly impossible to remember.
So what’s an admin to do? Well, there are some guidelines that we can give users to help them create strong passwords that are easy to remember. Read More
I got an interesting email this morning. It was “from” one of the owners of Xiologix – but the return address was a bit odd: “ofceo@comcast.net” As this unfolded, it became obvious that this was a classic “spear phishing” attack. I’ll run you through the email exchange for entertainment purposes, and then talk about the lessons to be learned here. The original message was short and sweet: 
Uila (pronounced wee-la) with its application-centric infrastructure monitoring and analytics identifies performance bottlenecks for business-critical services and plans workload migration strategies for private and hybrid cloud environments. Uila provides service dependency mapping, full stack correlation with one-click root cause analysis and patented deep packet inspection technology that understands over 3,000 application protocols for transactional meta data analysis. Businesses use Uila to align themselves with their IT operations team and cut time to resolution from days to minutes, keep their application at peak performance at all time and ensure end-user satisfaction to the fullest. 
Citrix XenApp v6.5 hit EOL June 30, 2018
