The following excerpt has been taken from our ebook, The Ultimate Guide to Protecting Your Security Infrastructure in the Broader Data Center. Observe Proper Segregation of Duties System administration and security administration are not the same job, and those functions should be done by different people.

The following excerpt has been taken from our ebook, The Ultimate Guide to Protecting Your Security Infrastructure in the Broader Data Center. Isolate Security Services on a Protected Network While the subject of proper network security design over the entire data center will be the subject of a future article, we still need to consider the special needs of security infrastructure here.

Juniper’s NetScreen series of firewall and VPN devices have not one but two backdoor vulnerabilities, Juniper disclosed. One of these vulnerabilities is an authentication bypass for telnet or SSH logins to the firewall. The other is an encryption weakness that allows for eavesdropping on VPN traffic. Needless to say there has been a lot of discussion in the technicalpress, especially in light of the current political climate around encryption and back doors. Patches are available to cover both vulnerabilities. Juniper notes that no other Juniper products, in particular JunOS based products, are affected by these vulnerabilities.

Digital Guardian asked a bunch of security experts (including me) for their predictions on where the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) market was going in 2016 and beyond.

We recently posted about an uptick in wire transfer fraud through bogus email. Since then we and two of our clients have been the subject of such attacks. All were emails purporting to be from executive leadership (CEOs or Partners) to the people in their organization responsible for finance.

In its most recent quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Ubiquity, Inc, a Silicon Valley networking equipment company, revealed that they had been the victim of a $46.7 million cyberheist. The swindle is an increasingly common one, known variously as CEO fraud, business email compromise (BEC) or man in the email (MITE) attacks, and it targets companies that make a lot of wire transfers, especially to overseas business partners.

On July 19th security blogger Brian Krebs broke a story on a security breach at adultery hookup site AshleyMadison.com. Actually AM is just the largest of three “adult” web properties owned by Avid Life Media (ALM), all having to do with hooking people up for sexual encounters. Credit was claimed by the “Impact Team” who have threatened to publish data on millions of users unless the Ashley Madison site is shut down. To date neither has happened, except for the identification of two hapless users, one in the US and one near Toronto (where ALM is based). While ALM’s websites remain online, their planned London IPO is said to be in trouble.

Vulnerability On Monday, Zimperium Inc, a maker of mobile security solutions, announced that their security researcher Joshua J Drake (@jduck), had discovered a serious vulnerability in the Stagefright library in Android that allows for arbitrary remote code execution, which could be triggered just by sending a MMS message. (Related coverage here, and here.) Stagefright is Android’s library for handling certain types of media files.

When it comes to data breaches, 2014 was a difficult year for the U.S. retail industry. The FBI warned of this a year ago in the wake of the Target and Neiman Marcus data breaches. The increasing concern in both the industry and government was justified, as we saw many high profile attacks. Beginning with Target, there were data breaches at at least 9 prominent national brands, over half of them linked to malware installed on Point of Sale (POS) terminals.

A new Ponemon Institute survey, sponsored by Varonis Systems (press release here) examined corporate internal data protection practices as seen by 1,166 IT practitioners and 1,110 end users in organizations ranging in size from dozens to tens of thousands of employees, in a variety of industries including financial services, public sector, health & pharmaceutical, retail, industrial, and technology and software.