Web Admin Blog

Real Web Admins. Real World Experience.

Entries for 2009

Velocity 2009 – The Web Performance and Operations Conference

You’re in luck!  Peco and I are attending Velocity 2009 and we’ll be taking notes and blogging about the conference.  You can see what to expect by going back and reading my coverage of Velocity 2008! As Web Admins, we love Velocity.  Usually, we have to bottom-feed at more generalized conferences looking for good relevant […]

Who Needs VPN When You Have PuTTY?

I was talking with my coworkers this afternoon about Time Warner’s plans to jack up rates for high-bandwith users and it got me thinking about how much of their precious bandwith I am actually using.  I know that my router at home has a web browser interface where I can get that information, but I […]

Thoughts on the TRISC 2009 Conference

This was my third consecutive year attending the TRISC Conference and it gets better and better every year.  This year, the location was outstanding, the presenters were top-notch, and the Keynotes were pretty good.  This was my first time actually presenting at the TRISC Conference and I thought they did an excellent job from the […]

Anatomy of an Attack: From Incident to Expedient Resolution

For the first session of the morning on the last day of the TRISC 2009 Conference, I decided to attend the “Anatomy of an Attack: From Incident to Expedient Resolution” talk by Chris Smithee, a Systems Engineer at Lancope.  He talked about the different types of attacks that you see on your network and how […]

PCI Compliance – Convert Drudgery Into a Powerful Security Framework

For my last session of the day at TRISC 2009, I decided to attend Joseph Krull’s presentation on PCI Compliance.  Joe works as a consultant for Accenture and has performed 60+ PCI engagements for various companies.  If your organization does any processing of credit card information, my notes from that session below should be useful: […]

Security Policy Architecture – How to fix your current disaster

One of the sessions that I attended during the day on the Tuesday of TRISC 2009 was by Doug Landoll from Lantego on “Security Policy Architecture”.  The presentation was a very good overview of how to put good security policies in place that are easily auditable should that need arise and that are as comprehensive […]

Deep Packet Inspection and the Loss of Privacy and Security on the Internet

For my first session of the day on Tuesday of the TRISC 2009 conference I attended a presentation by Andrew MacFarlane from Data Foundry, Inc. on “Deep Packet Inspection and the Loss of Privacy and Security on the Internet”.  While the concept of DPI is nothing new to me and I remember first hearing about […]

The Importance of Log Management in Today’s Insecure World

For my last session of the first day of the TRISC 2009 Conference, I made the mistake of attending Ricky Allen and Randy Holloway’s presentation on “The Importance of Log Management in Today’s Insecure World”.  I say “mistake” because out of all of the presentations I attended over the entire three days of the conference […]

Assessing Your Web App Manually Without Hacking It

After giving my presentation on “Using Proxies to Secure Applications and More” at the TRISC 2009 conference, I decided to attend the presentation by Robert “RSnake” Hansen and Rob MacDougal entitled “Assessing Your Web App Manually Without Hacking It”.  The gist of this presentation was that with a few simple tools (Web Developer Toolbar, NoScript, […]

Spear Phishing – Breaking Into Wall Street & Critical Infrastructure

For my first breakout session of the TRISC 2009 Conference, I decided to check out Rohyt Belani’s presentation on Spear Phishing.  Rohyt is the CEO of Intrepidus Group and has spoken at a variety of conferences from BlackHat to OWASP to MISTI to Hack in the Box.  I had heard from several other conference attendees […]