Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The onslaught of the novel COVID-19 has caught businesses off guard, sending many of them into a tailspin. To survive this, most businesses are considering the idea of remote work, and some have already implemented work from home policies. Under these circumstances, a virtual private network (VPN) is an organization’s best bet for providing access to business-critical services remotely and to avert operational disasters.

This is the final blog of our three-part blog series on living-off-the-land (LOTL) attacks. If you missed last week’s blog, you can read it here. LOTL attacks are also known as “malware-free” attacks because your own tools are used against you, either to hide malicious activities under a legitimate system process, or to leverage genuine system activities for malicious purposes.

On April 7, 2020, the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) released a notice confirming that two of its websites, SFOConnect.com and SFOConstruction.com, were targets of a cyberattack in March 2020. The attack has been attributed to a hacker group that was attempting to steal the Windows logins of the airport’s employees. When we hear news about cyberattacks, a few typical, yet crucial questions spring to mind: How did the attackers perform the cyberattack?

One of the primary concerns of IT admins when employees start working remotely is authenticating users. How can employees securely log in to their accounts while working remotely? What happens if users get locked out of their accounts? These are some of the questions that organizations are asking themselves when implementing work-from-home policies.

In the previous blog of this series, we discussed how monitoring SQL Server activities helps secure databases. The database security can further be reinforced by carefully configuring the authentication and authorization mechanisms for database accesses. In this blog, we’ll briefly explain the various authorization and authentication mechanisms of SQL Server and some best practices you can follow.

Over the past several years, telecommuting, or remote work, has gained significant traction across a wide variety of industries. According to a recent survey conducted by OWL Labs, 48 percent of employees worked from home at least once a week in 2019, and 34 percent were even willing to take a pay cut in order to work remotely.