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.

In the digital era, most enterprises use a web platform to reach potential customers and showcase the products or solutions they offer. Websites have become extremely popular as a medium of establishing a brand image, and they contribute in making a major share of revenue. Well-planned websites can capture the attention of the target audience, increasing the probability of them turning into valuable, paying customers.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we delve into how organizations are increasingly adopting a remote work model, and how they can equip themselves to build a synchronized virtual workspace. In the wake of COVID-19 and the subsequent mandates to stay at home, many organizations have implemented a remote work environment in order to maintain business operations.

We’re back with part two of our three-part blog series on living-off-the-land attacks. If you missed part one, you can read it here. In a nutshell, living-off-the-land (LOTL) refers to a type of attack where the attacker uses the tools and features that already exist in the target environment to carry out malicious activities. The concept of LOTL is not new, but LOTL and file-less attacks have been gaining popularity over the last few months.

MS SQL, Microsoft’s relational database management system (RDBMS), is known for its broad spectrum of capabilities such as transaction processing, business intelligence, and analytics. This is why most businesses trust and invest in SQL for their data storage and access needs. What are the benefits of monitoring SQL servers? Applications Manager offers proactive SQL server monitoring.