If you’ve had to work with Active Directory or Exchange, there’s a good chance you’ve come across a feature of DNS called a SRV record. SRV records are an extremely important part of Active Directory (They are, in fact, the foundation of AD) and an optional part of Exchange Autodiscover. There are a lot of other applications that use SRV records to some degree or another (Lync/Skype for Business relies heavily on them, for instance).The question, though, is why SRV records are so important and what exactly do they do?…
One famous misquote of American Founding Father Ben Franklin goes like this, “Anyone who would sacrifice freedom for security deserves neither.” At first glance, this statement speaks to the heart of people who have spent hours waiting in line at the airport, waiting for a TSA agent to finish groping a 90 year old lady in a wheel chair so they can take off their shoes and be guided into a glass tube to be bombarded with the emissions of a full body scanner.…
The most important step in diagnosing a specific security error involves determining what the error is telling you. There are a few things that can cause certificate errors, and what you do depends entirely on what is causing the error to begin with. Once you know what the error is telling you, it becomes much easier to figure out what you need to do next.…
One of the more annoying tasks in administering a publicly available website that uses HTTPS (Outlook Web App, for example) is certificate generation and installation. Anyone who has ordered a certificate from a major Certificate Authority (CA) like Godaddy or Network Solutions has dealt with the process. It goes something like this:
- Generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on the web server
- Upload the CSR to a CA in a Certificate Request
- Wait for the CA to respond to your Request with a set of files
- Download the “Response” files
- Import the files on the Web Server
Once that gets done, you will (usually) have a valid certificate that allows the server to use SSL or TLS to encrypt communications with client machines.…
One of my co-workers had some questions about email encryption and how it worked, so I ended up writing him a long response that I think deserves a wider audience. Here’s most of it (leaving out the NDA covered portions).
Email Encryption and HIPAA Compliance for the Uninitiated
In IT security, when we talk about encryption, there are a couple of different “types” of encryption that we worry about, one is encryption “in transit”, and the other is encryption “at rest.”
Encryption “in transit” is how we ensure that when data is moving from one system to another that it is either impossible or difficult beyond reasonable likelihood for someone to intercept and read that data.…
One of the things in IT Security that took me a while to figure out was the subject of Password management. There were a few pieces of it that confused me for a while. I knew how to create “secure” passwords, but I didn’t really understand what made them secure or how someone could crack a password.…
Exchange Transaction Logs are a commonly misunderstand facet of Exchange Server. There’s a lot of misinformation out there as well as a lot of confusing documentation. In this post, I’ll be going over the basics of Transaction Logs and explaining what they are, how they work, and, more importantly, what they are for.
What are Transaction Logs?…
One of the subjects that doesn’t get a whole lot of coverage in IT is how to name an Active Directory domain. There’s a lot of confusion around the how and why to name a Domain primarily because the best practices for doing so have changed a number of times over the past decade or so.…