Goodbye Aruba Instant On Access Point, SonicWall Firewall and Ubiquiti Kit

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Category: Cyber Security (Personal)

Published: 13 January 2020

I am never one to talk about my current tech products, services or defences, and this article is no different. My methods and defences can be described as paranoid, and last year I spent over £1,000 alone on hardware. Only to ditch it all and go back to my old setup from a few months back.

Over the years I have tried an assortment of well-known hardware firewalls plus a similar number of software O/S appliance firewalls. A few months ago, I thought I would try out one which has been on my list for years - a SonicWall. £600 later, it arrived to my excitement. It has basic subscriptions plus an in-built Wi-Fi AP.

Firstly I of course plugged it in, and it wanted me to register for an account which I did. On logging back into the web account, it said invalid address and would not let me log back in to fix the issue - how stupid! At least let me log back in to fix the "problem". I created a new account in the end, and it registered the device.

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Goodbye Black Hat Europe 2019!

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Category: Blog

Published: 06 December 2019

Wed and Thu this week was strangely my first visit despite going to InfoSecurity Europe a few times in London. Normally I shred everything with my name on and never post where I am or have been but this time I cannot hide.

Why not controlling your business data is a bad idea, part two - five years later things have not changed drastically

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Category: Cyber Security (Personal)

Published: 02 December 2019

In June 2014 I published https://www.datasecurityexpert.co.uk/articles/personal-articles/81-why-not-controlling-your-business-data-is-a-bad-idea.html when cyber security was less known about or “sexy”. A few articles ago in https://www.datasecurityexpert.co.uk/articles/personal-articles/331-cyber-security-the-gap-between-rich-good-security-and-poor-not-good-security.html. I said in the article, very early in my career I worked at a large firm whose security was incredible for the time. Still I stand by my comment that company x beats many companies today I see.

It is all good securing the corporate issued laptop, if you do at all, and then pay little attention to remote services like OWA (Outlook Web Access), Office365 (<), OneDrive (cloud file storage) or the web based DMS (document management system). It is likely your laptop will have FDE (full disc encryption) and maybe, just maybe USB storage devices blocked which makes it a little harder to leak data by mistake or on-purpose.

Post 2010 the concept of the four walls of a company or the boundaries of its physical firewall have slowly (or now rapidly) been degrading. In the old days all we used was a Outlook client and a shared folder which meant you needed to be on-site or with a VPN-laptop to get to your data. The days of client software are reducing and everything now is browser based, more specifically cloud based which is hosted in someone else’s data centre.

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