In recent years, revelations of security holes in widely used IT hardware and software have put IT pros on edge. A few times a year, a huge cybersecurity announcement introduces chaos into the IT world, forcing network and systems administrators to scramble to secure their environments and deal with the fallout.

Reports have recently surfaced about Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in most modern computer systems. These so-called side-channel attacks can allow one program (e.g. a browser) to infer and even read data used by the CPU to execute another program… even a more privileged one. These vulnerabilities affect phones, ​tablets, ​desktops, servers, and cloud computing services.

When a critical security flaw affecting hardware is identified -- such as the recently publicized chip vulnerabilities (Meltdown, Spectre) -- your cloud provider takes steps to implement the necessary patch(es) to protect its infrastructure. Updates performed by your cloud provider may require scheduled reboots for your cloud resources. For example, the security patch for Intel processors requires a machine reboot since the patch includes an update to the hypervisor kernel.

In many ways, AWS is often seen as a leader in the cloud space. This is for good reason — AWS represents a wide range of business, small and large, as well as a variety of individual users, and as such, where AWS goes in terms of trend is largely where the industry trend itself is going.

For ManageEngine, 2017 can be largely defined by one of our favorite C.S. Lewis quotes: “You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream.” We began the year with a goal; a goal to bring the numerous domains of IT management together. And we began the year with a dream; a dream to simplify IT management, a dream to help IT propel your business forward.

In Mr. Robot‘s episode 9 of season 2 (13:53), Angela Moss needs to obtain the Windows domain password of her superior, Joseph Green, in order to download sensitive documents that would potentially incriminate EvilCorp. Since her attack requires physical access to his computer, she starts with a good old-fashioned social engineering attack to get the only currently present employee in the office to leave.

With the proper auditing enabled (Logon/Logoff – Logon (Failure)) and EventSentry installed however, we can permanently block remote users / hosts who attempt to log on too many times with a wrong password. Setting this up is surprisingly simple.