Government News

Gaining Access to a Check Point Appliance – Physical Access Trumps All by Tom Kopchak Recently, one of my co-workers and I were tasked with reconfiguring a Check Point Appliance for use as the main firewall in a lab environment we are building for some internal testing. Because we both are recent hires (and thus, the low men on the totem pole), we were not given passwords to the devices or any other useful information regarding their previous configuration. We were expected to learn how to manage the devices, reload the Check Point software, and configure the equipment entirely from scratch. Unfortunately, the Check Point devices refused to play nicely and cooperate with our mission, instead insisting on throwing fatal exceptions whenever we attempted to reload the software. With our attempts to reload and configure the devices properly crippled, we were forced to se... (more)

Statement by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews on Data Privacy Day

OTTAWA, ONTARIO -- (Marketwire) -- 01/28/12 -- The Honourable Vic Toews, Minister of Public Safety, made the following statement today acknowledging Data Privacy Day 2012: "Data Privacy Day serves as an opportunity for all Canadians to learn about protecting their personal information online in an increasingly online world. Canada is proud to join with its partners in supporting this international day of recognition. The Government of Canada is proud to promote an open, resilient and trusted cyberspace. That is why, in 2010, our Government launched Canada's Cyber Security Strat... (more)

F5’s Certified Firewall Protects Against Large-Scale Cyber Attacks

F5 Networks on Tuesday announced that the latest release of the F5 BIG-IP product family has been certified by ICSA Labs as a network firewall, helping customers protect their public-facing websites from today’s massive cyber attacks. The newly certified solution handles eight times more traffic at the same cost of the closest competitor’s solution. “F5 provides an entirely new and more intelligent approach for defending public-facing web properties and DNS services against harmful attacks,” said Mark Vondemkamp, Director of Product Management at F5. “Many of the world’s largest... (more)

Catbird’s vSecurity 5.0

While virtualization offers many benefits to enterprise such as lower costs and greater flexibility, it also creates new challenges. One of the greatest concerns with switching over to virtualized infrastructure, espeically in government, is security and compliance in a complex and dynamic environment which legacy software can no longer handle. Catbird offers automated security solutions tailored to virtualized data centers and has recently unveilled the next generation of its vSecurity software, vSecurity 5.0. By integrating with the hypervisor, which manages all of the virtual ... (more)

Hadoop Quickstart: Use Whirr to automate standup of your distributed cluster on Rackspace

We have previously provided a Quickstart guide to standing up Rackspace cloud servers (and have one for Amazon servers as well). These are very low cost ways of building reliable, production ready capabilities for enterprise use (commercial and government).  And Bryan Halfpap has provided a Quickstart guide which shows you how to build a Hadoop Cluster (leveraging Cloudera’s CDH3).  Using Bryan’s guide you can have a Hadoop Cluster up and running in under 20 minutes. With this post we would like to provide you with some additional tips that flow from these other posts. We will s... (more)