DropBox Hack, Unique Passwords and Password Managers

Posted

Today The Guardian published new news about the 2012 DropBox hack. At the time, it was disclosed that only customer email addresses had been hacked, but in today’s news it now seems that users’ encrypted (but possibly crackable) passwords were also leaked. We thought it would be helpful to share with you three of our password management best practices. First, the old practice of changing your passwords every 60-90 days is (finally) coming under the scrutiny… Read more »

Zimbra 8.7.0 – Fine for New Smaller Installs; Wait A Little Longer Though To Upgrade

Posted

We really like Zimbra 8.7.0.  It’s been in the works for a long time and has gone through a huge amount of QA. The fix list is impressive and our experience has been that it’s rock solid in smaller installations. The challenges however are with upgrades and Zimbra farms with more than one LDAP server… You see, a lot of under-the-hood changes have been made to Zimbra over the years, and 8.7.0 includes a number of… Read more »

HIPAA Enforcement And Penalties – Data Breach Costs Increasing

Posted

How much does a data breach cost, per record? Recently, both Oregon Health and Science University and The University of Mississippi Medical Center paid penalties to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights of $2.7 million and $2.75 million respectively for post-breach HIPAA violations.  You can read the details at the links above, but the Oregon breach involved more than 3,000 individuals and the Mississippi breach involved some 10,000 individuals. The… Read more »

CloudExpo Day 2 Review

Posted

Today was a pretty busy day at Cloud Expo, and Security topics were covered in force, either explicitly or embedded as part of operational talks on best practices covering things like provisioning and backups/disaster recovery. Security Soundbite Of The Day – Zombie Servers Although Zombie Apocalypse topics have quieted down in popular culture, Zombie Servers are apparently a Big Thing. In case you need to catch up, a Zombie Server is a running server that no… Read more »

CloudExpo Day 1 Review

Posted

Thanks to Accelerite, I was provided with a Gold VIP pass to attend CloudExpo here in New York City.  For those of you who follow all-things-Citrix, Accelerite recently acquired from Citrix the CloudPlatform (based on the open source Apache CloudStack project) Private Cloud software suite.  (Full Disclosure: we are an Accelerite customer and use CloudPlatform for managing our, and our clients’ clouds.) The exhibit hall doesn’t open until tomorrow (if you exclude tonight’s welcome reception),… Read more »

Zimbra 8.7 Almost Here

Posted

Zimbra today announced a public release of the Zimbra Collaboration version 8.7 Release Candidate. We’ve been busy these past few weeks working on testing the private betas, and we like what we have seen so far.  This is also the first new major release under Zimbra’s new owner Synacor, so this release is a bit of a bellweather indicator for how Synacor is managing development versus the previous owner Telligent. What’s In 8.7? First, bug… Read more »

Zimbra and Exchange Email HIPAA HITECH Compliance Overview

Posted

Not a week goes by that we don’t get asked: “Can you host HIPAA-compliant email for us?”  The answer is always “Yes, but…” which is not always the welcomed response, but it’s the truth. The real truth is that, first and foremost, the Covered Entity is ultimately responsible for compliance.  This is not because our lawyers have added a clever clause to our contract absolving us of such responsibility, it’s because that’s the law.  And… Read more »

Citrix Synergy 2015 Orlando – May 12-14, 2015 – Come Say Hello!

Posted

CTX_P_Service_Provider_Dimensional_RGB

Reliable Networks is proud to be an Exhibiting Sponsor at Citrix Synergy 2015 from May 12 through May 14 in the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando Florida. We will have a booth in the IaaS Cloud Operations Pavilion to showcase our use of Citrix CloudPlatform, XenDesktop, XenApp and XenServer. Reliable Networks is one of only nine currently Verified Citrix-Ready IaaS Cloud for XenDesktop providers globally.  This year’s Synergy conference has a strong emphasis on Mobile, which dovetails… Read more »

The Internet of Things Isn’t Ready; Where’s My 100,000-Mile Technology?

Posted

Exploding Pintos and Physics Gone Wrong If you have some gray hairs like me, you remember a time when cars barely made 30,000 miles before requiring extensive and expensive repairs and maintenance.  Not only that, many cars came off the production line with all kinds of major defects, some more explosive than others. In college, a friend of mine painted a bull-eye on the back of his Pinto, equipped with white-letter Firestone 500 tires.  Google… Read more »

HOW TO: Barracuda Spam Filtering and Zimbra Domain Aliases

Posted

Over the past few years Barracuda has done a good job of improving their spam filtering appliances. We recently started to deploy a Barracuda 400Vx system in front of several Zimbra systems and found that the Barracuda doesn’t work with Zimbra’s Domain Alias function. Worse, the old Barracuda KB article which purports to offer a fix doesn’t work either, and the author of that article no longer works at Barracuda.  Since that KB article was… Read more »