You may have seen over the last few days reports of MySpace username and password combinations for sale on hacker spaces. MySpace was breached, and a possible 360 million accounts with 427 million passwords could have been stolen. Yes, MySpace has long since been dominated by almost all other social networks that you can think of today. So who cares? You should. The first topic applies directly to the user - password reuse. We have talked about this numerous times in previous blogs, and the point still stands. The odds are favorable that either you or your coworkers have/had an account with MySpace.…
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Here at Alpine we are in love with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and for good reason. They are by far the leading cloud platform and always push innovation. AWS has many different services, but the one we will focus on today is Lambda. Lambda gives you the ability to run code (written in Node.js, Java, or Python) without the need to have a server powering it, as far you you are aware or care. But how can this be real? We are used to running code. A server is stood up and libraries are loaded onto it. From there we…
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As we have mentioned numerous times in our blog posts, your company's biggest security vulnerabilities are its users. While security awareness training is a huge step in the right direction, it is not a foolproof plan to stop a user from opening a malicious attachment or surfing to a web address that hosts nefarious intentions. There are many tools that a security professional can use to help mitigate the risk. They range in price from reasonable to astronomical, as most software suites tend to do. This blog post isn't about those. We're focusing our efforts this week on an oft-overlooked tool that's already…
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Ever wondered what makes Alpine tick? We decided to create this post to give our faithful readers some personal insight into how we see the world. Read on to take a journey into the minds of a few of our engineers and architects -- and to have a little fun. So without further adieu, here is the first installment of Alpine Says. What are some of your favorite blogs to read to keep on top of the technology world? Steve: AWS Security, Full Disclosure, and High Scalability keep me busy enough. Wired and Engadget keep me in touch with the consumer market…
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We have written a few times in the past about some password etiquette, or how to create an effective password. But there is still more to a password than just creating a complex entry and moving on. A complex password goes out the window if your account credentials are stolen from a website and the attack went unnoticed. Luckily, there is still something we can do about this - passwords should be changed regularly. Something to consider -- even if your password is encrypted everywhere you store it, that doesn't mean it cannot be cracked. In time, all encryption mechanisms…
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