Mind Circus

Web Application Firewalls, or WAFs, are a brilliant concept. In essence, they are pretty much what they say on the tin: A firewall for a web application – monitoring web traffic for a given web application, and deciding on whether to allow or deny specific requests.

The first thing that came to mind was protecting internal IIS web servers which have to accept potentially dirty external traffic from the Interwebs; Outlook Web Access, for example.

For more information, InformIT has a nice overview of WAFs.

My colleague Dave just pointed out that TrueCrypt 6.0 was released on Friday, 4th July. The most important new feature here is that encrypt/decrypt speeds are massively improved on multi-core processors – multiplied by the amount of cores you have (e.g. 2x for dual core).

I’ll be testing this out on one of the Execs later

Grab TrueCrypt 6.0 here

One of the biggest issues with Truecrypt 5.0′s System Partition encryption was that it couldn’t hibernate the OS; which was holding me back from deploying it company-wide. Thankfully, this is now fixed in 5.1

Support for hibernation on computers where the system partition is encrypted (previous versions of TrueCrypt prevented the system from hibernating when the system partition was encrypted). (Windows Vista/XP/2008/2003)

Other things of note include faster encryption/decryption using AES, and faster boot times.

[ Version History ] [ Download Trucrypt 5.1 ]

TrueCrypt 5.0, the open-source, multi-platform encryption suite, is available for download. New features for Windows include improved write speeds (up to 100% improvement) and Full Disk Encryption. They’ve also released a long-anticipated Mac OSX version

Why did I embolden Full Disk Encryption? Because UK companies and Government organisations are losing laptops left, right and centre – without encrypting their sensitive contents. As an IT Professional, you’d be crazy to not be investigating the various options for keeping your company’s data safe, in the event of loss or theft.

Check out what’s new in TrueCrypt 5.0.

I just discovered that the NSA publish a fair amount of Security guides on their website. Looks like some very interesting content – not to mention free

Found via Network Geek (which I found via Ma.tt)