Patrick Hynds

Storage always seems to come first in technical discussions and security seems to be the perennial afterthought. This can be considered reasonable given how we shop for things in general, namely finding the thing that meets our expectations and then ensure it has all the bells and whistles. The good news is that this seems to be changing bit by bit as our industry realizes that security is no longer a nice-to-have feature, but is actually a core requirement. This movement was brought into focus recently when Patrick was involved in a meeting with Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire in which they discussed current technical challenges. A year or so ago the mention of security in discussing wired versus wireless infrastructure would likely sound like a non sequitur to ma... (more)

i-Technology Opinion: Will Cyber Storm "Break the Internet"?

Information Storage & Security Journal Co-Editor-in-Chief Patrick Hynds writes: The U.S. deparment of Homeland Security is performing a readiness test this month called Cyber Storm, after rescheduling. The Cyber Storm exercise is about ensuring and testing against a computer based attack or hack against public infrastructure targets as well as some parts of the private sector. This has c... (more)

.NET Editorial: Complexity for Developers

Developers are increasingly working on systems that abstract the underlying mechanisms they depend upon. SharePoint was the catalyst for this observation as I increasingly see development implementations that just don't seem to work out as hoped, with misunderstandings or in some cases bugs causing the issues. The fact that SharePoint 2007 is new (relatively) is a big part of the proble... (more)

Best Practices and Techniques for Building Secure ASP.NET Applications

When the enterprise depends on your application, careful attention to security is essential. This session provides specific recommendations to follow when developing secure ASP.NET Web applications and services, and focuses on the details of configuring IIS for security. Understand how to use: authentication  authorization  thread modeling  configuration settings secure database access Th... (more)

Random Salt - Preparing for real-world eventualities

It's a constant battle! Just when you think you understand security, someone or something reminds you of a whole aspect that you have been ignoring, usually at your peril. No matter how much you planned, prepared, worked, and worried about your plan of attack or defensive position, the job was literally never done! You had to settle for trying to be better prepared than the enemy - as opp... (more)