Day: August 20, 2014

Code Spaces AWS Security Breach: A Sad Reminder of the Importance of Cloud Environment Password Management

In the recently concluded Black Hat USA, 2014, one of the topics that drew much attention was the session on the pitfalls in cloud environment security. Normally, such deliberations at security conferences are perceived as hypothetical or purely academic. However, it was different this year with security professionals becoming quite interested in this topic. The reason for this is quite obvious – just a while ago, CodeSpaces.com, a code-hosting and collaboration platform went out of business for a whole day because hackers gained access to their Amazon EC2 control panel and deleted data of hundreds of their customers

Enhanced Microsoft IIS health checks using VBscript

By default, the load balancer uses a TCP connect to the port defined in the Virtual Service to verify the health of the real (backend) servers. For IIS this would typically be port 80. In many cases this kind of health check is adequate but for IIS this if often not the case.