Qualysguard Decentralized It How to Organize Your Assets

2018-08-07 Josh Rickard

I work for a University with a decentralized IT department: each college, division, department, etc maintains their users. As a security department who maintains QualysGuard, we were wanting each department to scan their own assets and re-mediate all vulnerabilities found in these scans based on the following policy:

Level 4 and Level 5 vulnerabilities must be re-mediated within 15 days
Level 3 vulnerabilities must be re-mediated within 30 days
Level 2 vulnerabilities must be re-mediated within the next semesters
Level 1 vulnerabilities must be re-mediated whenever possible

WIth this policy in mind, we began rolling out our QualysGuard service using the following methods. We would create Asset Groups for each group of servers that belong to one of the following: a department, college, division, application group, etc. Each Asset Group would be additionally subdivided into each network core. For example, if you have a Athletics department, they may have assets in all the different network cores (Faculty/Staff Network, Data Center, DMZ, Residential Network, etc.). Because each of these departments will have multiple assets in multiple network cores, we relied heavily on our naming conventions. Our naming convention is the following for Asset Groups: CAMPUS DEPT NETWORK Assets (SCANNER NAME) -> CAMPUS Athletics DC Assets (DC_SCANNER)

When dealing with QualysGuard in a decentralized IT infrastructure, your naming convention will save you!

Windows Security Publicprivate Key Exchange Basics

2018-08-07 Josh Rickard

My wife and I saw CITIZENFOUR yesterday during a secret screening. If you have not had the chance to see this movie, please do so as soon as you can - it’s a great documentary! The only complaint I have about the film is that they do not explain Cryptography or Encryption for the “normal” folks. When the film ended, I looked around and their were many non-technical people (including older individuals). I remember hearing someone say “well I guess I’m not going to be using email anymore”. This sentiment is not what the film is about, and I believe the director should have explained this very technical methodology to not confuse the non-techie people.

Windows Security Server Hardening Security Templates

2018-08-07 Josh Rickard

Hardening your systems (Servers, Workstations, Applications, etc.) ensures that every system is secured in accordance to your organizations standards. Microsoft has a “Solution Accelerator” called Security Compliance Manager that allows System Administrators or IT Pro’s to create security templates that help harden their systems in a manageable, repeatable, way. In addition to SCM, you can build your own by using the standard MMC console and adding the Security Templates Snap-In to the console - this gives you a more refined configuration, but can be cumbersome.

Windows Security Patch Management

2018-08-07 Josh Rickard

Recently, at work, I nominated myself to begin a “Windows Security” course for IT Professionals that I work with. Being a former IT Pro, and now part of our security department as an Incident Responder, I thought I would create a course surrounding security. So, i’m going to use my blog to layout my plans for this “Windows Security” course - which will hopefully be useful for others as well.

Qualys Guard Qualys in a University Environment

2018-08-07 Josh Rickard

The University I work for has began using Qualys for our Enterprise Vulnerability Scanning and so far it’s been well received. The problem is that every “College/School” maintains their own systems thus we are decentralized, which makes maintaining Reports/Scans/Maps/etc. very difficult.

Because I have not found many posts/articles focused on a decentralized environment I decided I would explain the way we are approaching this. This is all a work in progress - if you have any questions or ideas, please get a hold of me.:)

Mdt 2013 Installing Mdt 2013

2018-08-07 Josh Rickard

Now we are going to install MDT 2013. This is a simple process but I wanted to show you anyways.

After you have downloaded MDT 2013 from Microsoft (See This Post)

When you first Launch the MDT 2013 Installer, you should see the following screen:

Click Next to Continue

Mdt 2013 Installing Adk for 8 1

2018-08-07 Josh Rickard

Once you have all of the necessary files downloaded and saved on your Windows Server 2012 R2 box, then begin by installing the “adksetup.exe”.

The first screen that should pop-up is this one:

The Following Screenshots are all based on your own needs but these are the options that I have chosen for this setup:

Older posts Newer posts