Welcome to my site

Sticky Post Posted on July 8, 2015 by in General

Welcome to my site: Stan’s Landscaping Company.  OK, I am not really a landscaper.  I am an IT/INFOSEC professional.  Check out my Bio and resume for more information.  Why the landscaping company reference?  It’s a trick I got from a musician who called his band the trucking company.  Their music has nothing to do with trucking and their occupations (musicians) is far from trucking.  So with me, my day job is far from landscaping, although I do yard work on the weekends.

This is now the parent site for others I have. Check out the others I have (both coming soon):

  • We are INFOSEC! – Blog posts on various information security, privacy and auditing issues.
  • Spicy Oat Groove – Because I cook and like to try out new things

Leveraging AI to Create Your Organization’s Security Policies

Posted on March 15, 2024 by in Generative AI, Presentations

On Wednesday March 13, 2024, I gave a presentation at SecureWorld Boston 2024 on using generative AI to help create your organization’s security policies. It seems like this was a topic of interested, because it was a full room. For those that attended, thank you, and I hope the information was useful to you. Check out how I used AI to create some policies and the results. Leveraging AI to Create Security Policies

Email Feedback Loops

Posted on April 12, 2023 by in Presentations

I gave a presentation at SecureWorld Healthcare Virtual Conference on Email Feedback Loops. The following page is references that can help in getting started.

References for Email Feedback Loops

CISA

Posted on June 7, 2019 by in Uncategorized

Well I took the CISA exam in May, 2019 and passed. Although the job practice areas by domain has changed as of June, 2019, some of the study tips are still valuable. Check out the story of how I passed and especially how I learned I passed.

Passing the CISA

How can you get started in Information Security?

Posted on April 12, 2018 by in INFOSEC Notes

I have seen the following question come up in mailing list numerous times that I am on: How can I get started in Information Security?

This is a very valid question since there are many people interested in Information Security, but do not have any idea on how to enter into it.  Check out the post below.  It is designed to help answer that question and help you determine if you have what is needed now to enter into the field.  The way I answer that is by looking into my background and how I entered into the field and what I have done to stay current and relevant.

So you want to enter into Information Security

Updates!

Posted on September 20, 2017 by in Uncategorized

In view of the site migration to updated hardware and software, I have the following updates:

  1. The site’s URL has been updated to devsec.smham2.org: You will be redirected here from dev.smham2.org and sec.smham2.org, but update your bookmarks.
  2. Some tools available via a “secret” sub-site are now available on this site “publicly”.  Check out Utilities.

CygwinX and Putty

Posted on June 28, 2016 by in General

I recently installed Cygwin-X on my Windows 10 laptop.  Problem was Putty with X11 forwarding was not working.  It took some Google and trial and error, but the following needed to be done.  Hope this helps you out:

For Cygwin-X:

  • Edit the script that starts XWin Server
  • (right-click on the shortcut in the Start Menu, select More > Open File Location, right-click on XWin Server and select Properties)
  • Add the addition in Red to the Target 
    C:\cygwin64\bin\run.exe --quote /usr/bin/bash.exe -l -c "cd; exec /usr/bin/startxwin -- -multiwindow -listen tcp"

For Putty:

  • Under the X11 section, browse for the xauthority file located in your Cygwin home directory
  • Select it and save the profile

 

Improve System Performance, Redirect SSH Port

Posted on April 26, 2016 by in Security Tips

I have a Mac Mini that has an open port to the Internet.  This machine was also my internal media server.  But over time, I notice that the performance of the Mac was dropping.  One of the CPU threads was always running at 100%.  Eventually after some investigation, I found the problem.  This Mac had port 22 open through the router for external access.  Well, port 22 is frequently probed for weaknesses including weak passwords and vulnerabilities.  These frequent probes affect the SSH daemon and will affect the CPU and memory of the system.

Want to improve your external facing system’s performance, either change the default SSH port from 22 to another non-standard (>1024) port or have port forwarding setup to direct a non-standard external port to your internal SSH port.

The moment I did this, the probes stopped and CPU utilization dropped to near 0.  This tip will work for hosted virtual machines and cloud instances that have SSH open to the world.