Protect Your Business and Users from Email Phishing in a Few Simple Steps

The goal of email phishing attacks is obtain personal or sensitive information from a victim such as credit card, passwords or username data, for malicious purposes. That is to say trick a victim into performing an unwitting action aimed at stealing sensitive information from them. This form of attack is generally conducted by means of spoofed emails or instant messaging communications which try to deceive their target as to the nature of the sender and purpose of the email they’ve received.… [Keep reading] “Protect Your Business and Users from Email Phishing in a Few Simple Steps”

Where's the source!

SauceIn this post I will talk about data (aka the source)! In IAM there’s really one simple concept that is often misunderstood or ignored. The data going out of any IAM solution is only as good as the data going in. This may seem simple enough but if not enough attention is paid to the data source and data quality then the results are going to be unfavourable at best and catastrophic at worst.
With most IAM solutions data is going to come from multiple sources.… [Keep reading] “Where's the source!”

Security Vulnerability Revealed in Azure Active Directory Connect

Microsoft ADFS
The existence of a new and potentially serious privilege escalation and password reset vulnerability in Azure Active Directory Connect (AADC) was recently made public by Microsoft.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/connect/active-directory-aadconnectsync-whatis
Fixing the problem can be achieved by means of an upgrade to the latest available release of AADC 1.1.553.0.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=47594
The Microsoft security advisory qualifies the issue as important and was published on Technet under reference number 4033453:
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/4033453.aspx#ID0EN
Azure Active Directory Connect as we know takes care of all operations related to the synchronization of identity information between on-premises environments and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Security Vulnerability Revealed in Azure Active Directory Connect”

Using ADFS on-premises MFA with Azure AD Conditional Access

With the recent announcement of General Availability of the Azure AD Conditional Access policies in the Azure Portal, it is a good time to reassess your current MFA policies particularly if you are utilising ADFS with on-premises MFA; either via a third party provider or with something like Azure MFA Server.
Prior to conditional MFA policies being possible, when utilising on-premises MFA with Office 365 and/or Azure AD the MFA rules were generally enabled on the ADFS relying party trust itself. … [Keep reading] “Using ADFS on-premises MFA with Azure AD Conditional Access”

The Art Of War – Is your Tech Department Combat Ready?

Strategic planning is becoming increasingly important in the technology fuelled world we live in. It’s critical an organisation’s response to shifting external events is measured & appropriate. The flow on effects of change to the nature and structure of the IT department has to be addressed. Is a defensive or attack formation needed for what lies ahead? In this post, I’ll introduce what is meant by strategy and provide a practical planning process.

Operational vs Strategic

I often see technology departments so focused on operations, they begin to lose sight of what’s coming on the horizon & how their business will change as a result.… [Keep reading] “The Art Of War – Is your Tech Department Combat Ready?”

Azure AD Connect – Upgrade Errors

 
 
Azure AD Connect is the latest release to date for Azure AD sync or previously known as Dirsync service. It comes with some new features which make it even more efficient and useful in Hybrid environment. Besides many new features the primary purpose of this application remains the same i.e. to sync identities from your local (On-Prem) AD to Azure AD.
Of the late I upgraded an AD sync service to AD connect and during the install process I ran into a few issues which I felt are not widely discussed or posted on the web but yet are real world scenarios which people can face during AD connect Install and configuration.… [Keep reading] “Azure AD Connect – Upgrade Errors”

Back to Basics – Design Patterns – Part 2

In the previous post, we discussed design patterns, their structure and usage. Then we discussed the three fundamental types and started off with the first one – Creational Patterns.
Continuing with creational patterns we will now discuss Abstract Factory pattern, which is considered to be a super set of Factory Method.

Abstract Factory

In the Factory method, we discussed how it targets a single family of subclasses using a corresponding set of factory method classes, or a single factory method class via parametrised/ static factory method.… [Keep reading] “Back to Basics – Design Patterns – Part 2”

Back to Basics – Design Patterns – Part 1

Design Patterns

Design patterns are reusable solutions to recurring problems of software design and engineering in the real-world. Patterns makes it easier to reuse proven techniques to resolve design and architectural complications and then communicating and documenting them with better understanding, making them more accessible to developers in an abstract way.

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Design patterns enhance the classic techniques of object oriented programming by encouraging the reusability and communication of the solutions of common problems at abstract levels and improves the maintainability of the code as a by-product at implementation levels.… [Keep reading] “Back to Basics – Design Patterns – Part 1”

7 tips for making UX work in Agile teams

Agile is here to stay. Corporates love it, start-ups embrace it and developers live by it. So there is no denying that Agile is going nowhere and we have to work with it. For a number of years, I’ve tried to align User Experience practices with Agile methods and haven’t met with great success every time.

But nevertheless, there are a lot of lessons that I’ve learnt during the process and I’m going to share 7 tips that always worked for me.

[Keep reading] “7 tips for making UX work in Agile teams”

Microservices – An Agile Architecture Introduction

In the ever evolving and dynamic world of software architecture, you will hear new buzz words every other month. Microservices is the latest of them, though not as new as it appears, it has been around for some time now in different forms.
Microservices – The micro of SOA?
        “… the microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API.[Keep reading] “Microservices – An Agile Architecture Introduction”