Store and Forward

A blog about securing and using WebSphere MQ

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Entries Tagged as 'General'

Avoiding insider threat

October 5th, 2009 2 Comments

Passing along this article from Adam Bosnian of Cyber-Ark Software: Practical advice on avoiding the insider threat.  The whole article is worth reading but one item stood out:
Best Practice #4: Secure Embedded Application Accounts
Up to 80 percent of system breaches are caused by internal users, including privileged administrators and power users, who accidentally or deliberately [...]

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Wrapping up IMPACT 2009

May 8th, 2009 No Comments

Well, this is the last day of IMPACT. It’s always lightly attended as many folks take Friday as a travel day. I have one more session this morning though. It’s the WMQ ESE introduction. Overall the WMQ security sessions were well attended. Even the small rooms were large, compared to [...]

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When automatic translators go wrong…very wrong!

April 7th, 2009 No Comments

I just found a blog post about WMQ security that has, I believe, been run through an automated translation service with unintentionally hilarious results.   Here’s an excerpt:
WMQ Adventurer authenticating a connexion to a queue director
For both waiter and client hallmark, the queue director demands:

The personal credential released to the queue director by it Holds [...]

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Choosing a PCI DSS Auditor? Does WMQ awareness count?

January 26th, 2009 No Comments

James DeLuccia’s post about choosing a PCI DSS QSA auditor has some good advice.  I would add to his list a criteria one of my own: the auditor should at least know how to spell WMQ.  Or JMS.  Or “message oriented middleware”.  While I haven’t been involved in any PCI audits, many of my customers [...]

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Mission:Messaging: Migration, failover, and scaling in a WebSphere MQ cluster

December 2nd, 2008 3 Comments

Certain aspects of service orientation are best served using an IBM® WebSphere® MQ cluster. The cluster provides the location independence, run time resolution of names, and concurrency required by SOA applications. For these reasons, adoption of SOA is driving migrations from point-to-point messaging networks to clustered environments. This article looks at how migration, failover, and [...]

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Puzzled by WMQ vulnerability advisory

October 2nd, 2008 No Comments

Well, I knew this one was out there but never looked at the CVE for it – there is a memory corruption vulnerability in the WebSphere MQ ( CVE-2007-6044) that is network exploitable.  What I can’t figure out is why the Impact and Exploitability scores are both 10.  The CVE entry says:
NOTE: as of 20071116, [...]

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DQ #2 delayed

September 7th, 2008 No Comments

As those who follow me on Twitter already know, I was in the hospital for several days last week with a really high fever.  That has pushed almost everything on my calendar back a week, including episode #2 of The Deep Queue.  I tried to work on it tonight but I’m not entirely recovered yet [...]

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Upcoming publications

August 22nd, 2008 No Comments

I haven’t blogged much lately because I’m on deadline for a new developerWorks Mission:Messaging column.  The next installment discusses changing culture to embrace SOA and how SOA impacts WebSphere MQ prevailing practices.  The premise is that migration to SOA is not just a configuration change or a development style but rather a cultural shift at [...]

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If it aint broke – fix it anyway.

May 17th, 2008 No Comments

My web site has not ever been much of anything special.  I’m no artist so the site design was never flashy.  I just tried to keep it plain and easy to load.  The content has mainly been things I needed to make available for download on the public site and protected pages for clients (back [...]

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