• Shield Delivers Monitoring Solution for FTP on IBM i

  June 19, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions last month delivered FT4i, a new utility that helps to secure File Transfer Protocol (FTP) activity on IBM i. The new tool not only controls who is allowed to use FTP, but also logs all FTP activity to uncover possibly criminal activity after the fact.

  FTP is one of the most heavily used Internet protocols in the world. Across every industry, organizations use FTP to send and receive what is likely petabytes worth of data every single day. If the Internet is a “super highway,” then FTP is the 20-lane workhorse of an Interstate freeway, facilitating information …

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• Zero-Day Vulnerability in Fortra’s GoAnywhere MFT Being Actively Exploited

  February 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  A critical security vulnerability in Fortra’s (formerly HelpSystems) managed file transfer (MFT) solution, GoAnywhere MFT, is being actively exploited to steal data from companies and possibly even to spread ransomware according to published reports. Fortra told customers to consider every managed credential in their GoAnywhere environment to be compromised, shut down cloud instances of the service, and issued an emergency patch for the zero-day security vulnerability.

  Security reporter Brian Krebs was the first to share news of the vulnerability, which is described as remote code injection flaw that requires administrative console access for successful exploitation. In a February 2 post …

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• White Hats Completely Dismantle Menu-Based Security

  February 6, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Think menu-based security can prevent cybercriminals from accessing the most important parts of your IBM i system? Think again, as the white hat hacking group Silent Signal recently demonstrated in a real-world penetration test of a bank’s IBM i system through a seemingly restricted green-screen interface.

  Life was demonstrably simpler for midrange administrators before the Internet took off. Before we had all these different protocols providing access to applications and data – ODBC, FTP, SQL, Remote Command, etc. – an administrator could feel somewhat confident that users weren’t accessing things they shouldn’t by simply configuring their menus in a restrictive …

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• IBM To Stop Unencrypted Fix Downloads In February

  November 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have caught word from the IBM business partner community that starting on February 15, 2023, Big Blue will stop allowing customers to get operating system software patches that are not encrypted.

  The notification, which you can see here, was sent to business partners on November 23, just before the Thanksgiving Day holiday in the United States. Various IBM support methods, including IBM Electronic Fix Distribution (EFD), IBM Electronic Customer Care (ECC), and IBM Fix Central are all affected by this change.

  “Many leaders of the internet industry – such as World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Engineering Task …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Good Security Is Just As Important As Good Code

  June 13, 2022 Pauline Brazil Ayala

  Can my IBM i really be hit with a virus? Can it be hit with ransomware?

  These are the questions I regularly get from clients as a security expert with more than 20 years of experience. With the pervasiveness of these ransomware threats and sophisticated cyberattacks that we’re seeing in recent times, it only makes sense that we pay close attention to these threats.

  Security on the IBM i is a complex topic, and it is not one that is easily tackled with a few bullet points and tweaks of systems settings. Just like programming on the platform, for that …

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• Taking A Camel-First Approach to Integration

  August 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Unicorns and Chupacabras may not exist on this planet, but camels certainly do. And according to midrange open source guru Jesse Gorzinski, IBM i shops would do well to take a camel-first approach to integration challenges.

  The camel, of course, is Apache Camel, the Java-based integration framework that’s designed to connect two or more systems. During the recent OCEAN TechCon21 conference, Gorzinski, IBM’s business development manager for open source on IBM i, presented a compelling overview of Camel and how it can benefit administrators and developers in an IBM i environment.

  “Apache Camel can make it pretty easy to …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 31

  August 2, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  In this edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, we want to remind you once again that when you go to Fix Central at IBM to download PTFs to patch your IBM i operating systems and related systems software, you must use an encrypted variant of FTP to do so – that’s FTPS or SFTP, depending – as of July 10. If you follow all of the links starting with the Fix Central homepage, you will eventually get to this link right here, which tells you how to configure SFTP on your machine. We interpret this to mean that …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 26

  June 30, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Attention all IBM i shops. You may not be aware of it, but FTP is changing to FTPS/SFTP (secure) before the end of June or in early July 2021. (It’s not clear.) All orders submitted just prior to the change will be removed.

  Also, many thanks to Ron Schmitz for the IMGCLG link that I added to the IBM i PTF Guide sheet this week, which you will see below in its usual place.

  And finally, for those of you who are in the United States, happy July 4^th holiday, and for those of you who are not, why …

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• Controlling IBM i Access With Exit Points

  March 29, 2021 Bill Hammond

  Today, the job of managing security on IBM i can be complicated, requiring dynamic technologies and processes that can respond quickly to ever-evolving threats and new regulations. Ransomware and other malware can, and has, infected IBM i systems and effective access control is a major weapon in the battle to secure your IBM i. There are many different approaches and technologies you can use to keep your IBM i secure.

  Using the exit points provided by the IBM i operating system can be a powerful tool to monitor and secure four important levels of access within the IBM i:

  • Networks

  …

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• IBM Brings More Open Source to IBM i

  October 14, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM has brought an array of new open source packages to its IBM i operating system with the latest batch of Technology Refreshes, including tools for application developers and systems administrators. It’s all part of IBM’s strategy to keep IBM i on the cutting edge through open source, says IBM’s business architect Jesse Gorzinski.

  Before IBM unveiled IBM i 7.4 TR3 and 7.3 TR9 last week, we’d already written extensively about many the open source package that IBM has brought to the platform. For instance, we told you earlier this year how Apache Kafka and Apache Zookeeper were running on …

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