• Fortra Issues 20th State of IBM i Security Report

  May 24, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM is celebrating 35 years of its midrange platform next month, and there is no doubt it will be an exciting moment for the IBM i community. But there’s another occasion you might not be aware of: the 20th annual State of IBM i Security Study, which was issued last month by Fortra (formerly HelpSystems).

  Back in 2004, the security experts at PowerTech took it upon themselves to analyze the configurations of customers’ actual iSeries and AS/400 servers (there were still AS/400s around) and write a report sharing what they found. As you might imagine, the state of security, as …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Unlocking the Full Potential Of Your IBM i Applications

  May 15, 2023 Greg Patterson

  IBM i is the backbone of mission critical applications for over 120,000 customers worldwide in every conceivable industry and company size, particularly with companies ranging from $50 million to $1 billion in annual revenues and specializing in manufacturing, distribution, financial services, and healthcare. In other words, IBM i supports a significant share of the global economy.

  Although the IBM i platform is very productive, there are many things we can do to modernize our applications and provide more value to the business. But this is easier said than done. Some of the biggest challenges that that we face relate to …

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• Immutable Copies Are Only As Good As Your Validation

  May 23, 2022 Stan Wilkins

  A system can always be replaced, but the files and objects that comprise the application and the data that makes it useful can fall victim to all sorts of decay, neglect, or abuse in a modern system. And that is why we did backups to tape subsystems, or even tape libraries and then virtual tape libraries based on disk drives for so many years. And for those who cannot afford to have downtime or lost data, the IBM i base has been fortunate to have some of the best high availability clustering ever invented.

  With ransomware and malware attacks on …

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• Guru: IBM i *USRPRF Security

  May 23, 2022 Bruce Bading

  IBM i has long enjoyed a reputation of being one of the most securable application servers in the industry. IBM i object encapsulation or object-oriented architecture achieves a level of technology integrity not found in file-based systems such as Unix, Linux, and Windows – as long as QSECUTY is set to 40 or 50.

  This advanced technology however does not exclude the IBM i from security risks if your development teams are not practicing (DevSecOps | CSRC (nist.gov)) and (Zero Trust Architecture | NIST).

  Let me remind what one of the lead signatories on the Agile …

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• Guru: SIEM Is Only Part Of IBM i Cybersecurity

  March 28, 2022 Bruce Bading

  Many times, we hear from IBM i business owners that their SIEM – that’s short for Security Information and Event Management – is their cybersecurity solution for the IBM i. But that can’t be true, and I want to explain why it is part of the security shield but certainly not all of it.

  Let’s start with SIEMs and how they fit into cybersecurity frameworks. SIEM is mentioned in the PCI appendix, but not once in the core of the 250+ PCI DSS requirements, likewise, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework lists event monitoring as one of the 100s (1/100s) of NIST …

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• How Fresche Fills Security Gap with Trinity Guard

  March 21, 2022 Alex Woodie

  We live in a world full of security threats. Black hat hackers – some working for themselves and some working for the governments of China and Russia – are constantly probing the Internet, looking for weak links in the information supply chain. With its acquisition of Trinity Guard, Fresche Solutions is determined to prevent your IBM i server from being one of them.

  It can be hard to fathom the impact that cybersecurity attacks have on the world, and the enormous pains that some organizations are taking to thwart them. In 2021, ransomware grabbed our attention thanks to large attacks …

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• Trinity Guard Update Brings Joy to System Values, SIEM Integration

  December 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i administrators who ever desired more control over their system value settings will appreciate the latest gift that Trinity Guard has placed under its customer’s midrange trees. The IBM i security software vendor now has a dashboard that automatically tracks all IBM i system values, even across multiple systems or LPARs. The company is also providing a bulk data transfer to SIEMs to stay on top of the work of naughty elves with TGSecurity Suite 2.4.

  The new system values module that Trinity Guard is shipping with the update to TGSecure (one of three products that make up the …

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• HelpSystems Goes Phishing For Cyber Threat Hunter

  October 25, 2021 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems dipped into the security pond again with its acquisition last week of PhishLabs, a Canadian company that develops technology designed to protect organizations from various Internet-based threats, including malicious emails, account takeover, and data leakage. As is the case with most of HelpSystems’ acquisitions, its IBM i customer are expected to be among the beneficiaries.

  For over a decade, PhishLabs has been developing a security platform designed to find and identify and counteract threats to customers. As its name suggests, the company got its start with identifying phishing attacks. Its founder and chief technology officer, John LaCour, grew frustrated …

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• Adlumin Adds IBM i Support to SIEM

  March 31, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Banks that run their core banking software on IBM i servers will be interested to hear that Adlumin is now ingesting IBM i security log data into its cloud-based security information and event management (SIEM) solution, giving them another way to detect unauthorized activity from hackers and malicious users.

  Adlumin was founded five years ago with the goal of providing a low-cost SIEM and compliance solution to small and midsize banks and credit unions. The Washington, DC-based company started out by collecting log data from Windows and Linux devices, but it soon found out that customers wanted support for core …

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• SolarWinds Hack Raises Concern for IBM i Shops

  January 27, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The recently disclosed hack of the SolarWinds log management software enabled bad actors to gain access to the protected networks of numerous government agencies and private companies. It is also impacting an untold number of IBM i shops, which use SolarWinds software in not-insignificant numbers.

  In early December, Reuters broke the story of a massive and sophisticated breach of federal government computer systems that started in March 2020. According to the stories, state-backed cybercriminals exploited security flaws in at least three software vendors, including SolarWinds, Microsoft Azure, and VMware, to access private information in the target systems, …

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