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United Airlines Uses Azure Site Recovery to Build a Disaster Recovery Solution

Source: customers.microsoft.com

To address the need for an enterprise-ready disaster recovery solution, in June 2013 United Airlines joined the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for Windows Server 2012 R2. “Now that we are more virtualized, we are looking at a whole new approach to DR, where flexibility and cloud computing combine to provide a resilient solution that we can tailor to meet our needs,” says Wilson. “It made sense to continue on our cloud journey with a Microsoft DR solution.”

Hyper-V Replica offers a data replication solution that replicates virtual machines within a site or to a remote site. The latest version of Hyper-V Replica provides the flexibility that United is looking for, with variable replication frequency—from 30 seconds up to 15 minutes—and support for extended replication to a third site. And the new DR management service, Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, answers the airline’s need for a highly available DR solution because it is delivered as a cloud service running in the Microsoft Azure environment. Azure Site Recovery offers orchestration at scale delivered via recovery plans, so United IT staff can bring up applications in a desired manner at a low recovery time objective. While Azure Site Recovery is a feature of Windows Server 2012 R2, it supports backwards compatibility with all versions of Hyper-V Replica.

With Azure Site Recovery:

• Safeguard complex workloads against outages

• Support heterogenous environments (including Hyper-V)

• Leverage computer resources

• Reduce infrastructure costs by migrating workloads to Azure

Using Azure as a destination for disaster recovery eliminates the cost and complexity maintaining a secondary site, and replicated data is stored in Azure Storage, with all the resilience that provides.  Site Recovery provides test failovers to support disaster recovery drills without affecting production environments. You can also run planned failovers with a zero-data loss for expected outages, or unplanned failovers with minimal data loss (depending on replication frequency) for unexpected disasters. After failover you can failback to your primary sites. Site Recovery provides recovery plans that can include scripts and Azure automation workbooks so that you can customize failover and recovery of multi-tier applications.

Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.

We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.

 

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Digital Crimes Unit uses Microsoft data analytics stack to catch cybercriminals

The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit consistently leverages the latest in analytics technology, relying on some of the brightest employees, some of the smartest scientists, and certainly some of the company’s best partners in law enforcement, to disrupt and dismantle devious cybercriminals. Learn how Microsoft used some of our best technology to uncover the behavior of one cybercriminal ring, and how the Digital Crimes Unit worked in partnership with Microsoft IT and federal law enforcement, to shut down one of the nation’s most prolific cybercrime operations.

Business Problem

It’s not hard to find a good deal on the Internet, but this deal looked a little too good. Kelly Reynolds, a small-time operator in Des Moines, Iowa, was offering Windows software online at prices that were a small fraction of retail. In November 2013, an agent from the US Department of Homeland Security purchased a copy of the software, including a product key to activate and use it, and sent the key to Microsoft, along with a question: Was the product key legitimate or stolen?

They say timing is everything in life. In this case, it was true. Had the question been asked just a few years earlier, Microsoft probably would have passed it on to its Product ID Center, which would have checked the product key number against a database and identified it as a real number that hadn’t yet been activated. Microsoft probably would have answered that, as far as it could tell, the key was legitimate and unused. No flags would have been raised. And that might have been the end of the investigation.

Instead, it was only the start. That’s because Microsoft had already brought together leading data scientists, forensics specialists, and former law-enforcement officers; equipped them with the company’s own advanced
data-mining and analysis tools; installed them in the Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) of the newly created Cybercrime Center located on the Redmond, Washington, campus; and tasked these individuals to fight cybercrime worldwide.

Thanks to the involvement of the DCU, the inquiry about the suspect product key in Des Moines resulted in the identification of tens of thousands of stolen product keys, the disruption of a multimillion dollar criminal operation, and the generation of leads that are now helping to identify half a dozen more criminal enterprises. (Some names and locations have been changed due to ongoing investigations.)

This is a story of collaboration—starting with a team of Microsoft analysts who worked closely with law-enforcement agents in a public-private partnership at every stage of the investigation, from their earliest suspicions to the early-morning SWAT-team raid that busted the Des Moines operation.

Another partnership was equally crucial to the success of the case, this one a partnership wholly within Microsoft itself. It was an example of a model that sees business units—in this case, the DCU—working in collaboration with Microsoft IT, with each party playing to its distinctive strengths. Microsoft IT took the lead in providing and supporting the technology infrastructure on which the data analysis was based, and the DCU led in creating the data sets and models that would yield the most effective solutions. It’s a marked evolution from the traditional way that IT has been handled in most companies, with a centralized IT organization providing infrastructure and the business solutions that run on that infrastructure.

Here, Microsoft IT gathered and integrated data from 20 databases throughout the company, established a highly automated and efficient means of updating the system, and managed it on a 24 x 7 basis for optimal accuracy and availability. But it was the data scientists in the DCU who best understood the data and invented highly innovative ways to use it.

Yet another piece to the story is the collection of technologies for mining and analyzing big data that the investigators used to uncover the scope of the global conspiracy from a single set of numbers. It’s a collection of technologies that is proving increasingly useful not only to Microsoft but also to other corporations. And not only in the fight against cybercrime, but also in making sense of big data and propelling better, data-driven decisions in fields as diverse as physical sciences and financial services.

Those technologies include some of the newest Microsoft big data mining and analysis tools, including an Analytics Platform System to manage the massive volume of data; Azure HDInsight for big-data analysis; Azure Machine Learning for predictive analysis; and Power BI and Power Maps to give the Microsoft analysts a highly visual and easy-to-use tool to gain insights from the data.

When law enforcement asked about the Des Moines product key, the Microsoft DCU investigators were ready. They checked it against the 650 million product keys and 7 billion rows of data—growing at a rate of 4 million rows a day—in its product key activation database. No one had previously attempted to activate the key—a good sign. But then the key turned up in a Microsoft database of known stolen keys. It was one of more than 300,000 keys stolen from a Microsoft-contracted facility in the Philippines and resold and distributed by another rogue operator in China. That didn’t mean that Reynolds, in Des Moines, knew the key was stolen nor that he had any other stolen keys—but it was enough to raise suspicion.

It was enough for law enforcement to search his curbside trash and discover records of another 30,000 product keys, which also turned up in the stolen-key database. Now, Microsoft and law enforcement had enough to act—but they wanted more. Analyzing a database of PCs with stolen software keys—a traditional way to look for patterns of fraud—turned up nothing suspicious about the Des Moines location. So how was an online seller in Des Moines connected to a stolen product-key ring halfway around the world? Both Microsoft and law enforcement wanted to know.

“We took datasets about product keys shipped worldwide and merged them with datasets about key activation—and we did it in ways we’d never tried to do before,” says Donal Keating, Senior Manager of Cyberforensics at the DCU. “That requires some heavy lifting to manage the data volumes, especially when you’re asking new questions and want the answers quickly. At a different moment in time, we wouldn’t have had these tools—and we wouldn’t have gotten our answers, certainly not as quickly and easily as we did. What happened in minutes might otherwise have taken days.”

When Keating and his team looked at the data in an untraditional way, the answers instantly became clear. Instead of focusing on the PCs on which product keys were activated, they decided to look only at the activations themselves—and then an IP address in Des Moines suddenly appeared as the most prominent site in the US (see map, below.). Law enforcement used the information to obtain warrants to connect the IP address to the location of the suspect activity.

More than 2,800 copies of Microsoft Office had been loaded and activated on just four computers there. “We don’t expect to see Microsoft Office loaded on a PC 700 times—let alone see it loaded 700 times onto each of four PCs,” says Keating, with some understatement. “We didn’t understand it, but it confirmed that whatever was going on in Des Moines wasn’t legitimate.”

When law enforcement entered and secured the house, they found plenty of evidence, including invoicing and purchasing records, and emails indicating the imminent delivery of another 300 stolen product keys.

The officers also found one of the PCs on which Reynolds had activated hundreds of stolen product keys. And from him, law enforcement got the answer to the mystery of why he had done so. Reynolds confessed that he had activated the keys—a bit less than 10 percent of his inventory—to test them, much as a drug dealer tests random samples of a new narcotics delivery to ensure its quality.

“That was a new insight into the behavior of the bad guys,” says Keating. “And it gave us a new pattern—the ‘test spike’ algorithm—to put into the big-data warehouse to help detect new cases.”

Already, leads and lessons from the Des Moines case have helped DCU identify other suspected stolen key operations at home and abroad. And Microsoft IT is helping the DCU make the data discoveries in this case a standard part of its cyberforensics toolkit for future investigations.

“The bad news is that cybercriminals have never been as brazen and as sophisticated as they are today. But there’s good news: our tools and technologies are better than ever, and that means we can do more to disrupt the cybercriminals. We leverage big data and technologies like Azure HD Insight, PowerBI, and PowerMaps to understand and glean behaviors on how they operate and anticipate their next moves. And we have deeper partnerships with industry, academic experts, and law enforcement, too—all of which helps us drive greater impact,” says David Finn, Executive Director & Associate General Counsel, Digital Crimes Unit.

Conclusion

Organizations realize a competitive edge when more employees are empowered with data. The unique approach that Microsoft has to data technology delivers this capability—whether through insights and analytics or with powerful reporting for line-of-business applications. In a world where business demands the speed to compete, Microsoft data solutions cut the time it takes to go from raw data to results for everyone.

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Healthcare compliance, security, and trusted health technology

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Integrate and simplify your healthcare compliance

Security and healthcare compliance offerings from Microsoft help protect your ICT infrastructure. Protection, access , and management features help you manage risk and achieve your strategic goals. The cloud is a far more powerful, far less expensive way to innovate than health solutions built the traditional way. But health organizations need to trust that sensitive information will stay secure and comply with regulations when they adopt cloud platforms. We are committed to ensuring that your data stays secure, private, and under your control, and that with the Microsoft Cloud, you will stay compliant, even as regulations and standards evolve.

Deliver security-enhanced access from virtually anywhere

For more information call 858-429-3000

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Healthcare Mobility Solutions from Managed Solution

The Microsoft family of devices, services, and solutions can help transform the way care teams communicate and access and use information throughout the course of their day. Windows-based, clinical-grade devices help to enable virtually anywhere access to actionable intelligence, resources, and personalized experiences that improve user productivity. With these enterprise-grade solutions that help keep patient information secure and compliant, users can leverage any single clinical-grade device to tap into comprehensive information systems while enjoying the ease of use associated with advanced technology. By providing efficient access to patient health information to both care teams and patients, all involved parties have the information they need to make informed decisions and to follow through on the prescribed care regimen.

• Integrate and extend security features across your organization

• Built-in security features work across multiple platforms and environments, and integration across the layers helps you get more value from your existing investments

• Manage healthcare compliance, simplify the security experience

• Help simplify the deployment and delivery of security features aligned to the needs of health professionals and patients so health professionals and patients can quickly and easily access security-enhanced applications and information

• Accelerate the planning and delivery of health solutions

The Microsoft Connected Health Platform (CHP) provides a collection of best practices and guidelines to help build e-health solutions that are efficient, security-enhanced, flexible, and scalable. All of these features build a platform that helps improve patient engagement.

Based on the extensible and agile principles of the Connected Health Framework (CHF), Microsoft CHP provides offerings for optimizing health information and communication technology, including prescriptive architecture, design, and deployment guidance; tools; and solution accelerators. Microsoft CHP is built primarily on a foundation of application platform technologies and services, as well as generic Microsoft infrastructure optimization models and tools, tailored for the health environment, enabling the delivery and management of on-premises, cloud, or hybrid solutions.

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Eight Ways You Can Hide Your Online Identity

By Wendy Boswell as written on websearch.about.com

How to Surf the Web Anonymously and Hide Your Tracks

Would you like to be a little bit more anonymous when surfing the Web? You can be with the following simple tips that will help you hide your identity online.

Why is this important? More people than ever before in history are going online, and with that, there are increasingly more security concerns. It's smart and makes sense to take time to learn more cautious Web browsing habits as we'll talk about in this article, in addition to the information below:

Protect Your Web Privacy: Web privacy is something that should be a top priority for anyone spending time on the Internet. A few common sense tips can make the difference between staying safe and private online....or not.

Hackers - Are They Good or Bad?: The news brings us stories of systems, governments, and corporations being hacked into by highly skilled programmers every day. Are these exploits always hostile? Or are they meant to be for the greater good? About.com shows you the difference between good and bad hackers, as well as a list of famous hackers that have done some pretty amazing (albeit somewhat infamous) things.

How to Keep Your Kids Safe Online: This generation is growing up with the Internet, but there are still plenty of safety risks. Learn how to protect your kids from cyberbullying, sexting, and other inappropriate Web

Anonymous Web Surfing

Be invisible on the Web with anonymous surfing. Learn about anonymous surfing, what anonymous surfing is, why you might be interested in surfing anonymously, how much information is easily learned about you via your Web surfing habits, anonymous proxies and services, and more.

Hide Your Search Habits

Don't want anyone seeing what you're searching for? Search engines (and other people that use your computer) can and do keep records of searches - here's a few ways you can keep your searching history private.

Avoid Intrusive Registrations

Don't want companies to know your information? If you're as tired as I am of sites forcing you to go through registration just to view their content, than BugMeNot is for you. It's easy to use and makes life much simpler, not to mention it's a good guard of your online privacy and enables you to surf anonymously.

Use a Junk Email Account To Handle Signups

For many years now, every time I absolutely have to give my email address online, I've used a fake, temporary, or junk email address that I don't mind being filled up with spam. For instance, say you want to sign up for a contest and don't want your "real" email addy spammed; well, you just get an email address for that contest and that contest only. There are plenty of places you can grab a free email account from on the Web; I've listed a few of my favorites that will help you conceal your online identity.

Use RSS To Hide Your Tracks

Instead of flitting all over the Web to visit your favorite sites, you can hide your tracks a bit better with the anonymous power of RSS technology - you'd be surprised at how much you can do with RSS.

Protect Yourself From Dangerous Malware

One of the easiest ways for you to get tracked online is through malicious software applications (malware) that watch what your computer is doing. You can get rid of these with free spyware removal tools.

Practice Common Sense Web Safety

A lot of the traps that people get caught in online could be avoided with some common sense Web safety. Use my Safe Search Checklist to keep yourself from being tracked online.

Upgrade Your Facebook and Social Media Privacy Settings

Facebook, the world's most popular social networking site, has made a lot of changes to its privacy policy, and most of them are not beneficial to the average user. They're complicated, difficult to understand and even harder to change, and can potentially compromise your safety online. Learn how to change your Facebook privacy settings quickly, easily, and safely.

Online Privacy: You Are In Charge

Never underestimate the power you have to make sure your safety online is not compromised.

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As written on enterprise.microsoft.com

We all understand the importance of good personal hygiene, right? It keeps us from getting ostracized at school, it makes us more attractive to the opposite sex, and most importantly it helps us stay happy and healthy.

Just as brushing our teeth is vital to our individual health, maintaining basic cybersecurity hygiene is critical for the well being of businesses. The overwhelming majority of cyberattacks are the result of computer hackers taking advantage of opportunities that stem from businesses neglecting basic security hygiene. Running an outdated operating system (OS) or antivirus software may not seem like a big deal, but it could provide hackers the window they need to access sensitive corporate information.

Fortunately, investing in the latest technology and revisiting cybersecurity basics can safeguard against roughly 98% of what hackers are doing today. Learn how a renewed focus on security basics can bolster your cyber defense and keep your business happy and healthy in The Cybersecurity Bell Curve infographic.

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Enhancing Microsoft Office 365 with the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS)

By adding the Enterprise Mobility Suite to Office 365, your employees are enabled to access corporate data from any mobile device with a single sign-on, allowing your workforce to be productive from just about anywhere. This solution also provides IT with the high-level control that allows users to freely collaborate together, while protecting your company’s data.

The Enterprise Mobility Suite is a comprehensive cloud solution from Microsoft that enables our customers to meet their IT and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) challenges.

It addresses our customers’ need for an end-to-end secure and productive managed cloud environment for their mobile workforce that encompasses identity, Mobile Device Management, and Mobile Application Management.

Office 365 comes standard with the basic version of Azure AD, which includes MFA capabilities for Office 365 workloads only. To get the enterprise-grade services, you need EMS for its advanced identity management, security, and auditing capabilities, as well as Azure AD Premium’s enterprise-grade synchronization between on-premises AD and Azure AD. Additionally, EMS includes Azure RMS to provide protection for non-Office file types, as well as access for developers to Azure RMS SDK for Rights Management in on-premises Windows Server file shares.

Today’s workforce is mobile, making the business extend beyond office and customary work hours. EMS helps businesses stay agile and competitive, while keeping their data, tools, and resources accessible, yet more secure, anywhere, anytime.

Who should be interested?

Small and mid-size businesses with 50-500 seats*
*Note that Telcos may be ready for EMS once they add Intune for mobile device management to Office 365

Why is EMS important?

• Ensures that IT will be able to manage user access to the information they need quickly, easily, and securely

• Provides their users with consistent access to resources from a variety of mobile devices over diverse applications, thereby boosting collaboration and productivity

• Enables secure mobile access to data

Overview of Enterprise Mobility Suite that support customer scenarios

The suite at-a-glance:

• Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium for hybrid identity management

• Microsoft Intune for mobile device and application management

• Microsoft Azure Rights Management for information protection

Hybrid Identity and Access Management: Azure AD Premium

• Provides cloud-based, single sign-on password capabilities for more than 2,500 popular SaaS applications

• Reduces costs through self-service portals for resetting passwords, or requesting application access, without the help of IT resources

• Integrates with existing on-premises investments

• Employs rich, robust synchronization of user identities from on-premises directories

• Reduces risk and supports compliance requirements with comprehensive Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) options

Hybrid Identity and Access Management: Azure AD Premium

• Delivers mobile device and application management across popular platforms: Windows, iOS, and Android

• Manages and protects corporate apps and data on almost any mobile device

• Maximizes productivity with Intune-managed Office mobile apps

• Simplifies administration with a single management console in the cloud with Intune or on-premises

Information Protection: Azure AD Premium and Azure Rights Management

• Helps retain control of corporate data assets wherever its shared

• Delivers information protection in the cloud or in a hybrid cloud with an existing on-premises infrastructure

• Integrates information protection into your native applications with easy-to-use software development kit (SDK)

Contact us for more information:

 

Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.

 

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4 Secrets Wireless Hackers Don't Want You to Know

By Andy O'Donnell; Security Expert as written on lifewire.com

You're using a wireless access point that has encryption so you're safe, right? Wrong! Hackers want you to believe that you are protected, so you will remain vulnerable to their attacks.

Here are 4 things that wireless hackers hope you won't find out, otherwise they might not be able to break into your wireless network and/or computer:

1. WEP encryption is useless for protecting your wireless network. WEP is easily cracked within minutes and only provides users with a false sense of security.

   Even a mediocre hacker can defeat Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP)-based security in a matter of minutes, making it essentially useless as a protection mechanism. Many people set their wireless routers up years ago and have never bothered to change their wireless encryption from WEP to the newer and stronger WPA2 security.

   Updating your router to WPA2 is a fairly simple process. Visit your wireless router manufacturer's website for instructions.

2. Using your wireless router's MAC filter to prevent unauthorized devices from joining your network is ineffective and easily defeated.

   Every piece of IP-based hardware, whether it's a computer, game system, printer, etc, has a unique hard-coded MAC address in its network interface. Many routers will allow you to permit or deny network access based on a device's MAC address. The wireless router inspects the MAC address of the network device requesting access and compares it your list of permitted or denied MACs. This sounds like a great security mechanism but the problem is that hackers can "spoof" or forge a fake MAC address that matches an approved one.

   All they need to do is use a wireless packet capture program to sniff (eavesdrop) on the wireless traffic and see which MAC addresses are traversing the network. They can then set their MAC address to match one of that is allowed and join the network.

3. Disabling your wireless router's remote administration feature can be a very effective measure to prevent a hacker from taking over your wireless network.

   Many wireless routers have a setting that allows you to administer the router via a wireless connection. This means that you can access all of the routers security settings and other features without having to be on a computer that is plugged into the router using an Ethernet cable. While this is convenient for being able to administer the router remotely, it also provides another point of entry for the hacker to get to your security settings and change them to something a little more hacker friendly. Many people never change the factory default admin passwords to their wireless router which makes things even easier for the hacker. I recommend turning the "allow admin via wireless" feature off so only someone with a physical connection to the network can attempt to administer the wireless router settings.

4. If you use public hotspots you are an easy target for man-in-the-middle and session hijacking attacks.

   Hackers can use tools like Firesheep and AirJack to perform "man-in-the-middle" attacks where they insert themselves into the wireless conversation between sender and receiver. Once they have successfully inserted themselves into the line of communications, they can harvest your account passwords, read your e-mail, view your IMs, etc. They can even use tools such as SSL Strip to obtain passwords for secure websites that you visit. I recommend using a commercial VPN service provider to protect all of your traffic when you are using wi-fi networks. Costs range from $7 and up per month. A secure VPN provides an additional layer of security that is extremely difficult to defeat. Unless the hacker is extremely determined they will most likely move on and try an easier target.

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