Today Symantec announced that it is acquiring PGP. I certainly hope they treat the Mac PGP client better than they’ve treated some of their other Mac clients. This move brings Symantec squarely into the encryption space. They encrypt full disks (including the boot volume of Mac OS X), portables, file servers, jump drives, Blackberry and PDFs. They have a mature centralized key management solution (after all, all encryptions seems to be key based these days) and even recently added application control to their portfolio, to block malware. Perhaps the last is why Symantec went ahead and picked them up. Or perhaps it’s because they just like buying things at Symantec.…
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FDE on Mac OS X Server
I’ve rolled a few Mac OS X Servers into production either sitting on top of PGP or Checkpoint. Other than the obvious issues of killing the ability to remotely reboot the thing it’s actually going really well so far. If anyone else has any observations or has been doing this as well let me know as I’d be interested in comparing performance benchmarks and notes about other potential technical ramifications. So far I’m seeing almost the same performance (about 5% degradation, which is easily made up by running faster drives), there are limited troubleshooting options and the issue with it booting to a password request rather than to the OS…
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Lo/Jack
It’s Friday and I’m feeling fairly non-technical after a call earlier today with actual end users (I’d forgotten we had those). So I’m going to talk about Lo/Jack. Tangent time: One of the great parts about being involved with MacWorld is the schwag. The speaker bags are full of stuff that, to be quite honest, I would almost never think to buy myself. Not that the vendors who throw crap in there don’t get me hooked on their phonics. But one of the few things that have caused me to think about security strategies from that bag is LoJack for Laptops. The thing is, I don’t really need it for…
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Full Disk Encryption and Cost
If you require Full Disk Encryption for all laptops in your organization then don’t forget to calculate the costs of doing so. There is the chance that you might not need to provided you can control what company assets can leave the environment, but the cost of implementing a solution to do so might outweigh the cost of purchasing FDE software for the Mac populace…
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Partner Programs
So I’ve been working on getting us into a bunch of new partner programs recently. Some companies get it, others not so much. Companies I rather like working with: Cisco, IBM, SonicWALL, CheckPoint, PGP