It’s almost Valentine’s Day! And in honor of Mr. Saint Valentine I am going to opine for a bit on an ActiveGuard® feature that I LOVE. Specifically I am going to tell you why LOVE is at the heart of this technical process. What is this I speak of? ALVA. No, not Alva and the Chipmunks but the “ActiveGuard Log Volume Analyzer” or also commonly known as LAVA in its latest form within our company. Why is LOVE integral to ALVA/LAVA? Let me tell you!

ogs are the back bone of any security monitoring practice. But not all security incidents, threats or events have a specific log event tied to it. Not all products such as WAFs or IDSs have signatures to detect every security event, nor are there explicit log lines that will occur for every issue a device may face. But by... read more >

Over the last few months I’ve become a huge fan of the FX show, “American Horror Story.” My girlfriend is also a fan and introduced me to the series in the middle of season two. Since I am new to the series, we are now watching episodes from season one that we recorded on the DVR (I love my DVR).

Season one is absolutely outstanding, and although my girlfriend knows every plot twist and surprise that’s coming, she’s not giving anything away. Aside from the captivating story, I noticed something from season one that’s a little weird (well, actually the entire plot of the show is weird, but I digress).

The weird thing I’m referring to is the security guard the Harmon family (the family at the center of American Horror Story season one) hired when they had their new alarm system installed. Most alarm systems nowadays are monitored by a monitoring center. When the... read more >

There are valuable lessons to be learned when things go bad. All of us are susceptible to cybercrime in this industry as well as global business. I think it’s important to understand the “hows” in order to engineer the “solutions”.

Post Breach Summary – October 26, 2012:
The State of South Carolina announces that 3.6 million Social Security Numbers and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers were exposed in a recent successful cyber security attack. This Department of Revenue incident currently affects those who filed South Carolina tax returns since 1998. (With a... read more >

A leading industry analyst firm recently released a report describing the managed security service provider (MSSP) market in North America. Solutionary is recognized as a “leader” in the report.

Analyst reports like this are extremely useful for enterprises that are considering vendors to provide a service, giving them advice and perspective on a range of potential vendors.

There are some really large names listed alongside Solutionary. Most of them are known for providing solutions and services that are not related to IT security. Out of the leaders, Solutionary is the lone pure-play MSSP present.

Here at Solutionary, we are all extremely proud of this important industry recognition. Being a pure-play MSSP, all of our focus is on securing our clients and helping them comply with regulatory requirements. Security is all that we do, and it’s a 24/7 job.

To... read more >

For years I have been pondering how Big Data can help our challenges in information security. Let me start with a few clarifications about what the term Big Data means.

I think of Big Data as very large data sets that are housed in some sort of cloud-based data analysis repositories. However, unlike traditional data archives that sit and collect virtual dust on a few archive server 'thrones', Big Data repositories employ a vast farm of server 'folding chairs' that each does their small part to provide next-generation database analysis and mining tools. It’s democratization of data access and it makes mining and discovering valuable insights from the data both economical and possible.

In our world as a managed security service provider (MSSP), information security is mostly about collecting the data in logs and monitoring it. But traditionally when we think about monitoring data from a security perspective, we care mostly about detecting... read more >