In my last article I outlined why, for a number of reasons, mainframe shops are growing increasingly aware of the importance of bolstering security on their ‘Big Iron’ box. Despite that, in this piece I want to discuss why some organizations are procrastinating over...
Or: We need to talk about mainframe hacking There’s an elephant in the room says Mark Wilson. It’s mainframe-sized, at serious risk of being hacked, and its name is Z. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That was US president Franklin D. Roosevelt at his...
To be honest, mainframes are pretty secure, aren’t they? We’ve had RACF and other External Security Managers (ESMs) for years. On top of that, the new z14 gives us pervasive encryption. And there are any number of logs recording what’s going on on Z, and we can run...
Mainframe files/datasets are liable to change quite often. After all, people are using those files so they are likely to be modified/updated. So how could you tell whether there had been a legitimate change to the file or it had been hacked? How can you verify that...
What GDPR Means for Mainframe Storage, Archive and Backup On April 27, 2016, the European Union passed regulation 2016/679, more popularly known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). On May 25, 2018, GDPR implementation began, and enforcement activities...
Retinal scans. Face recognition. Fingerprint scanners. Spoken phrases. Randomized pins. Those cool full-body laser scanners from the movies. Science fiction has correctly predicted many aspects of how we live in the digital age, including the rise of security...
A: Become a Grandmaster at Whack-a-mole! “…used with reference to a situation in which attempts to solve a problem are piecemeal or superficial, resulting only in temporary or minor improvement…” Much (very much!) has been written regarding the security threats posed...
Mainframes come with plenty of security – why should they use a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), when it doesn’t even run on the mainframe? This is pretty much the opening argument from most mainframers when talking about SIEMs, and, at first glance,...
IT security crises are forever making business headlines. In 2017 it was the high profile ransomware attacks and huge data breaches such as Equifax. Barely a week into 2018 and we had the revelations surrounding the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities affecting...
