When this pandemic started and nearly the entire workforce went remote, our focus was to maintain the quality of service outside of what was then normal operations. Although it seems like we still have a long road to travel, we are starting to see signs of progress. Globally, many companies are opening up their offices and giving their employees the choice of working in the office or from home. For network administrators, this adds another layer of headache.
Read moreAuthor: James Dougherty
I have worn many hats in my professional life. Support engineer, developer, network admin and manager are all points on my resume, but the one common thread with all of these jobs is that I enjoy working with people; that is what I do here at Plixer. I make sure that everyone understands our product and can get the most out of it. It's just simple 'no bull' support!
Let me know if you have any questions, I would be happy to help.
- Jimmy D
Enhance NetOps/SecOps collaboration with Plixer’s new collections feature
Posted on - by James Dougherty
I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve been on where the NetOps and SecOps teams really don’t know what the other is doing. Sadly, in today’s remote-work-centric world, the relationship between the two teams has become vital in making sure the end users not only have the resources they need, but at the same time, making sure everything is safe and up to compliance requirements.
Read moreAre you looking for an easier way to see how your VPNs are being used on your network? Here’s how to do it.
Posted on - by James Dougherty
Who has the time, right?
You might laugh but the truth is, in the past few weeks you have become the guru of everything VPN on your company’s network. Questions are coming in left and right, and with a little time you have been able to dig into the data to find out who were your top VPN users, what applications they were using, and how your VPNs have been holding up.
Read moreVPN users complaining of poor application experience? Here’s how to troubleshoot it
Posted on - by James Dougherty
We’re all feeling it.
As a confident NetOps leader, you’ve made sure your business continuity plan had allowances for remote workers but BAM: in the blink of an eye, your company’s work-from-home policies became mandatory for everyone and your battleship of a plan now feels like it’s taking on water.
Read moreSharePoint vulnerabilities: using metadata to verify traffic
Posted on - by James Dougherty
Last month the FBI posted ALERT AC-000113-TT, which mentions an increase in unidentified cyber actors exploiting a known SharePoint vulnerability to gain access to unprotected networks. The CVE-2019-1491 vulnerability was found late last year and Microsoft posted an out-of-band patch soon after. The FBI soon raised the alert after it received reports that multiple municipalities here in the states had been compromised.
Read moreBuilding a geo attack map with the Scrutinizer API: part 2
Posted on - by James Dougherty
So far we have used the Scrutinizer API to build a dataset that tells us how many hits our top ten countries are getting. Next, we’ll explore how easy it is to use this data to populate an open source digital heat/attack map.
Read moreBuilding a geo attack map with the Scrutinizer API
Posted on - by James Dougherty
Every once in a while I get the opportunity to sit down and work on things that are outside of the box when it comes to Scrutinizer. Well, this month was the perfect one for that. For a long time, I’ve wanted to create a geolocation-based heatmap of countries that are being visited on the network. Honestly, I have always had a fondness for heatmaps and attack maps, specifically geo-heatmaps. With that in mind, I decided to build a script that outputs countries and their hits. I’ll then take that data and populate an open source digital heat/attack map.
Read moreThree Ways to Comply with GDPR
Posted on - by James Dougherty
The requirements of GDPR can be vague sometimes. I have had quite a few of my customers ask how we help companies with questions about GDPR compliance. Here are the three Scrutinizer abilities that they found to be the most valuable.
Read moreNetwork Security: Using Dashboards to Aid Your Investigation
Posted on - by James Dougherty
In my last post, titled Network Visibility: Using Dashboards to Tell a Deeper Story, we discussed how the dashboard feature of Scrutinizer can be an asset to multiple departments. I’ve had the opportunity to work with clients who had a one- or two-person shop and some who had multiple departments. There has been one common thing across all these deployments: by employing the features of the dashboard engine, they were able to reduce the time it takes to find what they are looking for. In this section, we will explore the network security department.
Network Visibility: Using Dashboards to Tell a Deeper Story
Posted on - by James Dougherty
When it comes to network traffic monitoring, a single and unified view of your networking infrastructure is essential in ensuring that your environment is correctly watched over. It’s common to have hundreds, if not thousands, of routing and optimizing devices in today’s global networks. This tends to make monitoring things like traffic load, application usage, host usage, and more a mission-critical feature.
