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I’m guessing that you’ve asked someone (perhaps even yourself) one or more of these questions.

By Carol Woodbury

I get asked a lot of questions—via email, when I’m presenting at conferences, after my Coffee with Carol article series sponsored by my employer, as well as questions asked in response to these articles, but some questions are asked more often than others. I thought it might be fun to answer the top six most-frequently-asked questions and provide references for additional information. Here we go!

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According to the IBM X-Force, misconfiguration is one of the top issues that leave organizations vulnerable. IBM i is not immune to misconfiguration. While there are many ways to misconfigure a system, Carol describes her top five.

By Carol Woodbury

I read articles about security breaches all the time. Except for cases when an organization is targeted by a nation-state or a competitor, the cause of the breach is usually attributed to “misconfiguration.” Misconfiguration can take numerous forms. Several situations come to mind that cause IBM i misconfigurations.

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Are you using IBM’s Authority Collection tool to find possible security exposures? If not, you should be! Now you can use IBM Db2 Web Query to quickly and easily analyze the large amount of collection detail.

By Bill Vientos

The Authority Collection feature available in IBM i 7.3 is robust and simple to use. The collection provides incredible insight to your applications without creating a performance impact. Coupled with IBM i Services via SQL, it’s a powerful system administration toolset. Unfortunately, depending on the complexity of your application or the number of active user collections you are running, the collection can contain a massive amount of detail.

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IBM has taken more steps to keep the IBM i super securable.

By Carol Woodbury

IBM recently announced a new release—V7R4—and with it some new integrated security features you’ll want to take advantage of. Let’s take a look at the top three features.

Service Tool Commands

IBM has externalized some of the system configuration options found in System Service Tools (SST) as well as the service tool ID configuration options by making them CL commands. This is in direct response to requests from organizations running large numbers of IBM i partitions and having the need to perform remote management rather than sign in to each instance separately. You can now create, change, and delete a Service Tool ID using the appropriate command (CRT/CHG/DLTSSTUSR). Using the Display or Change SST Security Attributes (DSP/CHGSSTSECA) commands, you can display or modify the system configuration settings, such as the ability to lock system values, the password rules for the SST service tool ID, and more.

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Do you have a formal plan for educating employees about ongoing IBM i and IT security threats?

by Carol Woodbury

This article is excerpted from IBM i Security Administration and Compliance: Second Edition, chapter 20.

A security awareness program is an official or recognized project, typically under the “jurisdiction” of the Chief Security Officer (CSO), that is created for the purpose of educating individuals such as the organization’s employees, contractors, vendors, and volunteers about the organization’s security policies. The education should explain how the policies relate to each individual, and it should be performed on an ongoing basis.

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So many attributes, so little time. It’s tempting to just skip over some of them, isn’t it?

By Carol Woodbury

If any of you have prompted the Create or Change User Profile commands, you’ll know that there are a full five pages worth of attributes that can be specified for a user profile. Do you have to specify all of them? Are some parameters more important than others? Read on to find out.

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I realize that I’ve spent a lot of time explaining best practices and what my recommendations are, but I don’t often explain why some settings aren’t the best. 

By Carol Woodbury

Some of my favorite magazines will describe a popular action and then explain why that practice is not so bad, pretty bad, or really bad. Using this method, I’m going to describe how bad certain security settings are.

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Security changes often, but old excuses don’t.

By Steve Pitcher

I had a great conversation with one of our salespeople a few weeks ago about the challenges of selling the value of IBM i security services.

Me: “Do you have ADT home security at your house?”

Salesperson: “No.”

Me: “Why not?”

Salesperson: “I’ve never had someone break into my house.”

Me: “That’s why it’s a challenge to sell computer security solutions.”

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