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Over the last year, Microsoft had been dropping lots of hints it would be reworking its authentication system in Windows 10. Multi-factors, support of FIDO, and the use of virtualization technology to secure credentials were all slated to be in its latest and greatest OS. With the general release of Windows 10 late last month, we now get to see what’s in the sausage.

AGLP is Microsoft’s four-letter abbreviation for guiding admins in setting permissions in an Active Directory environment. Account, Global, Local, Permission just means the following: you put user accounts (A) into global groups (G), put the global groups into domain local groups (L), and then grant permissions (P) to the domain local group. Makes sense, right?

An alarming 70% of large firm attorneys do not know if their firm has been breached, according to a recent American Bar Association (ABA) survey conducted by the ABA’s Legal Technology Resource Center.

There’s nothing new in using analytics in data protection or breach prevention. Firewalls, for example, analyze packet contents and other metadata, such as IP addresses, to detect and block attackers from gaining entry. And anti-virus software is constantly scanning file systems for malware by looking for bits of code and other signs that a file is infected.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) 3.1 is a set of regulations that govern how organizations manage credit card and other cardholder data. Many security professionals advocate that DSS is not only about passing an annual compliance audit, but also having programs in place for continual assessments, remediation, and monitoring.

Active Directory loves hierarchy. Domains, Organizational Units (OUs), groups, users, and so forth. Sometimes it can be confusing—how do I best structure my AD? We’ve written a bit about domains (How do I name my domain? What happens if I rename my domain?), but today our focus will be on the difference between OUs and groups.

CIOs have taken note of the nightmarish scenarios data breaches can bring – remember Sony and Target? To combat this ticking time bomb, they’ve beefed up their security budgets. The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at Carnegie-Mellon University also recommends creating a security policy which you can to refer to if your systems are compromised.

In April of 2016, the PCI Council released version 3.1 of their Data Security Standard (DSS). While most of the changes in this minor release are clarifications, there is at least one significant update involving secure communication protocols. The Council has decided that SSL and TLS 1.0 can no longer be used after June 30, 2016.

Reformatting, de-duping, merging, and filtering are just some of the functions that go under the broad category of data wrangling. It’s all the scrubbing and cleaning that data scientists apply to raw data before it’s ready for real analysis. Even The New York Times ran an article about this less glamorous side of Big Data, referring to wrangling as ‘janitor work’.

Privacy by Design (PbD) has been coming up more and more in data security discussions. Alexandra Ross, the Privacy Guru, often brings it up in her consultations with her high tech clients. Its several core principles have been adopted by U.S. government agencies and others as de facto best practices polices.

FIDO’s Universal Two Factor (U2F) is intended to make it easy for companies to add a strong second factor to their existing crypto infrastructure. Most of us are probably not ready to leap ahead to the password-less Universal Authentication Factor (UAF). So U2F is a comfortable half-way point that still leverages FIDO’s strong crypto technology but allows employees to continue with their more familiar password entry habits.

Alexandra Ross: Privacy Attorney and Guru Alexandra Ross is not your ordinary attorney practicing privacy law. Her CV includes a stint as Associate General Counsel for Wal-Mart Stores, where she built this giant retailer’s privacy policies and procedures from the ground up. She is San Francisco based and consults with many Bay area tech companies. Her point of view on privacy is based heavily on Privacy by Design principles. And more provocatively as The Privacy Guru, she believes that mindfulness has important lessons for how we as consumers interact with online services.