Security

Timothy Smith
We can see the option to enforce password policy when we manually create a login through the interface or selecting this option as ON when scripting logins for creation

Security Testing SQL Logins with the PWDCOMPARE function

June 3, 2020 by

In this article, we’ll look at using the built-in PWDCOMPARE function in SQL Server for security testing passwords. While this tool may seem like it exposes a weakness in Microsoft SQL Server because we can test for passwords, it should be of note that an attacker could do the same attack by attempting to login to our database server assuming the attacker was able to access a connection to it. Therefore, this function does not increase the risk of an attack on SQL Server but does help us identify possible weaknesses in our environment so that we can quickly mitigate these risks. In addition, we’ll also combine this with other related tools in SQL Server to help us with logins.

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Aveek Das
Viewing Data as North America

Introduction to Row-Level Security in Power BI

April 15, 2020 by

Analyzing data with Power BI has always been fascinating to me. With ever-growing data comes more risk, and hence more security is needed. In this article, I am going to introduce what row-level security in Power BI is and how does it work. I’ll also demonstrate in detail how to implement the same in Power BI Desktop. Later, we will also discuss how to implement this row-level security in Power BI service as well. To learn about row-level security in SQL Server, please have a look at my previous article, where I have explained how to implement the same.

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Aveek Das
Selecting Data

Introduction to Row-Level Security in SQL Server

March 31, 2020 by

In this article, I’m going to discuss Row-Level Security in SQL Server. RLS or Row-Level Security as the name suggests is a security mechanism that restricts the records from a SQL Server table based on the authorization context of the current user that is logged in. This means the records from the tables are displayed based on who the user is and to which records do the user has access to. This is usually done to allow specific users to have access to their data only without permission to view other users’ data.

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Jignesh Raiyani
How DDL trigger works over database?

Database Level DDL Triggers on Tables

September 23, 2019 by

This article portrays the different utilization of database DDL Triggers for the Tables with a counting mail alert on schema composition using DDL (Data Definition Language) standard. Using that efficient method we can keep close eyes on monitoring schema changes in any database of SQL Server. We’ll also see how we could monitor these movements and send an alert email to persons responsible to inform about this change.

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Ed Pollack
Sample form with validation errors that protect the underlying code from SQL injection attacks.

SQL Injection: Detection and prevention

August 30, 2019 by

Summary

With an understanding of what SQL injection is and why it is important to an organization, we can shift into a discussion of how to prevent it. We ultimately want systems where SQL injection is impossible or very difficult to pull off. We then want systems where exploiting bugs is slow, laborious, and likely to raise monitoring alarms within an organization when attempted. The trio of layered security, prevention, and alerting can provide an immense advantage against not only SQL injection, but other data security threats.

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Ed Pollack
Attempting to locate a SQL injection vulnerability by entering special characters into form fields.

SQL Injection: What is it? Causes and exploits

August 30, 2019 by

Summary

Many security vulnerabilities are discovered, patched, and go away forever. Some linger and continue to plague software development and will continue to do so for years to come. Setting aside social engineering and non-technical attacks, SQL injection remains one of the top security threats to our data, as well as one of the most misunderstood.

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Gauri Mahajan
Advanced Threat Protection in Azure SQL Database.

Vulnerability Assessment and Advanced Threat Protection in Azure SQL Database

June 17, 2019 by

In today’s time where data breaches are highly expected to happen, there is a high need to ensure sensitive data in the Azure SQL databases is secured and which is why data security implementation is gaining momentum across each community. We covered one of the features of Advanced Data Security here in Advanced Data Security in Azure SQL Database – Data Discovery & Classification. Let’s dive further into the other two features that Azure SQL offers with this capability in this article.

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Gauri Mahajan
Columns classified using T-SQL in Data Discovery & Classification.

Advanced Data Security in Azure SQL Database – Data Discovery & Classification

June 17, 2019 by

Azure SQL supports in building and managing wide range of SQL databases, tools, frameworks etc. on the cloud. Organizations are drifting towards Azure SQL because of its obvious advantages over on-premises SQL Server and are generating, exchanging and storing data at an exponential rate on Azure. It becomes essential to safeguard, monitor our sensitive data and get alerts on anomalous activities else companies may come under fire for letting data leak and hacked.

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Timothy Smith
Compare auditing Azure costs using self-auditng on the same App Service versus an independent server auditing

User Security and Risks to Azure Costs

May 16, 2019 by

We’ve looked at both the organization and development side of managing Azure costs. One risk we have is attackers who compromise an account and mis-scale resources (such as scaling up), driving up our costs. Another scenario is attackers scaling resources too low that affects client’s ability to do their work (performance problems) – a separate risk that may result in lower costs on the cloud side, but higher costs against our reputation. A third risk is reconnaissance of our Azure use: this allows the attackers to get information about our design and later make a wide range of attacks that will appear as normal to us – in this case, Azure costs may be only one of the impacts with other impacts being as severe.

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Timothy Smith

DevSecOps: Developing with Automated Security Testing

March 6, 2019 by

A key component of DevSecOps and identical to running unit tests to validate code after a build, running automated security testing after an application has been deployed (such as automated penetration tests) can provide us with a tool that identifies security risks. As we’ve seen recently, there’s been a growth of many companies experiencing information being compromised and with the development culture of “move fast and break things”, I expect this trend of successful attacks will continue. Before we look at our options for automating this testing, we want to be aware of its limits, evaluate the requirements, and consider common designs that are useful.

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Sifiso W. Ndlovu

How to Programmatically Pass Credentials in an Embedded Power BI Report

November 20, 2018 by

In the article, How to embed a Power BI Report Server report into an ASP.Net web application, we looked at available options for embedding a Power BI Report Server report into an ASP.NET web application. Since the publication of the article, I have received several questions relating to how one goes about programmatically passing credentials for report server connection within an embedded Power BI Report Server report. The simple answer to such questions is that it is currently not possible to implement user impersonation in an embedded Power BI Report Server. However, like in most scenarios, there are workarounds that one could temporarily employ – at least until Microsoft comes up with a permanent solution to what is becoming a top requested feature at ideas.powerbi.com.

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