TentaCom's Blog

Topics that may catch your interest, as they did ours.

Making Passwords Random

In 2017 the US National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) published a wonderful document entitled “Digital Identity Guidelines - Authentication and Lifecycle Management” containing detailed guidelines and recommendations for password use. In addition, it expressed useful opinions about the (bad!) password policies that many systems and organisations work with. It may be because of this that Microsoft adjusted some of their default password policies. NIST Special Publication SP800-63b is freely available, and periodically updated.

Silicon Valley Bank implosion

The (sudden) implosion of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) that served about half of all VC funded companies in that region of the world has brought some interesting questions to the forefront. And it’s not “how did this happen”. It’s all well and good aiming to prevent fires in the kitchen, but they do happen so we need a contingency plan for that scenario.

International Women's Day 2023

One of my daughters got a statement from the bank about an old account that had just $10 in it. We all agreed that it was probably best to close that account, so the bank wouldn’t chew up those few pennies in fees (to its credit, but for unknown reasons contrary to its own policy, the bank hadn’t been taking out fees - yet).

Use of personal equipment to access organisational resources

LastPass provided some more information about how they were breached. Seemingly everybody has commented on the LastPass matter, being very quick to pass judgement from a distance. Certainly, for LastPass in particular, the bar was higher. So many things went wrong, and many other things were sub-optimal.