Data classification is essential for achieving, maintaining and proving compliance with a wide range of regulations and standards. For example, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX and GDPR all have different purposes and requirements, but data classification is necessary for compliance with all of them — after all, you need to accurately identify and tag health records, cardholder information, financial documents and other regulated data in order to protect that data appropriately.

As you use your computer, the registry can collect obsolete, redundant or even damaged entries. By using a reg cleaner tool, you can: However, there is no clear consensus on the value of registry cleaning.

NIST SP 800-171 details requirements that all Department of Defense (DoD) contractors have been required to follow for years. The guidelines were updated in 2020, and Revision 3 was published in May 2023. Netwrix is ready to help organizations achieve, maintain and prove NIST 800-171 compliance. Below, we summarize its key requirements and share recommendations for getting started with the regulation.

In the wake of escalating cyber-attacks and data breaches, the ubiquitous advice of “don’t share your password” is no longer enough. Passwords remain the primary keys to our most important digital assets, so following password security best practices is more critical than ever. Whether you’re securing email, networks, or individual user accounts, following password best practices can help protect your sensitive information from cyber threats.

Compromising privileged accounts is the penultimate objective of most cyberattacks — once attackers gain privileged access, they can then accomplish their final goal, whether that’s to steal or encrypt information assets or disrupt business operations. Typically, cybercriminals gain a foothold in a network by compromising of a low-level account on a local machine.

The push for data privacy has exploded in recent years, with regulations such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) leading the charge. This means consumers around the globe are gaining rights regarding how their data is collected, stored, processed and sold, as well as more ways to hold companies accountable when poor data security practices lead to data breaches involving personally identifiable information (PII).

The Windows registry is a database that contains important information about your computer — users, preferences, applications, attached devices and much more. The Windows operating system constantly refers to the registry; for example, to open a program, install new software or change your hardware, Windows must check the values of certain registry keys.

Local WMI querying is straightforward to implement and troubleshoot — but remote WMI querying is another story. Indeed, setting up secure remote WMI querying for a user with no admin rights is a daunting task. This blog can help. I’ll walk you through the steps I used to enable a standard domain user to query the Microsoft SQL Server WMI namespace class on a Windows Server 2012 R2 running Microsoft SQL Server 2016.

Mimikatz is a popular post-exploitation tool that hackers use for lateral movement and privilege escalation. While Mimikatz is quite powerful, it does have some important limitations: As a result, other toolkits have been created to complement Mimikatz. This article explains how three of them — Empire, DeathStar and CrackMapExec — make attacks easier for adversaries.

Imagine being named XYZ in a crowd of other XYZs – a purposeless name that creates confusion and does not communicate a purpose, adding to the cognitive pile of everyone’s day-to-day tasks. Similarly, Active Directory groups created by users need to have logical names so that current and future users do not find themselves stuck in a pickle.