Since publishing the article on Zero-Day Vulnerability Protection with Privilege Management, there has been a lot of additional press around the September 2012 Microsoft Internet Explorer vulnerability that adds additional insights into this problem. The bottom line is that zero-day vulnerabilities, while not new, continue to be a big problem to organizations.

Time to respond to security threats is crucial and there is some concerning news around the disclosure of this latest Internet Explorer vulnerability. Reviewing the publicly disclosed timeline, we see the following key events:

• September 14, 2012 – Security researcher, Eric Romang, discovered the vulnerability
• ...

If you have ever needed to create a report but dont know what table you are looking for this might help you out. In my case I had to find something that had the "Publisher".

 To look for columns in view...

USE
Symantec_CMDB
SELECT
V.name AS View_name,
SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id) AS schema_name,
c.name AS column_name
FROM sys.views AS v
INNER JOIN sys.columns c ON v.OBJECT_ID = c.OBJECT_ID
WHERE c.name LIKE '%Publisher%'
ORDER BY schema_name, View_name;

To look for columns in tables...

USE
Symantec_CMDB
SELECT t.name AS table_name,
SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id) AS schema_name,
c.name AS column_name
FROM sys.tables AS t
INNER JOIN sys.columns c ON t.OBJECT_ID...

Windows 7 migrations are in full force with Windows 8 on the horizon. One of the many challenges is addressing application compatibility and security. Arellia will be hosting a webcast to learn about issues related to moving legacy applications to Windows 7 or 8 and how to make those applications compatible and secure. Arellia is integrated with the Symantec Management Platform and sold through Symantec.

Register for the webcast

So as we are working on our 7.1 migration from 6.x, we have encountered various mysteries and oddities in the way the database schema changed in 7.x (at least in 7.1, never looked very closely at 7.0).  One of these came up while we were working on recreating some filters (and reports) and we found that while Resource Manager for a particular machine shows "Notebook" for the "Chassis Package Type" in the Hardware > Chassis Inventory, the DB table Inv_HW_Chassis just has the numeric value from WMI (documented in this Technet article).  However, we ALSO found that there is a view RMV_HW_Chassis that has the "friendly" chassis type information that you would normally have to use a CASE statement to report on, along with a lot of other handy columns, like CPU "real" descriptions such as "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2620M CPU @ 2....