DAIR Newsletter: January 2018

Welcome to the January edition of the DAIR Cloud Community Newsletter. This month we will focus on patching your Windows environment. If you are looking for patching tips for your DAIR Linux environment, please refer to our previous video listed here.

Please take five minutes to watch our latest video to learn about the best practices for patching Windows environments on DAIR.

1. Windows Patching

2. Program Update: DAIR Hits 1000!

Big news! Since the DAIR Cloud program’s inception, we have worked with over 1000 Canadian SMEs to encourage the adoption of cloud technology.

We at CANARIE are extremely proud of everything accomplished with DAIR, and are happy to see your progress and success! Without you, the DAIR Cloud program would not have hit this milestone, so thank you for sharing your businesses journey with us.

We are excited to see what the future of DAIR holds for Canadian SMEs.

3. Advance your Knowledge

Recommended articles about patching Windows environments:

Windows Update Model Changes  (Microsoft, 2017) Windows Defender for Windows Server 2016 (Microsoft, 2017)

Securing Windows 2012 R2 (Microsoft, 2013)

4. Security Announcement

Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre (CCIRC) has listed several of our tenants as having vulnerable ports open.Our assessment shows it is all due to lax firewall rules in the tenant environments.Please take some time and review your firewall rules. Any rule with a CIDR of 0.0.0.0/0 should be replaced with one locked down to a specific source IP. Check out our video on DAIR Firewall Rules and learn more about these vulnerabilities on the CCIRC website.

We are aware of the security vulnerabilities known as “Meltdown” and “Spectre” which were announced recently.

We are actively working on mitigating these issues and their potential impact in DAIR.

As vendors release security patches for their operating systems, we will provide details on what steps you need to take within your instances in order to safeguard your DAIR environment.