• Townsend Security Calls It Quits

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  After 40 years in business, Townsend Security will cease operations at the end of the month, the company’s principal, Patrick Townsend, announced last week. “It has been my honor to serve you and work with you for these many years, and I know that our security solutions have kept many safe from harm,” he wrote.

  Townsend Security traces its roots back to 1984, when Townsend created a consulting team to provide network and communications solutions for a global chipmaker, according to Patrick Townsend’s LinkedIn page. Townsend formally founded Townsend Security in 1991, and has served the IBM midrange community …

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• ACS, Merlin Hit With Serious Security Vulnerabilities

  December 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Three serious security vulnerabilities in IBM i Access Client Solutions and six in Merlin were disclosed and patched by IBM last week. The flaws could allow attackers to commit a range of crimes, from executing arbitrary code and denial of service attacks, to obtaining sensitive data on IBM i conducting phishing attacks. All of the flaws – including another three reported by IBM in November – should be patched immediately.

  IBM published a security bulletin December 8 covering all three of the ACS flaws, which impact ACS versions 1.1.2 through 1.1.4 and 1.1.4.3 through 1.1.9.3. The fix is to download …

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• Many Different Kinds Of Cloud, Very Big Piles Of Money

  December 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  From the very beginning, there have been many kinds of clouds. Yes, Amazon Web Services started out with the Simple Storage Service (S3) object storage service in March 2006, and quickly followed it up with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, and even though it cannot decide if service is part of a product name or not, AWS set the stage for how infrastructure services (IaaS) and then platform (PaaS) and application software (SaaS) services would be layered on top of raw, virtualized iron.

  Many observers thought that in the end, everything would go PaaS and SaaS and IaaS would …

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• Happy Holidays To You And Yours From Us And Ours

  December 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  First of all, thank you.

  It is a great privilege and an honor to do the work we do for the IBM i and Power Systems customer base and the software vendors, hardware sellers, and service providers who also serve customers like you. If history has demonstrated nothing else in the more than five decades of IBM midrange computing, it is that we are one single ecosystem, that we are all in this together and always have been.

  We did a little bit more content earlier this year, and so that means we can get our Christmas break a little …

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• As I See It: Riffing On Retirement

  December 11, 2023 Victor Rozek

  It didn’t take long after my father retired for him to start getting bored. There were suddenly lots of unstructured hours to fill and no prescribed way to fill them. So, he did what many retired men do: He stayed home and annoyed his wife. But after several months of straining my mother’s tolerance for togetherness, he settled on a novel solution.

  The back of our property was bordered by a very tall hedge which shaded portions of the lawn. During the rainy season the shaded areas never fully dried and became saturated. So my father decided to replace patches …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 50

  December 11, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Well, there are two new security vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack, as we report elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred. And there is also an update to the System Planning Tool. Let’s do the latter first and the former last.

  The System Planning Tool, version 6.23.340, is now available for download at this link. The System Planning Tool is used by customers and business partners to build valid system configurations for Power Systems machines and their software stacks. You can look at the release notes for various SPT generations here.

  Now on to the …

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• Fresche Bolsters MFA with IBM i Exit Point Coverage

  December 6, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Organizations relying on Fresche Solutions’ multi-factor authentication (MFA) to protect their IBM i assets can now implement more fine-grained enforcement by protecting access to IBM i exit points, the company announced recently. The MFA offering also now hooks into enterprise-level MFA solutions.

  MFA has emerged as a minimum standard for protecting critical IT assets and data, as well as for preventing ransomware attacks. Even if a cybercriminal were to obtain the user ID and password to access sensitive applications and data, MFA serves as a difficult-to-overcome barrier that slows, if not prevents, them from actually getting into systems.

  Fresche Solutions …

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• AWS Taps Precisely to Bring IBM i Data Into Its Cloud

  December 6, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Amazon Web Services and Precisely have entered into a partnership agreement that will see AWS reselling Precisely’s data replication software to bring IBM i data into the cloud. It’s part of a larger effort by AWS to bring more IBM workloads into its data centers.

  Precisely and AWS previously had a relationship to move mainframe data into the world’s largest public cloud through a program called AWS Mainframe Modernization Data Replication. In late November, the companies announced they’re expanding the program to include IBM i. (While not technically a mainframe, the IBM i server is often called a mainframe. If …

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• Government Cracks Down on Security Responses, Unpatched Vulns

  December 6, 2023 Alex Woodie

  New federal rules that go into effect next week require public companies to share information about past security incidents within four days of the event, as well as detail in annual reports how they’re preparing for future attacks. And a state prosecutor in New York fined a company for allowing hackers to steal customer data through a critical zero-day security vulnerability that was left unpatched for 11 months.

  The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s new cybersecurity rule that went into effect on October 1 requires public companies to report details of cybersecurity incidents that impact their operations. Companies must report …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, December 6

  December 6, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  As one year comes to a close, it’s natural to look ahead with anticipation of what the new one will bring. No matter your age, there’s something about rolling over the calendar that makes us take stock of our lives, reset goals, and make a plan for the year ahead. That applies to companies, too. For instance, one of the oldest names in computing is hoping to shape the future of, well, everything. Yes, our very own IBM is making big moves in quantum computing and AI that it hopes will pay off big in the new year, as you …

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