Jean-Pierre Paradis's Blog

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Microsoft is please to announce the final release of the security configuration baseline settings for Windows 10 version 1511, also known as "November Update," "Build 10586," "Threshold 2," or "TH2." The downloadable attachment to this blog post includes importable GPOs, tools for applying the GPOs to local GPO, custom ADMX files for Group Policy settings, and all the settings in spreadsheet form. We will also be publishing SCM .CAB files for this Windows 10 baseline shortly, and will announce their availability on the Security Guidance blog. (Note that we will not be providing updated SCM .CAB files for the IE11 guidance. For that content, see the attachment on this blog post.)

Source : Microsoft Security Guidance

Policy Analyzer is a utility for analyzing and comparing sets of Group Policy Objects (GPOs). It can highlight when a set of Group Policies has redundant settings or internal inconsistencies, and can highlight the differences between versions or sets of Group Policies. It can also compare GPOs against current local policy settings and against local registry settings. And you can export its findings to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

Source : Microsoft Security Guidance

One of the great additions to PowerShell 5.0 is the new information stream. You can use this stream as a logging mechanism in your scripts and functions, which is something I want to demonstrate today.

Source : Petri

In the first article of this series, I taught you how to install and configure the Git version control system (VCS) to help you manage your Windows PowerShell scripts. Today, you'll learn how to sync your PowerShell scripts between your computers.

Source : 4sysops

Software as a service (or SaaS) is a relatively new model of how a lot of software companies are conducting their business today – often to great success. So it comes as no surprise that malware writers and cyber crooks are attempting to adopt this model for their own nefarious purposes. In the past year a whole bunch of these “Ransomware as a Service” campaigns appeared, like for example Tox, Fakben or Radamant. Today we want to spotlight the newest of these campaigns.

Source : Meet Ransom32: The first JavaScript ransomware

PowerSploit is an offensive security framework for penetration testers and reverse engineers. It was born out of the realization that PowerShell was the ideal post-exploitation utility in Windows due to its ability to perform a wide range of administrative and low-level tasks all without the need to drop malicious executables to disk, thus, evading antivirus products with ease.

Source : PowerShell Magazine

Below I will show few methods which can prevent WPScan scan.

Source : security.szurek.pl

Hello everyone, this is Ayesha Mascarenhas on the Remote Desktop team. We released the Remote Desktop client preview for Mac in August this year. Over the last few months many of you have shared feedback and feature suggestions. Today, I’m sharing with you some of the updates we have made to the Remote Desktop client preview app for Mac since it was first released.

Source : Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services) Team Blog

In the second week of this month, Microsoft had alerted Windows Live Mail 2012 users that some chnages are coming to users of Microsoft accounts like Outlook, Live, Hotmail, MSN accounts that may prevent mails being delivered to Windows Live Mail 2012. And it said, in order to continue using this Mail client, you need to install this update.(Update for Windows Live Essentials Mail 2012 (KB3093594) )

Source : meraTechPort

You’ve adopted an Android smart phone, but your contacts, email, and calendaring information are tied up in your Outlook.com or Office 365 account. No worries, you can access it all from Android, and even make sure that your phone calls and text messages correctly identify who’s reaching out to you.

The best news? You can make this work no matter which apps you choose to use to manage your contacts, email and calendar.

Source : Thurrott.com

When using WPScan you can scan your WordPress website for known vulnerabilities within the core version, plugins, and themes. You can also find out if any weak passwords, users, and security configuration issues are present. The database atwpvulndb.com is used to check for vulnerable software and the WPScan team maintains the ever-growing list of vulnerabilities.

Last time, we taught you how to install WPScan on Mac and Linux.

This time we are going to dive into how to use WPScan with the most basic commands.

Source : Sucuri Blog

NirSoft released the free MMCSnapInsView tool that allows you to view and launch all MMC snap-ins that are installed on a Windows computer.

Source : MMCSnapInsView – MMC snap-in launcher

Concurrent Remote Desktop allows you (the administrator) to simultaneously use a client computer while a standard user is still interactively using it. For IT, this is huge! Imagine never having to kick a person off of their computer because you need to work on it. Concurrent Remote Desktop (CRDP) makes this possible. This guide will cover CRDP setup for Windows 10.

Source : DeployHappiness

About 4 months ago we decided to deliver what the community clearly needs: A WordPress Security Learning Center. We all put our noses to the grindstone and worked as quickly and effectively as we could. We brought in video producers, designers, copywriters and security experts from around the community.
Today we are ready to announce the completion and official launch of our WordPress Security Learning Center.

Source : Wordfence

Microsoft released KB 3095113 to enable future Windows 10 feature upgrades. Whether you will deploy upgrades or not, you need to know what this hotfix does and how not applying it can break WSUS.

Source : 4sysops

Well today's news gives WLW a fresh lease on life as open source software. That means the opportunity is once again available to build a robust community around the software and see it thrive.

Source : SuperSite for Windows

A must read article by 4sysops on how to active the administrator account or change the password of any account without logging in !
Offline activate the built-in administrator on Windows 10 without signing in - 4sysops

If you tried out the previews of Windows 10, you may have seen the experimental options in the command prompt. Now that it's released, the Experimental tab in the Properties dialog is gone, but the key features are still there – just slotted into the other tabs.

To see what's available, right-click on the title bar of a command prompt window and choose Properties if you want to only change the current command window, or Defaults if you want to change every command window you open.

Source : www.techradar.com

Windows 10 Enterprise comes with quite a few interesting features that Windows 10 Pro lacks. In this post, I summarize these additional features and link to further information.

Source : 4sysops

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of reading these sensational headlines: “Windows 10 is Stealing Your Bandwidth!” and “Windows 10 is Costing You Extra Money!” and so forth. By the end of this article, you’ll understand a thing or two about Windows Update Delivery Optimization (WUDO), how to control its behavior, and what you can do to minimize the likelihood of running over your ISP account’s bandwidth limit.

Source : 4sysops

If you have the task of performing an Active Directory migration from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012 R2, there are a number of steps that you must complete for a smooth transition.

Source : 4sysops

Using the CreateFromDirectory and ExtractToDirectory methods, it is possible to compress and extract files. In this tip I will show different constructors that can be used to either compress or extract files using this class. The following example will compress the files stored in the c:\testing folder:

Source : PowerShell Magazine

Excellent article that explain in details my the new Outlook app (Android and iOS) should not be used in enterprises.

Microsoft has released their iOS app “Outlook” today. And it will break your companies security for mobile PIM access in multiple ways! No matter if you’re a Microsoft Exchange or IBM Notes Traveler customer. I cannot believe that Microsoft has done what they’ve done. Even as a non-Microsoft guy I would have expected that they obey the rules of common company security rules.

Read it : {rene.winkelmeyer}
Also look at the follow up post : Updates on the latest Outlook iOS App issues

Microsoft has quietly added Office Remote—previously a Windows Phone exclusive—to the Google Play Store, allowing users of that platform to remotely control PowerPoint 2013 presentations on a Windows PC. There’s no official announcement about the app yet, so it’s possible that an iOS version of the app is coming as well, perhaps as soon as today.

Source : Office Remote Comes to Android - Thurrott.com

While studying up on Windows 10, I came across a technique that has been shown to reduce the time it takes to apply an OS WIM to disk by 20 – 50%*. That’s a fairly significant savings in time and the implementation of this technique is relatively easy and does not require you to change how you deploy Windows. Believe it or not, the savings come from adjusting the OS power management settings during a deployment. While there are multiple ways to implement these power management settings, below I’ve outlined what I consider the most non-intrusive to existing deployment methods.

Source : Reducing Windows Deployment time using Power Management - The Deployment Guys

In its drive to integrate OneDrive deeply with all of its core products, Microsoft has made the open and save operations in Office 2013 a bit ponderous. If you’re already syncing your OneDrive content to the PC—or if you intend to only use local folders regardless—you can configure various Office applications to open and save files more efficiently. Here’s how.

Source : Office 2013 Tip: Skip the Cloud Integration - Thurrott.com

DFS Replication Initial Sync in Windows Server 2012 R2: Attack of the Clones NedPyle [MSFT] 21 Aug 2013 5:18 PM 9 Hi folks, Ned here again. By now, you know that DFS Replication has some major new features in Windows Server 2012 R2. Today I talk about one of the most radical: DFSR database cloning. Prepare for a long post, this has a walkthrough…

Source : DFS Replication Initial Sync in Windows Server 2012 R2: Attack of the Clones - The Storage Team at Microsoft - File Cabinet Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Today we are releasing MS15-011 & MS15-014 which harden group policy and address network access vulnerabilities that can be used to achieve remote code execution (RCE) in domain networks. The MS15-014 update addresses an issue in Group Policy update which can be used to disable client-side global SMB Signing requirements, bypassing an existing security feature built into the product. MS15-011 adds new functionality, hardening network file access to block access to untrusted, attacker controlled shares when Group Policy refreshes on client machines. These two updates are important improvements that will help safeguard your domain network.

Source : MS15-011 & MS15-014: Hardening Group Policy - Security Research & Defense - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Today, we announced the release of Outlook for iOS and a preview of Outlook for Android. If you have an iPhone, iPad, Android phone or Android tablet, chances are that you’re using the built-in email and calendaring capabilities of your device. Why use the new Outlook app instead? We’re glad you asked!

Source : A deeper look at Outlook for iOS and Android - Office Blogs

Last week, I wrote on the arrival of Microsoft’s security bulletin MS14-066, containing a security update addressing several vulnerabilities in the Secure Channel. Yesterday, Microsoft issued an updated version of the update.

Source : The things that are better left unspoken | Update on MS14-066
References : It’s time to update your Secure Channel (MS14-066, CVE-2014-6321)

LAN Speed Test Lite is a very simple network performance test utility that doesn’t have to be installed. You can simply launch it from your USB stick and then measure the upload and download speed for a network share of your choice. After you click Start Test, you can configure the size of the file you want to use for the test.

Source : FREE: Network performance test – LAN Speed Test Lite - 4sysops

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is quickly becoming the most used data-interchange format. XML enjoyed the top spot for a long time but slowly people have been moving towards JSON. JSON is a first-class citizen in Windows PowerShell. With many automation frameworks and software products adopting JSON, it is important for system administrators to understand what is JSON and how to use it. This article is a JSON primer to give you an overview of this data-interchange format and how to use it.

Source : PowerShell Magazine » A JSON primer for administrators

Anyone who is familiar with RDCMan will be thrilled to hear that there is an updated version available! For those of you who are new to RDCMan – it is a tool that allows you to easily manage multiple remote desktop sessions:

Source : Update for RDCMan - Ben Armstrong - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Onetastic is a free multi-purpose addin for Microsoft OneNote 2010 and 2013.

Includes OneCalendar

Source : Onetastic for OneNote

ABC-Update is a free command-line tool that allows you to install Windows updates. It is easy to use and gives you the flexibility of deploying only specific updates in your scripts.

Source : FREE: ABC-Update – Install Windows updates at the command prompt - 4sysops

NEW YORK — Nov. 12, 2014 — On Wednesday, Microsoft Corp. reinforced its commitment to cross-platform developer experiences by open sourcing the full server-side .NET stack and expanding .NET to run on the Linux and Mac OS platforms. Microsoft also released Visual Studio Community 2013, a new free edition of Visual Studio that provides easy access to the Visual Studio core toolset. The announcements kicked off Microsoft’s Connect (); event, where the company released Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 2015 Preview.

Source : Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform, adds new development capabilities with Visual Studio 2015, .NET 2015 and Visual Studio Online | News Center

I think that I will start this Diary with the following statement: If you use an open source CMS, and you do not update it frequently, there is a very high chance that your website if not only compromised but also part of a botnet.

"You should proceed under the assumption that every Drupal 7 website was compromised unless updated or patched before Oct 15th, 11pm UTC, that is 7 hours after the announcement"

Source : InfoSec Handlers Diary Blog - The Wonderful World of CMS strikes again

If you have read some of my previous blog posts and IIS.NET articles about WebDAV, you will see that I often use the WebDAV Redirector that is built-in to Windows in order to connect to various WebDAV websites. This allows me to access my files via a mapped drive letter, which also enables me to use WebDAV with applications that do not have native WebDAV support. (Like Visual Studio.) I'm also a big fan of OneDrive, but sometimes I'm on a legacy system where I don't have OneDrive installed. With that in mind, I thought that I would put together a quick blog series to show you how to map a drive letter to your OneDrive files.

Using the WebDAV Redirector with OneDrive Part 1 - Standard Security

Using the WebDAV Redirector with OneDrive Part 2 - Two-Step Verification

Source : http://blogs.iis.net/

The other day I was troubleshooting 100% CPU utilization on a SQL Server 2008 database server. The server had 100 or so databases of varying sizes however none were larger than a few hundred MB and each database had a corresponding web site on a separate web server. Since the server hosted quite a few databases the high CPU needed to be resolved quickly because it was causing issues for everyone. High CPU on a database server can often be symptomatic of a issues occurring outside the server. In this case the real issue was in fact being caused by a SQL Injection attack on a web server.

Source : Solving SQL Server High CPU with IIS Request Filtering | Peter Viola

Another one of the great built-in features of IIS 8 is Dynamic IP Restrictions (DIPR). With a few simple configuration steps you can quickly set limits for blocking IP addresses based on the number of concurrent requests or frequency of requests over a period time. With these parameters in place IIS will take over blocking requests unattended thereby making your server more secure.

Source : Preventing Automated Attacks with IIS Dynamic IP Restrictions | Peter Viola

Microsoft is pleased to announce the final release of security baseline settings for Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Internet Explorer 11. Some of the highlights of the new security baselines (many of which we intend to backport to older versions of Windows and IE):

Use of new and existing settings to help block some Pass the Hash attack vectors;
Recommendations to control the storage of plaintext-equivalent passphrases;
Blocking the use of web browsers on domain controllers;
Incorporation of the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) into the standard baselines;
Removal of the recommendation to enable "FIPS mode" (this is discussed in greater detail in this blog post: Why We’re Not Recommending “FIPS Mode” Anymore);
Removal of almost all service startup settings, and all server role baselines that contain only service startup settings.

Source : Microsoft Security Guidance

We have made a small number of changes in the baseline security guidance for Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Internet Explorer 11 since we released the beta version of our guidance last April. This blog post discusses those changes and the reasons for them.

Source : blogs.technet.com/b/secguide

Microsoft released the new Sysinternals tools, Sysmon, which allows you to monitor Windows process creations, file creation time changes, and network connections in the Windows Event Log.

Source : 4sysops.com

Many online articles suggests using the MakeCert.exe tool available in the Windows SDK for creating a self-signed certificate, but now there is an easier approach available.

New-SelfSignedCertificate-DnsNametest.powershellmagazine.com-CertStoreLocationcert:\LocalMachine\My

Source : PowerShell Magazine » #PSTip Generating a self-signed certificate

Kansa, a free, open source, PowerShell-based incident response framework hosted at https://github.com/davehull/Kansa.
Kansa is modular. It features a core script, dozens of collector modules and analysis scripts to help make sense of the data collected. Kansa takes advantage of Windows Remote Management and PowerShell remoting. It uses PowerShell’s default non-delegated Kerberos network logons, not CredSSP and therefore does not expose credentials to harvesting.

Source : PowerShell Magazine

FREE Microsoft eBooks! Who doesn’t love FREE Microsoft eBooks? Well, for the past few years, I’ve provided posts containing almost 150 FREE Microsoft eBooks and my readers, new and existing, have loved these posts so much that they downloaded over 3.5 Million free eBooks as of last June, including over 1,000,000 in a single week last year (and many, many more since then).

Source : Eric Ligman, Microsoft Senior Sales Excellence Manager, Blog

Microsoft this week detailed an obscure command line tool for Connected Standby (now InstantGo)-based PCs and devices that will help identify which applications are causing battery drain while the machine is sleeping. Dubbed Sleep Study, the tool is part of the powercfg.exe utility in Windows 8.1/RT 8.1 and will tell you how well the system slept and how much activity it experienced during that time.

Source : Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows

With Internet Explorer 11, we’ve done work to make signing into sites faster and more reliable as well as give users more control when saving credentials. In addition, IE11 will now roam credentials to IE11 on Windows Phone 8.1!

We are giving control back to the user when deciding to save passwords on a given site. IE11 will now prompt the user to save passwords even if the autocomplete=off attribute is set on login forms.

Source : IEBlog

Excellent post with a step-by-step procedure to create a an inbox for all your accounts in Outlook 2013.

Ref : TinkerTry

We are removing FRS from Windows Server Today I’ll talk about what this means and how to get ready. We want this to be as easy as possible and I welcome any conversations that help you move forward with migrating to DFSR for SYSVOL replication.

Source : The Storage Team at Microsoft

You may have heard about InstantGo in Windows 8.1 (known as Connected Standby in Windows 8 and Windows RT), and how it has replaced the traditional sleep or standby function in many Windows 8.1 and Windows RT 8.1 systems. What you might not know is how fundamentally different—and better—it is, and why.

Source : InstantGo: a better way to sleep

Today we’re excited to announce the release of the Internet Explorer Developer Channel, a fully functioning browser designed to give Web developers and early adopters a sneak peek at the Web platform features we’re working on. The Developer Channel is available for download today for both Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP1 customers running Internet Explorer 11.
IE Developer Channel can run alongside and independently of IE11, and has all of the browser features that you love in IE11, as well as the latest platform features we’re working on. As you test drive these features, make sure to give us feedback through @IEDevChat or Connect.

Source : IEBlog

Installing Android on VirtualBox is a bit more complicated than with Windows. I’ll give you a few tips on how to install and configure a virtual machine for your Android lab.

Source : 4sysops

The name of the free tool Bulk Password Control is perhaps a bit misleading because the free tool enables you to automate all kinds of bulk modifications on Active Directory user objects with a fast to use GUI.

You know this popular picture of the GUI admin who clicks all day to reset user passwords after a security breach. Bulk Password Control is a nice example that proves that such tasks can be quickly done with a GUI tool without much click-click.

Source : 4sysops.com, www.wisesoft.co.uk

To reuse script samples on the Internet, the following steps seem quite familiar to IT Pros: wandering through different script galleries, forums and blogs, switching back and forth between webpages and scripting environment, and countless download, copy and paste operations. But all of these will drive one as dizzy as a goose. Need a simpler way of searching and reusing scripts? Try out the new Script Browser add-in for PowerShell ISE!

Source : Windows powershell Blog

There is a known issue which causes some PCs updated with the Windows 8.1 Update (KB 2919355) to stop scanning against Windows Server Update Services 3.0 Service Pack 2 (WSUS 3.0 SP2 or WSUS 3.2) servers which are configured to use SSL and have not enabled TLS 1.2.

Microsoft plans to issue an update as soon as possible that will correct the issue and restore the proper behavior for Windows 8.1 Update KB 2919355 scanning against all supported WSUS configurations. Until that time, we are temporarily suspending the distribution of the Windows 8.1 Update KB 2919355 to WSUS servers.

Source : blogs.technet.com/b/wsus/

Microsoft is taking an important step towards helping businesses stay up to date with the latest software, services, and devices. Enterprise Mode for Internet Explorer 11, announced today as an update for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, provides better compatibility for older versions of Internet Explorer and tools to manage which Web apps use it.

Source : IEBlog

Security Compliance Manager (SCM) is a great free tool for helping with deployments and environment hardening. This article explains what’s new in version 3.0 and describes how you can use SCM in your deployment process to secure builds.

Source : 4sysops.com

So, let me kick off this series in which I’ll be sharing what it feels like to virtualize and clone Active Directory Domain Controllers safely on both platforms, with a blogpost on finding out whether your virtual Domain Controllers may benefit from the VM-GenerationID on the VMware-based hypervisors and, thus, may be safely virtualized and cloned.

Source : The things that are better left unspoken

The rumors are true: Microsoft confirmed today that it is making a version of OneNote available for free on every major desktop and mobile computing platform, including even the Mac. Additionally, the firm has announced some new OneNote tools, OneNote Clipper and Office Lens, as well as new partner services and a new extensibility model that will make it possible for any cloud service to integrate with this amazing note-taking and thought organization solution.

You can download OneNote 2013 for Windows from OneNote.com

You can get OneNote for Mac from the Mac App Store

Source : Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows

Check out UptimeRobot. This is a free external monitoring tool that will check your site every five minutes and send you an email, text message, twitter notification, and more. What’s even better is that it will allow you to specify up to 50 monitors in total.

Source : life as a sysadmin

Good reading from Microsoft Malware Protection Center : Malicious Proxy Auto-Config redirection

Reading view is a new feature in Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 8.1 that helps you focus on the main content of the Web page you want to read. Reading view is a way to experience just the article or blog post you want to read, without the distractions of related (or unrelated) content surrounding the story. Find an article you want to read, switch to reading view, and settle into a great reading experience. When you’re done, just exit reading view to continue browsing on the site.

Source : IEBlog

Have you ever heard about IE Enhanced Protected Mode or Mark-of-the-Web (MOTW) ?

Well, if you encounter one of those problems you should :

Opening IIS Failed Request Logs files (XML+XSL) from you local machine with IE result in a text page without formatting.
Trying to access your local web server with the 127.0.0.1 ip (not localhost) or the real local ip of your computer with IE results in an error page.

You have to blame the IE Enhanced Protected Mode for those ‘problems’. Here’s two solutions :

1) Disable the Enhanced Protected Mode

Open Internet Options
click on the Advanced tab
Unselect ‘Enable Enhanced Protected Mode’ in the Security Section
Restart IE

2) Add you site to the Intranet Zone

Open Internet Option
Click on the Security tab
Select the Intranet zone
Click on the Sites button
Click on the Advanced button
Add the following address :

http://127.0.0.1 To allow access to your local web site

about:internet To allow access to file with a MOTW (ex: IIS Failed Request Logs)

Personally I prefer option 2.

References :

KitKat is the latest Android release from Google with a lot of attractive changes both inside and outside. Before it hits every Android phone out there, you certainly have a new way to experience it with a very simple set up in VMware Workstation 10.

Source : VMware Workstation Zealot

A couple of weeks ago, I delivered a presentation on Work Folders deployments, and there was a slide on how Work Folders interoperates with other file server technologies. It occurred to me that it is worth writing a blog post about it.

File classification infrastructure (FCI)

RMS encryption

Quotas and File screen

DFS Replication

Failover Clustering

SMB

Dynamic Access Control (DAC)

Source : The Storage Team at Microsoft - File Cabinet Blog

In Silicon Valley (and in media satellites that take the NoCal mindset to New York and beyond), everyone has an iPhone, a MacBook Pro, and a Gmail account. Microsoft products and services might as well be from Mars. So be skeptical when you read analyses or predictions of what's coming next from Redmond.

“The Nokia acquisition is a colossal mistake”

“Microsoft hates Open Source”

“Everyone hates Microsoft Office”

“Internet Explorer is a buggy, incompatible mess”

“Bing is a money-losing flop”

“Windows is fundamentally insecure and unreliable”

“Xbox should be spun off into a separate business”

“The ‘One Microsoft’ reorg is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic”

“Windows Phone is a failed experiment”

“Windows RT is dead”

Read the full article at The Ed Bott Report

Hello everyone, I am Palash Acharyya, Support Escalation Engineer with the Microsoft Platforms Core team. In the past decade, we have come a long way from Windows Server 2003 to all the way to Windows Server 2012R2. There has been a sea-change in the overall Operating System as a whole, and we have added/modified a lot of features. One of these is Disk Defragmentation and I am going to talk about it today.

Source : blogs.technet.com/b/askcore

Must read article about WinSXS folder and what’s new in Windows 8.1/2012 R2

Component Store Analysis Tool
Component Store Cleanup

Ref : blogs.technet.com/b/askcore

Apple's solidly built PCs have developed a cult following over the years, but they never made a dent in the enterprise. Why did the Mac fail to crack the enterprise code? I've found six reasons.

Source : The Ed Boot Report

No matter the application, I’ve always had three issues with MSIs. First,editing the MSI is a pain. Orca makes this a little less painful but the tool is starting to show some age. Second, distributing drivers with the original MSI is nearly impossible! Most of the time, the solution is using a mixture of DEVCON/PNPUTIL or a deployment share. Finally, custom actions (such as activations or follow-up procedures) have to be manually ran or deployed with Group Policy. There isn’t a simple way to embed these into an MSI.
There is one easy free solution to all of these issues. Today, we are going to use Scalable’s Smart Packager to make your MSI maintenance simple.

Source : DeployHappiness

Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) is available worldwide in 95 languages for download today. We will begin automatically updating Windows 7 customers to IE11 in the weeks ahead, starting today with customers running the IE11 Developer and Release Previews. With this final release, IE11 brings the same leading standards support--with improved performance, security, privacy, and reliability that consumers enjoy on Windows 8.1—to Windows 7 customers.

Source : IEBog

Windows Management Framework 4.0 is now downloadable from Microsoft.

Windows Management Framework 4.0 includes updates to Windows PowerShell, Windows PowerShell ISE, Windows PowerShell Web Services (Management OData IIS Extension), Windows Remote Management (WinRM), Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), the Server Manager WMI provider, and a new feature for 4.0, Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC).

Link : Windows Management Framework 4.0 on Download Center

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog that was titled "How to create an HTML Application to configure your WebDAV Redirector settings", where I showed how to use HTMLA to create a simple editor for most of the WebDAV Redirector settings. These settings have no other user interface, so prior to my blog post users had to manually edit the registry in order to modify their WebDAV Redirector settings.

Source : Robert McMurray : The Official Microsoft IIS Site

Is Microsoft about to go to war with its long-time virtualization partner Citrix? It sure looks that way, given the imminent arrival of new Microsoft remote desktop apps for iOS, Android, and OS X.

Source : Mary-Jo Foley @ ZdNet

According to an announcement from Adobe (via MacRumors), hackers have obtained customer information from 2.9 million accounts. The information obtained includes encrypted passwords, encrypted credit and debit card numbers with expiration dates, and customer names. Anyone that has downloaded software from Adobe could be a victim.

Source : AppAdvice

File History was introduced in Windows 8, and gives you a new way to protect your files. It supersedes the existing Windows Backup and Restore features of Windows 7 because it was never a very popular application. This leaves your personal data and digital memories quite vulnerable, as any accident can lead to data loss.

Source : TechNet Magazine

If you’re running Java SE 6, we have some news for you: Oracle stopped providing public updates to it after February 2013.

Source : Microsoft Malware Protection Center

Source : joyoftech.com

If you haven’t seen the news, PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio is now available on the Visual Studio Gallery! The first beta brings with it many enhancements from alphas past and supports VS2013 RC. Here’s a quick overview of the current state of the extension.

Source : Adam Driscoll's Blog

With Windows Server 2012 or below, domain privileges were essentially on or off. Devices were either members of your domain or not. Windows Server 2012 R2 introduces a new middle ground called WorkPlace Join.

Source : 4sysops

At Microsoft TechEd Australia 2013 a couple of weeks ago, my good friend Alan Burchill told me about a sneaky new feature in Windows 8.1 that should make a lot of business users very happy. Built in to every Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 is “Work Folders“, a free and managed synced-storage alternative to Dropbox or SkyDrive that any business can self-host for their staff. Soon it’ll also work with Windows 7, iOS and even possibly Android."

Source : istartedsomething

Lost in all the excitement around Apple's iPhone 5C/5S announcement this week is news that the Cupertino consumer electronics giant will no longer charge for its iWork mobile productivity apps. Is this a serious threat to Microsoft's Office juggernaut?

Source : Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows

It is a great pleasure to be able let you know that v1 of the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) for .NET has reached General Availability! You can add the library to your projects directly from Visual Studio (search for ADAL) or you can download the NuGet package directly from here

source : Active Directory Blog

Apple unveiled their new line of iPhones today, and there were absolutely no surprises. Both the iPhone 5S and 5C each have their own merits and new features. But many of those features seemed all too familiar to us Android users. Did Apple source all their inspiration from other companies?

source : Android and Me

OffCAT, a free tool, is advertised as a “quick and easy method to analyze several Microsoft Office programs for common configurations that may cause problems.” According to Microsoft, it “can be very useful for busy Help Desk personnel when end-users call for help with Office programs or when you want to proactively identify possible issues.” Always interested in being proactive, I decided to check it out.

Source : 4sysops

Just when I was thinking that there is a need for a nice regular expression helper for PowerShell, SAPIEN Technologies announced the community preview of their new product called PowerRegEx. PowerRegEx is a regular expression building tool that provides help and real-time testing.

Source : PowerShell Magazine

Here’s another cool project created by PowerShell MVP Doug Finke. PSharp is a tool designed for PowerShell’s Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) editor. Its fast navigation capabilities allows you to quickly identify the functions, variables and commands in the current file, with a simple key stroke.

Source : PowerShell Magazine

Ever wondered why isn’t there support for writing PowerShell scripts in Visual Studio? I have had several projects where I needed to integrate PowerShell scripts into a C# solution I created in Visual Studio. For this, I needed to use multiple editors – one for C# and another for PowerShell scripts. I am sure that I am not the only one looking for such integration between Visual Studio and PowerShell.
Adam Driscoll, a fellow PowerShell MVP, announced that he is working on PoshTools - a reincarnation ofPowerGUIVSX. PoshTools is a Visual Studio extension to enable writing PowerShell scripts and supports full IntelliSense capabilities for PowerShell inside the Visual Studio Editor. This new integration has no dependency on PowerGUI editor.

Source : PowerShell Magazine

Because DISM is a command-line utility, learning its syntax can take some time. For instance, you’d need the following syntax to install three custom device drivers into a mounted WIM image.
Mike Celone‘s wonderful CodePlex project DISM GUI is a graphical front-end to DISM, and makes it much quicker to accomplish the simplest to the most complicated image maintenance and servicing tasks.

Source : 4sysops.com

You might want to think twice before you let someone borrow your computer.
The most obvious risk of allowing someone else access to your desktop is that they can impersonate you, using any app where you’re already signed in. They could send prank messages using your default email client, or profess your undying love for Justin Bieber using your logged-in Twitter account.
That’s annoying, but far from fatal.
But the situation becomes considerably worse if you use Google Chrome to save and sync passwords for easy logins at your favorite websites. An intruder who has unrestricted access to your computer for even a minute can view and copy all of your saved passwords just by visiting an easy-to-remember settings page: chrome://settings/passwords.

The Ed Boot Report

Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 comes with a completely redesigned and enhanced suite of in-browser developer tools that help developers build, diagnose, and optimize modern Web sites and apps across multiple devices. The new tools, which we call F12 for short, enable Web developers to work quickly and efficiently.
The Visual Studio and IE teams have worked together to build F12 with a core principle of helping you get from problem to solution quickly with actionable data. The new F12 enables you to deliver fast and fluid Web experiences with tools for diagnosing and fixing performance issues and tools that give you deeper insight into how IE is laying out and rendering your app. F12 supports the fast, iterative workflow used by modern Web developers.

Source : IEBlog

Kerberos is becoming increasingly mandatory for really cool features such as Protocol Transition. Moreover, as you might be painfully aware, managing Service Principal Names (SPN’s) for the use of Kerberos by applications can be daunting at times.
In this blog, we will not be going into the gory details of SPNs and how applications are using them. In fact, I’m assuming you already have some basic knowledge about SPN’s and how they are used.

Source : Ask the Directory Services Team Blog

In today’s blog I am going to discuss how to handle booting from a USB drive on a UEFI system so you can deploy Windows

Article : Ask the Core Team

Did you know there are 5 places where ASP.NET requests can become queued on an IIS server?
Not all these queues are documented, and it can be very difficult to tell when and where requests are queued.
As part of LeanSentry's automatic hang detection and troubleshooting, we had to figure out the IIS/ASP.NET request queueing behavior. So, we wanted to share the knowledge with everyone so you can properly track down queued requests.
Read on to learn all about these queues, how to tell when requests are queued, and how to identify the exact requests that are actually queued!

Source : blog.leansentry.com

With Windows 8.1 we will receive a new Powershell. Read all about it.

Windows PowerShell 4.0 includes several significant features that extend its use, improve its usability, and allow you to control and manage Windows-based environments more easily and comprehensively.

Windows PowerShell 4.0 is backward-compatible. Cmdlets, providers, modules, snap-ins, scripts, functions, and profiles that were designed for Windows PowerShell 3.0 and Windows PowerShell 2.0 work in Windows PowerShell 4.0 without changes.

Continue reading : technet.microsoft.com

Did you know you could customize the "Windows 8 Win X Menu" ?
Yes you can !
Check out this great article by Joseph Moody on DeployHapiness :
Windows 8 Win X Menu: Editing

At long last, Microsoft has released a version of its Office suite for iOS. The new app targets the iPhone and closely resembles the Office app that’s built into Windows Phone 8. Here's what you'll find in the new app, which is available from the App Store immediately.

Souce : The Ed Bott Report

Today at Computex 2013, Tami Reller, CFO and CMO of Microsoft's Windows Division, announced that Outlook 2013 RT will be available on Windows RT tablets as part of the free Windows 8.1 update coming later this year. This means that if you have a Microsoft Surface or a Windows RT tablet made by one of our hardware partners, or you are planning to buy one, you'll soon have access to the familiar tools in Outlook that help you communicate with others, manage your contacts and appointments, and find information fast.

bink.nu

There is a ‘must read’ chapter in ASP.NET documentation on MSDN about security :

ASP.NET Security Content Map

Jean-Pierre Paradis's Blog

1) Disable the Enhanced Protected Mode

2) Add you site to the Intranet Zone

References :

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http://127.0.0.1	To allow access to your local web site
about:internet	To allow access to file with a MOTW (ex: IIS Failed Request Logs)