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.
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.
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.
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.Source : IEBlog
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.
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
Don't waste your time trying to understand what this blog is about or why is there so many unrelated news in it (from Formula 1 to computer programming). It's simply my own personal blog where I can put any information I like.
