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.
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
