Update to Windows Management Framework 5.1 on Windows 7

July 31, 2017 by Leave a comment

mslogo3Over the weekend i read this article about PowerShell Security in the Enterprise. I decided whilst reading it, i should probably make sure my clients machines have the latest WMF installed.

Assuming this was just a KB article i searched WSUS for KB and found nothing. Reading the blog article about the 5.1 release and then the Install and Configure guidance, we see that WMF 5.1 is released to Windows 7, but, manual steps are required to install it.

The download comes as a ZIP file with a PowerShell script (Install-WMF5.1.ps1) and an MSU for the architecture of the PC.

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Filed under General, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks Tagged with , , ,

Quick Fix: Enable DKIM for Office 365

July 26, 2017 by 2 Comments

DKIMIf you have been following some of my recent posts you’ll know i have been talking about Office 365 and Exchange Online and how you can tweak the settings to better secure your mail.

One of the steps for that is to setup DKIM. For Office 365 this requires two CNAME records to be published in your public DNS.

The problem i was having when setting up a new client, was knowing what the CNAME should be set to.

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Filed under Exchange, General, Quick Fix, Tips & Tricks Tagged with , ,

Quick Fix: 2008 R2 api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll is missing, not enough storage to process this command.

July 5, 2017 by Leave a comment

picard-facepalmI have just been through a particularly bad support incident, which I wanted to share in great detail. However confidentially precludes me from doing so.

Anyway it turns out it was caused by a failed Windows Update, not a hardware failure as we first suspected.

Plenty of lessons learned here on how not to handle a ticket, but the takeaway is, if you are facing the errors in the title, try this and reboot:

sfc /scannow

You may be unable to launch anything, except a command prompt so it may be you need to go into safe mode which you can set via BCDedit:

bcdedit /set {current} safeboot network

I wish I had thought to check for failed Windows Updates before I started a restore job.. but you live and learn.

Filed under Backup, General, Quick Fix, Tips & Tricks Tagged with , , ,

Configure and Deploy Microsoft LAPS

June 29, 2017 by Leave a comment

IT Security is essentially a risk mitigation game. There is no such thing as a totally secure system, certainly nothing you can ‘set and forget’ and so we are left to decide what we can do, to best protect our systems.

We don’t want an unauthorised person to use our computer, so we use a password. We know passwords can be guessed, or cracked, so we choose more difficult passwords. More powerful attackers can crack more difficult passwords, so we use 2 Factor Authentication.

The list goes on and on and on, but with each risk we can look for a mitigation that works in our environment, knowing that there is nothing we can do to fully protect ourselves but we can make things as difficult as possible for a would be attacker, in the hopes that he or she may look for some lower hanging fruit elsewhere.

With that in mind we are going to look at managing the Local Administrator password for your client computers to help prevent lateral movement through your network.

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Filed under General, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks Tagged with , , , ,

Spear Phishing: What Can you do?

April 28, 2017 by 5 Comments

I have seen a sharp rise in the number of spear phishing attempts my clients are subjected to. I’m sure this trend will continue. Of course our best line of defence when protecting our clients is user education. We can of course try and make things easier for them.

Our most recent example was quite lacklustre by comparison, they hadn’t even bothered to try and find a similar address, just some random Comcast account and setting the ‘From’ name to that of the Executive they were trying to impersonate.

I decided that to counter this we can tag the subject of any such email and then also generate an incident response within Office 365.

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Filed under Exchange, General, Tips & Tricks Tagged with , , ,

Using Office 365 to Protect Your Email

March 28, 2017 by 3 Comments

exchange-2014No doubt everyone reading this is familiar with spoofed email. Where an attacker crafts a message to appear as though it comes from a legitimate sender, in the hopes the recipient will reveal personal information or part with their hard earned cash.

With the rise in so called ‘spear phishing’, being able to effectively block spoofed email is no longer just desireable, it is critical.

Also bear in mind that whilst technologies like Sender ID and DKIM exist, they require both parties of an email to be using them for them to be effective.

You may think any domain you have moved to Office 365 recently is automatically protected by Exchange Online Protection however, like previous versions of Exchange, SenderID checking is disabled by default, as are advanced spam filtering and malware protection. Read more of this post

Filed under 2016, Exchange, General, PowerShell, Tips & Tricks Tagged with , , , , ,

Migrate SBS 2011 Standard to Windows Server 2016

March 28, 2017 by 174 Comments

Drawing1

Your trusty old SBS 2011 is finally being retired. It had a good run. It probably still works but you cant get the parts, and the cloud is so appealing and for whatever reason you have, you are putting in a new on premises DC.

Hey, you don’t have to justify it to me. Chances are you shipped Exchange off to the cloud long ago, your clients never really ‘got’ SharePoint and SQL was just used by the backup software and WSUS.

The only thing we want to migrate is Active Directory and File & Print services. Read more of this post

Filed under Exchange, General, PowerShell, SBS S, Tips & Tricks Tagged with , , ,

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