Notes from the Virtual Study Conference 2010

Last Saturday I spent at home attending the Security Track the the Virtual Study Conference 2010.

The conference was the first edition of this virtual, worldwide conference and consisted of tracks in both Polish and English.   
After reviewing the different tracks I decided to go for the securitytrack that sounded very promising, and belive me it really went above and beyond my expectations..

The first Session Thomas Shinder heldt on DirectAccess and Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway 2010 was a good walkthrough of the technologies and possibilities Microsoft provides for remote access.

The second was a great and detailed explanation by Tomek Onyszko on how Kerberos authentication works.

The next session was called Cybercrime: The Gathering Storm! By Andy Malone, and I must admit that this was the session I was most looking forward to.
A description of the latest trends regarding cybercriminal sophistication, the impact of the credit crunch and Chinese ”hacking schools” and their latest targets.
Packed with demos of the tools available for information gathering, Phishing site “generators”, and other malicious tools a cybercriminal has in his toolbox.
This session was truly amazing and I am happy to be able to link to the same presentation held at TechEd earlier this year.

Moving my passwords from my wallet to the cloud

Stopping passwordreuse with Roboform Online and GoodSync

A lot of people have a handful of passwords that they keep re-using for more than one personal online account.
This is a habit that is as understandable as it is dangerous, since we are constantly creating more and more  online accounts and remembering unique passwords and where they should be used is not an easy task.
Even though most of us have been fine reusing the same half-dozen-or-so passwords over and over again for years, I think the days of innocence are coming to an end, as recent studies by  Kaspersky Lab shows that “Password reuse opens door to ID theft” .

Passwordmanagers are well and good but they have one big problem  – you are helpless when you do not have access to it.
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So long, and Thanks for all the Sid’s

On the retiring of the NewSid tool and the creation of Myths in IT

When working as a consultant, its not unusual to come across  customers who for some reason has chosen to do things in a way that is not in accordance with established “Best Practice”.

Often the customer will tell you that it is because of some unique characteristic of his solutions and environment, and that the decision not to honor the best practice is based on previous experience of internal staff, and/or other external consultants. The rationale behind the decisions might have been true in the past , but may not be true anymore.
However- the details of the previous experience is not known, – but someone once made this decision, so it must have been based on some rational reason, – right?
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The Sysinternals Suite – The all-in-one Troubleshooting Kit

Mark Russinovich announced yesterday that the Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities have been rolled up into a single Suite of tools that can be downloaded for free at Microsoft TechNet.

The tools are:
AccessChk, AccessEnum, AdExplorer, AdRestore, Autologon, Autoruns, BgInfo, CacheSet, ClockRes, Contig, Coreinfo, Ctrl2Cap, DebugView, Desktops, DiskExt, DiskMon, DiskView, Disk Usage (DU), EFSDump, FileMon, Handle, Hex2dec,
Junction, LDMDump, ListDLLs, LiveKd, LoadOrder, LogonSessions, NewSid, NTFSInfo, PageDefrag, PendMoves,PipeList,,PortMon, ProcessExplorer, Process Monitor, ProcFeatures, PsExec, PsFile, PsGetSid, PsInfo, PsKill, PsList, PsLoggedOn, PsLogList, PsPasswd, PsService, PsShutdown, PsSuspend, RegDelNull, RegJump, RegMon,RootkitRevealer, SDelete, ShareEnum, ShellRunas, SigCheck, Streams, Strings, SyncTCPView, VMMap, VolumeID, WhoIs, WinObj and ZoomIt.