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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PowerShell Scripts for finding Services and Scheduled Tasks that are using a specific account

A while ago I created some scripts that others might find useful.
The scripts where made for checking whether or not it was safe to disable a specific account, by looking for services and scheduled tasks that might be needing this account to run.
The scripts where originally made for checking win-2003 servers.

I have written them so that they now look for the use of the local administrator account on the servers, the scripts can therefore be helpful if you are going to disable this account in your environment (which you should..)
I made three scripts to accomplish this task, one “ping-script” to get a list of servers to check, one to check for services and one to check for scheduled tasks.

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18 critical bugs fixed in MS June 09 Security Updates

Today Microsoft issued 10 security updates that patched a record 31 vulnerabilities
in Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), Excel, Word, Windows Search and other programs, including 18 bugs marked “critical.”
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