One year of Windows XP support remains. After twelve years, now is the time to migrate off this 2001 Operating System or to take your security measures to assure your colleagues experience the least impact of the End of Support (EoS) situation. Of course, migrating to a later version of Windows or to another (supported) Operating System is the ...

Most people spend the short days and long nights of December with loved ones. At Microsoft, December is a vacation month for a lot of employees as the end of December marks the first half of the fiscal year and targets have mostly been met. For the Active Directory team, however, December marked the fourth Active Directory-related Security ...

It’s not very uncommon for Microsoft to issue a patch for a problem in Active Directory technologies (including Active Directory Domain Services, Lightweight Directory Services, Certificate Services, Rights Management Services, Federation Services and Group Policy). In this blog post, let’s look at some statistics:    Domain ...

On Tuesday November 13, 2011 Microsoft, in its monthly Patch Tuesday, released a Security Bulleting addressing an issue with Active Directory. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would first need to acquire credentials to log on to an Active Directory domain. An attacker could then run a specially crafted application that could exploit the ...

While days are getting shorter in my part of the world, Microsoft relentlessly continues to address issues in Active Directory. Between November 1, 2011 and November 30, 2011 Microsoft introduced one Active Directory-related KnowledgeBase article with information, seven Active Directory-related KnowledgeBase articles with hotfixes, one ...

On Tuesday November 8, 2011 Microsoft released a Security Bulletin addressing an issue with Active Directory. The problem is the LDAP over SSL (aka LDAPS) implementation in Active Directory, Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM), and Active Directory Lightweight Directory Service (AD LDS) does not examine Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs). ...

Whenever a worm utilizes the normal access and daily tools systems admins use, there is a significant problem. After all, shutting down the attack vector suddenly isn’t that easy. So, without making dramatic changes to your environment, how can you rest assured?     About Win32/Morto.A One of the latest threats to use ...

Microsoft touts the smaller attack surface as one of the biggest benefits of using Server Core, compared to a Full installation of Windows Server 2008. Because a Server Core installation is optimized, it doesn’t include most of the vulnerabilities found in Full installations. A consequence of these optimizations is a Server Core installation might ...

Updating environments with Hyper-V can be more of a challenge compared to updating an environment that consists of mere physical servers. Not only the workloads need regular updating, but also the Windows servers and Hyper-V servers underneath them. The challenges Hyper-V relies on a Parent Partition, whether you're using a Full installation of ...

One of Server Core's touted benefits is it requires less security updates. Jeff Jones did some interesting research a little while ago in which he compared a theoretical Windows Server 2003 Server Core edition to a Windows Server 2003 installation in terms of security updates. In the accompanying blogpost he concluded: […] looking at the ...