Hardening Microsoft Solutions from Attacks

Take a minute to go over this post from Dirk-jan Mollema. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait…

Did you realize how scary that kind of attack is? As an IT guy who specializes in Exchange server and loves studying security, that article scared the snot out of me. Based on my experience with organizations of all sizes I can say with a good bit of authority that almost every Exchange organization out there is probably vulnerable to this attack.…

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If You Have a Cisco Firewall, Disable this Feature NOW!!!

I don’t often have an opportunity to post a rant in an IT blog (And even less opportunity to create a click-bait headline), but here goes nothing! Cisco’s method of doing ESMTP packet inspection is INCREDIBLY STUPID and you should disable it immediately. Why do I say that? Because when Cisco ASAs/whatever they call them these days are configured to perform packet inspection on ESMTP traffic, the preferred option of doing so is to block the STARTTLS verb entirely.*…

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ADFS or Password Sync: Which one do you use?

I’ve run into a number of people who get confused about this subject when trying to determine how to get their On-Prem accounts and Office 365 synced and working properly. Most often, people are making a comment somewhere that says, “Just use Password sync, it’s just as good and doesn’t require a server,” or something similar.…

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Disabling Direct Access Forced Tunneling

So you’re trying to get Direct Access (DA) running in your environment and you suddenly realized that your test machine can no longer access…anything. Well, this may be due to the “accidental” enabling of “Forced Tunneling” in your DA configuration. How do you fix it? You can pretty easily reconfigure your DA configuration to disable Forced Tunneling, but unless your test machine is directly connected to your AD environment, you’ll never be able to get the Group Policy updates on your test machine.…

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Anatomy of a Certificate Error

The most important step in diagnosing a specific security error involves determining what the error is telling you. There are a few things that can cause certificate errors, and what you do depends entirely on what is causing the error to begin with. Once you know what the error is telling you, it becomes much easier to figure out what you need to do next.…

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