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Updates Updated May 8 to add information on a second issue. Updated May 9 to add information on possible additional issues as well as instructions for using the recovery console. Updated May 10 with some clarifications, a possible video driver problem causing other STOP errors, and an additional work...
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Last week I found a post in the Vista newsgroups from a lady who was having problems installing Kaspersky Anti-Virus. She was getting an error 1722 upon installation on one computer out of three and the installation failed. She had called both Kaspersky and here computer manufacturer (HP) and neither...
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On January 23, Jeff Jones, Director of Security at Microsoft, published his "One Year Vulnerability Report" for Windows Vista. In the report, he analyzed whether Windows Vista had fewer vulnerabilities in its first year than it's predecessor, Windows XP had in its first year. Jeff also...
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A couple of weeks ago I published a script to list installed updates . Predictably, one of the comments ask for a version that can do that remotely. Here it is. This version can be run a couple of ways. First, you can double-click it. If you do it will prompt you for which computer to list the updates...
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The January issue of TechNet Magazine has an article I wrote about how to hack a system using autoplaying USB flash drives. While it is not possible to stop all attacks from USB tokens, Vista does include some interesting protective measures. However, the autoplay decision flow in Vista is quite convoluted...
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This evening I brought my WSUS server up to WSUS 3.0. Mostly I wanted to see if it still was as big a memory hog as 2.0. After the 90-minute-or-so installation was finished, here is what I had: wsusservice: 50 MB IIS worker process: 100 MB SQL 2005 instance: 400 MB That's over half a gig! For a single...
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OK, so whose bright idea was it to put the F12 key so close to the Delete key on the keyboard? And whose bright idea was it to map F12 to "Save As..." in every MS Office application? And, whose bright idea was it to default the Save As... option to the users home directory, even if that directory...
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Recently I started noticing a very strange problem. user Group Policy was not applying for a single user. All other users got GPO just fine, but for one user GPO failed to apply. This manifested itself in a couple of interesting ways: When you run gpresult under this user's account you get an error that...
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I've had this love-hate relationship with Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) for years. On the one hand, I agree to a large extent with Tom Shinder and Tim Mullen that SBS makes security compromises that in many, if not most, businesses are imprudent. It combines all services onto a single system...
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For several years I have used a homepage in Internet Explorer (IE) that is a list of links I often visit. I find it a lot more convenient than using Favorites to track this, and it is easier to save, move to a new system when you flatten this one, and even send to someone else if you want. For example...
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Today I tried installing the latest build of Vista and ran into an interesting problem. The compatibility check during installation failed because I had "Roxio Backup MyPC." The only Roxio app I have is Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite 8, so I went and checked that and the backup portion was...
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While poking around for a blog post on Susan's blog, I found this one , asking how to wipe a drive. Teacher, Teacher, I know the answer, I know: cipher /w:<drive letter> This command, built into Windows XP and higher, does a three-write pass over a drive to wipe all free space. You will, of...
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Susan posted this a few days ago , and I just thought it made sense to give it some more attention. SMB Message Signing is one of, if not the most, problematic security setting in Windows. It is commonly used to defeat man-in-the-middle attacks, but getting the settings to match on clients and servers...