Did you know that your Windows computers store and send weak password hashes which are very easy to crack? Even if you run legacy operating systems, there are methods that you can implement that will protect against these weak authentication protocols and password hashes being generated.
Spyware has reached epidemic proportions and is only getting worse. I have seen recent statistics indicating that approximately 95% of the world’s PCs are infected with spyware. Unfortunately, removal techniques that worked just a couple of months ago are no longer effective in many cases and new types of spyware being released are more advanced than most computer viruses. In this article, I will discuss why the spyware problem has gotten so out of hand and more importantly, what you can do about it.
Spam and e-mail-laden viruses can take a lot of the fun and utility out of electronic communications, but at least you can trust e-mail that comes from people you know – except when you can’t. A favorite technique of spammers and other “bad guys” is to “spoof” their return e-mail addresses, making it look as if the mail came from someone else. In effect, this is a form of identity theft, as the sender pretends to be someone else in order to persuade the recipient to do something (from simply opening the message to sending money or revealing personal information). In this article, we look at how e-mail spoofing works and what can be done about it, examining such solutions as the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Microsoft’s Sender ID, which is based on it.
Public Key Infrastructure, aka PKI, vaunted as the solution for addressing the network security issues in the cyberspace using cryptographic techniques. This article discusses about how the PKI attempts to address network security threats and issues associated with the PKI.
This article looks at the different ways you can customize Windows Firewall when deploying Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. The methods covered include manually configuring Windows Firewall, customizing the Unattend.txt answer file used by unattended setup, customizing the Netfw.inf file that defines the default configuration of Windows Firewall, configuring Windows Firewall using the new firewall context of the netsh command in XP SP2, and configuring Windows Firewall using new Group Policy settings in Windows XP SP2.
Microsoft has recently released an updated version of the Windows XP Security Guide (version 2.0) that includes information on XP with Service Pack 2 installed. It is a very comprehensive document that should be a part of the security arsenal of every network administrator who has Windows XP clients on the network. In this article, we’ll provide a review of the new Guide and point out which parts are most useful to administrators.
A security template contains hundreds of possible settings that can control a single or multiple computers. The security templates can control areas such as user rights, permissions, and password policies. Security templates can be deployed centrally using Group Policy objects (GPOs). Finally, security templates can be customized to include almost any security setting on a target computer.
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