Operation Monster Smash against RCE security vulnerability – Part 2
Included in this month’s Microsoft monthly software update releases are fixes for a critical Remote Code Execution vulnerability, CVE-2019-0708, in…
Operation Monster Smash Against The Pre-Auth RDP Bug (Bluekeep) – Part 1
Got Some Critical News to Share… The Situation: Yesterday (May 14), Microsoft issued a global warning about a monster computer…
Environmental Deployment and Secure Configuration with Release Manager 3.0
Using Visual Studio Team Service’s automated build system empowers projects with simplified and powerful automation for build, test, and deploying projects in the cloud. However, before the introduction of the Release Manager features, it was difficult to manage releases, as packages and projects often validated code branches for release or promotion, instead of binary packages.…
Migration of Azure ASM VM to ARM using PowerShell in 5 steps
As you know, Microsoft is recommending the newer Azure Resource Manager (ARM) as the default environment for Azure. Many of us have deployed Virtual Machines (VMs) in the older Azure Service Manager (ASM) model. And now we are looking at how to get your Azure ASM VMs into the new ARM world for access to…
The Cloud Whisperers Episode 1 – Third Party Integreated App Ransomware Exploit
I blogged about this recently (here), but our first episode of The Cloud Whisperers is up and you can hear Brian and I talk in more depth about the issue and how to address it. https://soundcloud.com/user-319841705 Follow us on SoundCloud and follow our new twitter handle @CloudWhisperers
Should you upgrade your SharePoint Intranet
Recently I saw a good article making that case that now is the time to upgrade your SharePoint. One of the primary things that the article identifies is that the nature of the Intranet that a company creates and then essentially ignores for years until the next version of SharePoint intranet was released is behind…
Enable and Integrate Intel Active Management Technology with AD and ConfigMgr
Sometimes, as ConfigMgr admins we need more than just the built in tools provided out of the box. Specifically, the tools used for remote administration tasks such as modifying the BIOS options, checking boot order, remote re-image using PXE, remote recovery, etc. Within ConfigMgr, that has historically been the Out of Band Management role (OOBM). With…
Techniques to make Azure Monitor alerts from Log Analytics more useful: Creating custom alerts with Azure Automation
In the first blog post of this series we showed how you can make your alerts more useful by cleaning up the underlying query (which provides a quick way to include only what is relevant in the alert). In this blog post we will show how to use the power of Azure Automation to customize…
The Caveats of ConfigMgr Collection Refresh
Collections. They’re one of the base components of a Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr for short) environment and they can be the key to making or breaking[1] [2] it. In my travels, I’ve seen collections for specific functions (e.g. power settings, deployments, client settings, etc.), collections for logical grouping (OS version, server vs. workstation, etc.),…
Office 365, Retention Policies, and Deleted Users
With the creation of O365 scoped Retention Policies its important to understand how policies that “Retain” data actually work.