I’m sure you’re probably tired of the bombardment of Info-Sec (Information Technology Security) articles and posts telling you that you need something more to fight lateral movement. Do this, do that, buy this, trial that, use this freeware. It is exhausting if you are an IT Pro trying to do the best thing without impacting your budget or users too much. Ransomware and other exploits target lateral movement as a way to get to the privileged accounts on your network. I am not going to list changes that have a big impact on your users like removing local admin rights. You should never allow users to have local admin rights in any production environment and, if you are allowing it, you’re going to spend a lot of time implementing the removal of those rights. Passwords should be long and complex and if you aren’t protecting your log in accounts with lock out policies then you have bigger problems than Ransomware. Patching shouldn’t be talked about because patching isn’t negotiable any more. Do it and don’t ask questions. You shouldn’t be more than 30 days (14 days is better) behind in patching and you should be patching ALL of your third party software in that time frame as well. Instead, I will be talking about things that IT Pros can do that cost very little or nothing at all and have little impact on your users. Most of this will consist of minor configuration changes in Microsoft software including Windows and Office as well as other infrastructure changes related to networking that can yield decent protection rewards. So let’s get to it.
How To:Upload Email to Office 365 Mailboxes
Cloud migrations can be painful. Part of the pain with migrating to Office 365 is getting ALL of the company email into the cloud. Active users are typically easy as there are endless methods for migrating active users. But what about companies that have archived and\or offline email? Trying to manage them locally on PCs is cumbersome and risky. Opening them over the local networks is slow and unstable. We need a method to upload PSTs into shared mailboxes where we can easily attach them to other mailboxes using Office 365 memberships. This blog post is how you should upload PST files into Office 365 mailboxes.
How To: Install Office 365 Suite on an RDS server
The process of installing Office 365 on an RDS server is much more complex than just installing from an image or disc. I have done this enough now to have a pretty good process for doing this quickly without any issues. I wanted to share this in an attempt to shortcut the process for all those new Office 365 admins that are not familiar with deploying the suite to an RDS server. I’m sure this process will change as time goes on, (Shocker right?) so feel free to comment when this does not work for you.
Driving IT
“If you’re working on something you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you in.” -Steve Jobs
Exchange 2016 Changes Infographic
*Courtesy of CODETWO
Stay on top of IT
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” –Andy Grove
How To: Diagnose a hard drive issue in Windows 10
PC performance issues can be difficult to diagnose sometimes. In my experience the hard drive is the most common culprit. Now, I am only talking about a hard drive. Not a solid state drive. Solid state drives have a different set of diagnostic tools because of the nature of their inner workings. This blog post is only for those needing to troubleshoot hard disk drive based PC performance issues.
How To: Office 365 bad image error ApiClient.dll 0x000012f
Office 365 suite installs are updated regularly these days and sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes when it goes wrong, it is stuck with a cryptic bad image error involving the ApiClient.dll file. You can’t launch any Office apps. You can’t repair the install. You can’t even uninstall it without getting this error and it crashing. Sit back, relax. Here is how you fix it.
Defend IT
“Defenders have to be right all the time. Attackers only have to be right once” -Unknown
Destroy IT
“I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.” – Stephen Hawking
You must be logged in to post a comment.