Month: April 2015

SysAdmin Magazine May: Cornerstones of Windows Server Security

If you consider Windows Server to be secure by default, you might be making a big mistake. It is very important – if not crucial – to go an extra mile and establish a customized security policy that will protect the organization from losing sensitive information. You might consider appropriately restricting access to critical systems … Continued

Advanced Event Log Filtering Using PowerShell

In a previous blog post, Monitoring Event Logs with PowerShell, I showed you how to use Get-WinEvent to perform basic event log monitoring using PowerShell. In this article, I want to demonstrate how Get-WinEvent can be used to run more complex queries using the –FilterHashtable parameter. Let’s start by returning the last 50 events in … Continued

Netwrix State of IT Changes Survey 2015: Documenting and Auditing

How do most organizations handle the impact of changes made and what methods do they use to maintain security and system availability? Netwrix 2015 State of IT Changes Survey, the research of more than 700 IT professionals across over 40 industries, reveals its unsettling results. Nearly 70% of organizations continue to make undocumented changes and … Continued

Nine Steps to a Better Password Management

Passwords remind me a bit of the Coyote. Not the one that chases the Road Runner, but the one that lives in my native South-West and howls at the moon. No matter how hard humans have tried to get rid of it, it hangs in there, and in most cases, even manages to gain ground … Continued

Fighting Vulnerabilities: Microsoft Security Bulletin, March 2015

Microsoft has released a number of critical security patches for various vulnerabilities. Let’s try to clarify some important updates of security-related software. Most of these flaws belong to Internet Explorer with others found in Microsoft Office programs. One of the updates is ‘Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (3032359)’, which helps fixing vulnerabilities in the … Continued

Monitoring Event Logs with PowerShell

A routine sysadmin task that PowerShell lends itself to is parsing data and text files, and the Windows event logs use XML formatted information that can be easily parsed using the Get-EventLog and Get-WinEvent PowerShell cmdlets. In this article I’m going to show you how to get started using PowerShell to parse the event logs, … Continued