January 2007 - Posts

Does Windows Server 2003 Even Need Hardening?
Many people tell me they are surprised with how much effort I put into hardening Windows Server 2003–the last hardening document I wrote for a client was 112 pages long. That’s not 112 pages of writing, policy, and how-to’s, that’s...
Pafwert: Smarter Passwords
Pafwert is an unique free tool to help you to select strong passwords that are easy to remember. Read More...
GoDaddy’s NoDaddy
Fyodor got annoyed enough with his MySpace/GoDaddy incident that he decided to start his own GoDaddy-bashing web site. Although there certainly is not enough time in the world to create web sites to vent our frustrations with every business, the free...
Plagued with Leaky Buckets
A couple years ago I thought a pond would be a nice addition to an empty space on the side of my old house. I didn’t know anything about constructing ponds at the time but I thought that actually doing it would be a good way to learn. After reading...
Dilbert’s Password Recover Service for Morons
See it here. Read More...
Long passwords are strong passwords
I noticed that Schneier wrote a bit on choosing passwords and gets into some detail on how to secure a password based on some of the techniques used to crack passwords. His specific advice is: “…if you want your password to be hard to guess...
Passwords: First Letters
I recently did an analysis of my password list to see which letters users most commonly used as the first password character. To put it into perspective, I also ran the same statistics on a wordlist of 250,000 English words. The results were not quite...
Windows Vista Security Guide
Microsoft has released v1.2 of the Windows Vista Security Guide: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5639874 Read More...
Pointless Permissions
One thing I have always liked about NTFS security is the fine-grained control you have over file permissions. But this power comes at a price—you must understand a whole new world of acronyms, confusing metaphors, and expanded definition of words such...