Did you know - A famous Computer company was formed by Two Housewives

Late 70s - Vector Graphic (rings a bell ???)

One thing sad is that the management did not listen to the design engineer, 


From the Article:

Lore Harp and Carole Ely started Vector with $6,000 in capital.

In April 1977, when the Vector 1 and Apple II both launched at the West Coast Computer Faire.



More info here:
http://www.fastcompany.com/3047428/how-two-bored-1970s-housewives-helped-create-the-pc-industry

I did not know this - Windows "Disk Cleanup" now includes option to remove outdated Windows Update

IMPORTANT:
Search for "disk cleaner" and make sure you choose "run as administrator"


Something new to learn everyday.

Some use "cccleaner" but this one is part of the OS and gets an nice upgrade



Details on How to do it:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2013/10/07/breaking-news-reduce-the-size-of-the-winsxs-directory-and-free-up-disk-space-with-a-new-update-for-windows-7-sp1-clients.aspx

Screen Recording tool in Windows 10

Nice to know

Hit the Windows key and G, and a popup will appear asking if you would like to open Game bar -- there are no Yes and No buttons, but check the 'Yes, this is a game' box (you will have to do this the first time you access the screen recorder in any application).

For More info:
http://betanews.com/2015/07/19/windows-10-secret-screen-recording-tool/

Workaround for a Critical Vulnerability in Windows -CVE-2015-2426

OpenType Font Driver Vulnerability - CVE-2015-2426
A remote code execution vulnerability exists in Microsoft Windows when the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library improperly handles specially crafted OpenType fonts. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of the affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.


Mitigating Factors
Microsoft has not identified any mitigating factors for this vulnerability.



Workarounds
The following workarounds may be helpful in your situation:


Follow this link to implement the workaround:
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/MS15-078

How-To: Use Autoruns and Sigcheck with VirusTotal

We know SysInternals has a wonderful set of free tools.

The following two links show how to use two of them along with VirusTotal 

Autoruns:

Shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and when you start various built-in Windows applications like Internet Explorer, Explorer and media players. These programs and drivers include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. 

Sigcheck:

Shows file version number, timestamp information, and digital signature details, including certificate chains

How-To links from SANS:

https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Autoruns+and+VirusTotal/19933

https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Sigcheck+and+VirusTotal/19935

Shared credentials - The Inconvenient Truth

"Credential Sharing" is one thing that really scares IT Security folks.

Even though privilege account monitoring has been around for some time, it has not been widely adopted.

Hopefully, Multi-factor authentication should provide some solace.

From the article 

1. Conducted among 200 of these (IT) decision-makers, the survey found that 52 percent of US-based IT employees  shared credentials with contractors.
2. 74 percent of those surveyed in the US reported that their organization needed to do a better job monitoring who is accessing data.
3. 62 percent believe their organization has too many privileged users

For more info:

http://www.darkreading.com/operations/identity-and-access-management/shared-passwords-and-no-accountability-plague-privileged-account-use/d/d-id/1321306

Free tool to keep up with the everlasting patch cycles (for home users)

We have seen non-stop release of Adobe Patches . Now, we have Microsoft and Oracle releasing patches.


How do we keep up with them.

I use a free software called "PatchMyPC.exe" .
The good news is that this is a stand-alone EXE and it does a decent job.

This tool allows software that can be exempted from Patching.

I normally exclude Chrome, Firefox and Malwarebytes (as they can be updated from within the App).

It is not a perfect solution but it can list a range of products for which patch is available and will patch them for you.

One downside is that it sometimes downloads the entire package and re-installs (instead of just the updates)


I generally run this every alternate day just to know, what tools have new updates/patches


Give it a shot.




You can get it from:
https://patchmypc.net/download