IT Pro Tuesday #148

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

Ransomware remains the cybercriminal’s favorite means of squeezing money from victims, and there are good business reasons why. Check out this article to learn more about the history of ransomware and what's driving its latest evolutions.

This week, we're asking for your favorite tools we can share with the community... those that help you do your job better and more easily. Please reply or leave a comment with your suggestions, and we'll be featuring them in the coming weeks.

As always, we’re updating the full, searchable list on our website here. Enjoy.

But on with this week's tools...! Here are the most-interesting items that have come across our desks, laptops and phones this week. Hornetsecurity has no known affiliation with any of these unless we explicitly state otherwise.

A Free Tool

Everything Toolbar is the easy-access interface you've been craving for Everything that enables you to quickly search for files, folders and more right from the Windows taskbar. Our thanks for this suggestion go to hectornuss.

A Tutorial

20 CIS Controls & Resources offers detailed explanations of key controls you'll want to address in your security planning. rujopt finds this resource from Center for Internet Security "useful to help get understanding and prioritization of critical security controls to focus on implementing or building up."

A Free eBook

Office 365/Microsoft 365 – The Essential Companion Guide covers everything from basic descriptions to installation, migration, use-cases and best practices for all features within the Office/Microsoft 365 suite. This 100+ page second-edition eBook, written for Altaro by Microsoft Certified Trainer Paul Schnackenburg, is the perfect desktop reference guide for current and aspiring Office/Microsoft 365 admins.

A Website

MITRE ATT&CK Navigator is a simple, open-source web app that provides basic navigation and annotation of the ATT&CK for Enterprise, ATT&CK for Mobile and PRE-ATT&CK matrices. It allows you to manipulate the cells in the matrix by color coding, adding a comment, assigning a numerical value and more. For those who appreciate MITRE ATT&CK, lucasni recommends adding this one to the toolbox.

A Tutorial

Red Team Blues: A 10 step security program for Windows Active Directory environments provides a nice set of steps you can take to make it dramatically more difficult for attackers to create an opening that allows them to move inside your Active Directory environment. Flashy-Dragonfly6785 describes it as a "condensed primer [on AD].”

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Observium Community is a low-maintenance, auto-discovering network monitoring platform that supports a wide range of device types, platforms and operating systems. It offers a powerful, intuitive interface for assessing the health and status of your network so you can proactively respond to more issues before they affect your services. Automatically collects and displays information on services and protocols and provides long-term metric collection and intuitive visual representations of collected performance data. Kindly suggested by meshinery.

Samplicator is a simple tool for receiving UDP datagrams on a given port and resending them to a specified set of receivers for occasions when you need to export NetFlow traffic to more than one NetFlow collector. Can also be configured to individually specify a sampling divisor N for each receiver that will only receive one in N of the received packets. crankynetadmin adds, "It's normally used for replicating netflow data, but can also replicate any UDP traffic."

Have a fantastic week and as usual, let us know any comments.