IT Pro Tuesday #164

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

Did you know that Microsoft 365 allows ransomware threats, phishing messages and spam to enter your users’ mailboxes? Although Microsoft provides email threat protection on M365, it only offers a basic level of security that is not enough. To prevent your users from introducing ransomware and other threats, you need an additional layer of email security.

In case you missed last month’s launch announcement, we’d like to spread the word about 365 Threat Monitor: a new, free tool that will allow you to find out how many threats make it through to your organization on M365 and proactively prevent users from being tricked. It’s called 365 Threat Monitor, and we’re proud to share it with all our friends in the IT Pro Tuesday community!

This forever-free mobile app detects any threats that breach your Microsoft 365 security and sends a phone alert, so you can instantly delete it with just one click and prevent any damage. The app is developed by Hornetsecurity, which provides premium email security services to more than 40,000 customers worldwide.

Hornetsecurity—the people behind IT Pro Tuesday—are offering the first 10,000 M365 IT admins who download the app a forever-free version that allows you to make a limited number of deletions.

Setup takes seconds – Learn more and download the app here.

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

ASCIIFlow is a online tool that allows you to easily design text diagrams you can then export with ASCII Characters. Dvst tells us, "For really basic, dead simple diagramming I like ASCIIFlow.”

A Tip

Rocket5421 shares a shortcut: "You can freeze (hold/pause) Task Manager values by holding Ctrl button. Open task manager -> Go to performance tab -> Hold Ctrl key -> Voila, the values are frozen." And vodafine adds, "Hold down F5 to get 'realtime' stats too."

Another Free Tool

Trinity Rescue Kit is a live Linux distribution for recovery and repair operations on Windows and Linux. Offers command-line control of offline operations like rescue, repair, password resets and disk cloning. Razorray21 adds that it's a "really good bootdisk. Can crack password up to Win8.1. Also has some other good repair tools."

Humor

Tech Support Shorts: The Interview is a highly amusing peek into the life of an IT pro, and it does a bang-up job speaking to the repressed frustrations lurking deep in the souls of most who work in the field. It's the brainchild of Adam Bergeron, a professional writer/actor with 15 years experience in IT, so it's both well-done and pretty accurate.

One More Free Tool

PS Pad is a plain text editor with lots of useful formatting functions, spell check and a web-authoring editor. It catches and parses compiler output, integrates external help files, compares versions and more. MattF tells us "There are lots of text editors on the market, but this one is my favorite [for its] simplicity, the number of filetypes it works with, tools including diff and lorem and the extremely small memory footprint."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

XtreemFS is an open-source, scalable, fault-tolerant distributed file system for all storage needs. This general-purpose storage system covers most storage needs in a single deployment. Requires no special hardware or kernel modules, and can be mounted on Linux, Windows and OS X. Automatically handles all failure modes, including network splits.

netboot.xyz enables you to PXE boot various operating system installers or utilities from a single place in the BIOS without having to retrieve the media to run the tool. A user friendly menu from within the BIOS lets you choose the operating system you want along with any specific types of versions or bootable flags. Blackphidora  explains, "Its a well maintained IPXE repository, used to install Operating systems directly from over the web using the PXE, IPXE and https. Can work for windows as well if your windows disk is mounted and reachable via http."

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