IT Pro Tuesday #174

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

To start off, we'd like to take a moment to spread the word about our own free tool that lets you see how many threats get through to your organization on M365—so you can proactively prevent users from being tricked. 365 Threat Monitor detects any threats that breach your Microsoft 365 security and sends a phone alert. Then you can delete it with a click and prevent any damage! The app was developed by Hornetsecurity—the people behind IT Pro Tuesday—a provider of premium email security services to 40,000+ customers worldwide. This forever-free app allows a limited number of deletions, and setup takes seconds.

Next, we're looking for your favorite tips and 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.

And as always, we’re updating the full 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 Tutorial

How to Export Office 365 Mailbox to PST using PowerShell Commands explains how to quickly export user mailboxes from Office 365 to PST format via PowerShell command and an automated tool, thus working around the inefficiencies of Outlook's built-in options. Our thanks for directing us to this one go to Aronacus.

A Free Tool

CVE Details provides an intuitive, browsable web interface for CVE vulnerability data from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) xml feeds provided by NIST as well as other sources like www.exploit-db.com and vendor-supplied data. You can view statistics about vendors, products and versions of products, with results displayed in a single-page view of the statistics. Kindly suggested by PaleMaleAndStale.

A Tip

Some sage advice, compliments of h0ll0wc: "For organizations out there that make their users change their passwords quarterly, it is highly likely that they are using something like: ‘Spring2021!’, ‘Summer2021!’, etc. Implementing a mechanism to make sure your users cannot do this is important. For orgs that use Azure AD, there is a tool called Password Protection that can do this for you. I believe it can run in audit mode or block mode.

While Microsoft has their own list of compromised passwords you can use, you can also set up custom lists with passwords specific to your organization like ‘Companyname123!’. There is also Daniel Miessler's SecLists that you can pull custom password lists from."

Another Tutorial

Manage Windows 10 default file type associations with SetUserFTA is the answer to the sometimes frustrating defaults that are set in Windows 10. It explains how you can quickly use this tool to manage those associations in bulk for all your users with a single command.  Our thanks for directing us to this tool go to isitokifitake and caeptn2te.

A Script

WSUS Optimization Script is a comprehensive Windows Server Update Services cleanup, optimization, maintenance and configuration PowerShell script. HanSolo71 explains, "One of the big things you can do to help WSUS run well is optimize settings, DB configurations and the indexes. Of course Microsoft tells you how to do this but doesn't have a readily built script, and the inbuilt PS commands sometimes still fail.… I didn't write this, but damn does this community need this."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Meld is a visual diff and merge tool that makes it easy to compare files, directories and version-controlled projects so you can review code changes and understand patches and merges. Offers two- and three-way comparison of both files and directories, with support for lots of popular version-control systems. Our appreciation for this one goes to Forgery.

Google DNS Flush Tool allows you to refresh the Google Public DNS cache for common record types and most domain names. forkworm appreciated it while "chasing down why NS records were taking longer than anticipated to propagate onto Google's public DNS. This worked extremely well, [so I] figured I would share!" And error404 directs us to the equivalent resources for Cloudflare and OpenDNS/Umbrella.

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