IT Pro Tuesday #191

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

What led Microsoft to discontinue future releases of the free Hyper-V Server SKU of Windows Server? Our podcast with 'Mr Hyper-V' Ben Armstrong on Hyper-V feature updates was very insightful! It's a SysAdmin DOJO podcast you won't want to miss! Watch/listen on The SysAdmin DOJO Podcast.

We're looking for cool tips and tools we can share with the community... those that help you do your job better and more easily. Please reply with your latest finds, so we can help others benefit from your experience.

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 Free Tool

Jitsi is an open-source Zoom alternative that allows you to create highly secure videoconferencing solutions. The main project gives you the tools for web-based videoconferencing, and community add-ons facilitate audio, dial-in, recording and simulcasting. mikeboucher21 adds, "I think Jitsi is the best on privacy. You can make it 100% P2P."

Security Guide

Network Infrastructure Security Guidance is intended to establish the best practices for overall network security that will prevent cybercriminals from exploiting a network. randomdood81 describes it as "a new report that gives all organizations the most-current advice on how to protect their IT network infrastructures from cyberattacks."

Another Free Tool

Cloudimized is a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) configuration scanning tool that allows you to monitor changes to selected resources. Essentially a cloud version of Oxidized, it executes periodic scans of GCP resources via API calls and dumps them into yaml files, so you can track information on every configuration change. Author FINpacket explains, "As [our] company started using GCP, we as a Network team needed to have visibility on changes that happen on network-related configurations."

One More Free Tool

Mandiant Azure AD Investigator is a PowerShell module designed to detect "high-fidelity" and "dual-use" artifacts that can indicate UNC2452 and other threat activity. Provides a foundation for analysis and verification that can determine if there is a compromise under way. Our thanks for the suggestion go to PhilipG.

A Tip

A simple, handy keyboard shortcut, compliments of GoobyFRS: "F5 in Notepad prints a timestamp.”

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

CRT (CrowdStrike Reporting Tool for Azure) is an open-source tool to easily review permissions in Azure AD environments. Designed to help determine configuration weaknesses and provide advice to mitigate the risk associated with excessive permissions in your AD environment.

Windows Package Manager 1.1 is a command-line tool for discovery, installation, upgrade and application removal/configuration on Windows 10 and 11 computers. PhilipG explains, "The tldr is as an admin, one of the ways I used to quickly set up laptops with mass installing software was using Chocolatey… MS came out with their own last year and I’ve been playing around with it a bit since, and it's actually decent—plus it's official MS (and now supports Windows apps cos everyone loves those.)"

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