IT Pro Tuesday #216

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

Email continues to be the primary method of communication for business today, so it's no wonder threat actors target email to get a foothold inside organizations. This week's Sysadmin DOJO podcast with security expert Gil Blumberg focuses on email vulnerabilities in M365. We discuss some surprising findings from our recent survey on cybersecurity and M365 and what you can do to protect your organization.

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.

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

A Free Tool

GSmartControl is a GUI for the smartctl query and control tool for interacting with SMART drive data. The simple interface allows you to inspect a drive's SMART data as well as running a number of useful tests to assess drive capability. throwawayskinlessbro says he "couldn't get by without [it]."

A Tutorial

Learn how Google Search organizes the world's information is an explanation of the tech giant's current approach to finding and suggesting relevant content. It's a quick read to understand the various elements Google considers when it visits a page and how they are screened, so you can better position your organization's websites to be properly indexed by their crawlers.

Another Free Tool

SNMP Simulator is an open-source, pure Python tool for executing the SNMP agents simulator. hombre_sabio explains, it "collects data from network traffic and tcdump snoops. It also stores snapshots collected from agents for future simulation. It is a pure Python solution that is easy to deploy and is highly portable."

One More Free Tool

Krita is an open-source graphics program with a clean, intuitive interface and pro-grade features. This powerful painting application can be useful in creating or manipulating images for documentation,  presentations or other visual tasks. Thecrawsome appreciates it as a good "Photoshop substitute/multiplatform."

A Tip

Some sound advice from SWEETJUICYWALRUS for occasions when you need to ask for help from a more-experienced colleague: “[I write] a 'here's the situation' email [with] exactly what's happening… what's broken and how, [plus] everything I have tried… I'm trying to make it look like I'm not incompetent and that I tried all the basics and the obvious things a senior tech would ask you to try. 90% of the time I don't even send the email because… I catch something I missed before. However, if I still havent figured it out, then my senior would have an excellent write up of everything and be able to solve it faster in turn. Lastly, always ALWAYS follow up with the senior after they solve it and ask them how they came to the conclusion, not just for the fix itself. What logs did you check? how did you know to check this seeming unrelated service? What terms did you google?"

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Resource Hacker is a resource editor for 32- and 64-bit Windows applications. Enables viewing and editing of resources in executables and compiled resource libraries, with both GUI and CLI options. Szeraax explains, "It's niche, but for those times that you need to directly get into an exe or a dll to pull strings or icons (and optionally edit them and save the executable)."

RPort is an open-source tool for remote management on Windows and Linux. This self-hosted option provides simple, intuitive inventory management, script execution, remote access and more. Coriron recommends it "for accessing devices on a network remotely."

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