In the last 24 hours, two announcements slipped under the covers by Microsoft show that Microsoft really are not interested in partners at all. These announcements apply to both the Action Pack subscription, as well as the Silver and Gold reseller levels. All of these programs come with a yearly fee – some of them the fee is in the multiple thousands of … [Read more...]
If you have RDP open, you will be hacked–close the door now!
Many users offer remote access to their office for staff via permitting them to connect directly to the server over the RDP protocol via a port forward on port 3389 direct to a server or workstation. This is a major open door for which hackers can try brute force attacks on your systems and cause not only potential breach of your systems but also stability issues while they … [Read more...]
SBS 2008 and SBS 2011 and MS16-072–The Solution
After posting earlier this week about MS16-072, I’ve done quite a bit of investigation and sought advice from fellow MVPs (Jeremy Moskowitz and Darren Mar-Elia) who focus on Group Policy. Jeremy has a good post here that he’s done a lot more explanation on this change. With respect specifically to SBS 2008 and SBS 2011 however, I’ve found that we can run Jeremy’s script but … [Read more...]
Group Policy not working on SBS 2008, SBS 2011 and Windows Server 2008/2008R2 since MS16-072
Further to the blog post I put up yesterday, I’ve now done additional testing and found that the script referenced in the article here is not quite right. Also – I’ve found that there is some specific problems with this on SBS 2011 and likely SBS 2008 as well. Firstly, the script – It turns out there are different PowerShell commands for GP Permissions in 2008/2008R2 vs … [Read more...]
Microsoft Update MS16-072 breaks Group Policy Application in some environments
Microsoft last week released security update bulletin MS 16-072. This upgrade seeks to improve security with Group Policy implementations, however due to the way it works, it actually can break the application of GPO in certain environments. Environments such as SBS 2003 R2, SBS 2008 and SBS 2011 are subject to this problem. The result would be that if … [Read more...]