The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has published new documents on Microsoft Windows 10 and how to secure it. I looked at the BSI security recommendations for Windows 10 before I wanted to report on them. The background to this is that in the past, publications in this direction were sometimes more than outdated when they were published or they were very superficial.
PowerShell
Intune packaging made simple
I like to work with installation wrappers for packaging. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (MECM) or the Microsoft Deploment Tollkit (MDT), I have also used them for Microsoft Intune packaging.
Software management with Chocolatey
This time it is about a so-called “freemium” software management solution. Feemium is made up of the two words “Free” and “Premium” and means that the software can be used free of charge, but certain functions cost extra. With mobile apps, this also means banner ads and annoying video commercials, but that is not the case here. This article is exclusively about the free version.
A new home for the downloads
After my download solution annoyed me a few times, I outsourced the download. The new home for the downloads is GitHub. This also makes it easier for me to maintain and update.
“Domain Controller Enforcement mode” will be activated as of 9 February 2021
With the security update of 11 August 2020, Microsoft has addressed a security vulnerability (CVE-2020-1472). This has not yet been closed automatically, as compatibility problems may occur. How to close the vulnerability beforehand is explained in KB article 455722.
Update, maintain and use Windows Image Files (WIM)
Since I’m very busy with deployment and rollouts, I thought I’d write a few basic articles that I could refer to. This sometimes saves you some time in workshops for the more interesting things or gives administrators incentives to automate things.
Creating Users Easily with PowerShell
As most people know, I like to make my life easy at work. That doesn’t mean I’m afraid of work, I just like to automate or simplify it where I can. I like to use PowerShell for this.
Another reason besides the convenience or lack of time why you should solve tasks through scripts is a consistent level of quality. Let’s face it, who doesn’t know this, even if there are checklists, you might forget one step when you get distracted.
Properly secure and document group policies
It’s been some time since I started working on the first basic version of the script in August 2014, and posted about it on CONET’s blog. This first version came to just 6 lines of code without the header. Since then a lot has happened and the script has grown in the TechNet Gallery. Time for a new article about the script and its function.
Windows WinRM over HTTPs
Windows Remote Management is no longer a way to think in today’s world. But why do we do it unencrypted? Normally the authentication is done by Kerberos. That’s secure enough for most people. However, Kerberos also has limitations, for example when using local accounts.
In the standard system, communication is via HTTP via TCP port 5985. Why not HTTPS? This is possible, the port TCP 5986 is intended for this. Unfortunately, this is not only missing in the firewall rule templates but also has a few barriers still in the way. We take care of these barriers today.
New version of get-GPOBackup
It has once again reached me a feature desire, and here is the implementation. With version 1.58 the group policy templates can be saved from the central store. This is especially good when importing new templates that may be buggy. This even happens to Microsoft with the German translations for Windows 10 times quite often. If you don’t know the script yet, I recommend having a look at the article: “Gruppenrichtlinien richtig sichern und dokumentieren“.
