stuart test blog

This is a quick rant about some common annoyances I come across on websites… SnapShots – these are those annoying JavaScript popup windows which appear when you hover your mouse over a link. In theory they are supposed to help you by proving a thumbnail screenshot of the site being linked to, but in practice […]

Flickr unveiled a new feature recently that enables you to search through your address books in various email systems to find contacts that are also on Flickr. If you’ve used one of the many social networking sites, you’ll realise that this isn’t a new feature – most other social networking sites allow you to search […]

On the TV1 Breakfast show this morning, Paul Henry was interviewing Peter Griffin about security software for home computers. In my previous field engineer roles, and my current role as "IT guy" for my extended family, I’ve got a lot of experience setting up and securing home computers as well as small business computers (ones […]

[tags]security,passwords,hacking,cracking,microsoft,complex,best-practices[/tags] As a follow-up to the secure USB drive post, I wanted to give some pointers on how to create secure, complex passwords. Complexity… In a Microsoft environment, a complex password must be at least six characters long, cannot contain three or more letters from the user’s username, and must contain characters from at least […]

A quick step-by-step tutorial on how I secure my 4GB USB drive: Create the file… Download TrueCrypt from here: http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads.php Unzip the download, but don’t install it. Browse to the “Setup Files” directory. Run “TrueCrypt.exe” and click the “Create Volume” button to start the wizard. Choose the “Create a standard TrueCrypt volume” option. Click the “Select […]

Jeff Jones (Strategy Director in the Microsoft Security Technology Unit) has written a post about Server Core and how its reduced footprint increases security dramatically. The key here is “reduced attack surface area” as all of the most insecure areas of a server have been removed, such as IIS, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, etc… […]

This has just been released but I haven’t had a chance to look at it properly yet. Will write more once I have a better understanding of it. Citrix Desktop Server New Citrix Desktop Server revolutionizes desktop delivery and management Managing and securing the Windows Desktop OS is a significant and growing challenge for most […]