Just noticed this as I was looking for a solution for a different WSUS problem and thought I would share this here as well.  http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/ScriptCenter/en-us/90ca6976-d441-4a10-89b0-30a7103d55db Apparently a “Thomas Schlacter...

Not sure if anyone saw this bit of news recently where a report put out by ScanSafe indicates that PDF’s accounted for 80% of exploits in the 4th quarter of 2009 .  I support both FCS our antivirus product and I also do Incident Response work. ...

Counting and sorting by unique text in the strings section: As a follow on to a previous article http://blogs.technet.com/kfalde/archive/2009/01/28/using-logparser-eventcomb-to-find-malware.aspx I found some other useful queries that I figured I would...

Realistically this process should work for other AV clients as well but I’m doing it in the context of the one I support.  Although it isn’t extremely common we do run into scenarios where customer has issues with the FCS client taking up large amounts...

Working an interesting case at the moment where we have multiple files across servers that were infected and we are needing to generate a list of all the files that were infected on each server. So the first thing to realize is that the 1006 and 3004...

It is currently MS’s giving campaign where we promote philanthropicness :).  A coworker sent this out to our internal blogger alias along with some others from this site that various MS MVP’s and internal employees worth with asking if we could post...

So lately we keep seeing variants of malware that modifies content on file servers in an environment in hopes of spreading to other users.  My guess is that it is just using mapped drive letters thinking they are USB keys but the effects is the same...

I’m not a treehugger but I can definitely see the $$ with power savings. Having said that I had a customer recently that wanted his computers to wake up from sleep in order to do their scheduled scans for FCS. At first I was like nope not possible we...

With a recent case I have an issue where the client count of managed computers in MOM admin console was quite different then that in the FCS console so I was trying to find out exactly which computers were not in FCS so I could troubleshoot some of those...

Nothing profound with this post just detailing out a step I typically recommend to most of our new customers with regards to making life easier when viewing updates in WSUS.  In order to make your life easier viewing FCS inside of WSUS I typically...

I already did one post about using eventcomb/logparser to look for clients but found a better way to do it on a case last night which I wanted to share.  The first thing you need is to enable netlogon debug logging on all of your DC’s save the following...

This is a follow up post to my previous FCS definitions post.  The first one focused on the mpam-fe files and what is contained that you can find on the security portal at www.microsoft.com/security/portal .  This one instead focuses on what...

EDIT 4/27/09: THIS NO LONGER WORKS WITH NEW VARIANTS OF CONFICKER HOWEVER THE CONCEPT IS STILL SOUND IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR SYSTEMS THAT ARE QUERYING FOR SPECIFIC DNS NAMES.   I’ve already created one post on finding malware systems using eventcomb...

A fairly frequent question we get is how do FCS definitions work. How do I find just the delta’s for the month etc. You can always manually download the latest definitions from http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal with the links on the right. This...

During the course of these Conficker / Downadup issues we typically see cases that started because accounts are getting locked out.  I pause briefly here to point out that account lockouts are the work of the devil and are a sorry excuse for most...

Another Conficker post :) however this one is aimed at our FCS customers. It semi-applies to other customers however other AV vendors operated differently with regards to updates etc so this won’t necessarily be applicable to all. So today is Patch...

So in my last post I mentioned the fact that Conficker/Downad whatever can also have a component that will spread through file shares that allow everyone to write at the root level of the file share. So a typical autorun.inf looks something like this...

So for the past 2 weeks now we are absolutely getting hammered with calls in CSS Security here at MS with organizations contracting this piece of malware. You can find write-ups from various AV companies at the following URL’s http://www.ca.com...

This doesn’t really affect the FCS world but it is an interesting development. https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/Nov08/11-18AmyBarzdukasQandA.mspx apparently we are going to begin to offer a no-cost anti-malware solution in 2nd half of...

I’m not really advocating using this and I can’t take credit for this as it was posted on the FCS forums by a “ lofty10 ”. However I do know that many people are looking for something like this to manage FCS clients that do not have an FCS server infrastructure...

The default option for scheduled scans in FCS is kind of sparse currently and it's something we get requests about so I'm posting a possible workaround to get more scheduled scans. Below is the shot of the FCS policy setting.. you can either pick "every...

So you've seen the following options with your FCS settings and are wondering how do these work??? Malware Scanning "Run a Quick Scan at set interval (hours):" Security state assessment "Scan at set interval (hours):" Malware Definition...

Just found this posting on the SCE forums regarding integration of SCE and FCS: http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1797488&SiteID=17 is the link, The text is below from the forum posting: Question 16: Can I use Essentials...

By default WSUS does not clean up anything in an automated manner.  This is not normally too much of an issue for a system with plenty of drive space and a system that does not do definitions.  However with FCS thrown into the environment WSUS...

So Forefront Client Security SP1 is out now. To download it go to the Microsoft Update Catalog http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/home.aspx and search for "Forefront Client Security SP1" this will allow you to download it. Here is the KB http...