Confessions of a Microsoft Consultant : Tool

Anti-Virus Software, That's Free!

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:27:00 GMT

I am probably the last Microsoft blogger to actually get round to writing something about this… but hey, I have been busy!

Microsoft recently released to the public their free anti-virus solution, Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). I had been trialling the beta versions for a few months on a Windows 7 computer and I was really pleased with it, so the fact that it has now been released as a final product is great! Bizarrely, it even got the stamp of approval from my Anti-MS brother who told me that it consumes much less CPU and memory on his computer, and he has now gotten rid of his McAfee software completely (even though his paid for subscription has not expired). Of course, then he finished the sentence with the usual “but it is from Microsoft so is bound to be full of security holes” nonsense he actually believes.

The virus signature updates are automatically downloaded via the Windows Update service, so it is important that you have this feature enabled. MSE is available in 32 or 64 bit and will run on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, so go get it now! There really is no excuse not to run an antivirus product on all your computers, especially because it is completely free – you just need to have a genuine license of Windows in order to be able to install it… :-)

The download and more information is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

Safely setting autologon for Windows

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:16:57 GMT

When configuring Microsoft Windows to auto-logon, most people just modify the following keys in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\AutoAdminLogon
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\DefaultUserName
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\DefaultPassword
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\DefaultDomain

However, the problem with doing it that way is that the password for the user account is stored in the registry as unencrypted text, which means that anyone with enough rights to view the registry, be it locally or remotely, can view the password easily and potentially compromise the system. This also applies if the computer was infected with a virus or malware, which could also potentially read the configured auto-logon user credentials and then send them over the internet for future malicious use.

However, if you use the Sysinternals tool AutoLogons to configure the auto-logon then the password string value is stored encrypted in the registry as an LSA secret. Which means that, once the autologon is configured, the unencrypted version of the password used cannot be viewed by anyone/anything at all.

The tool couldn’t be simpler to use, and most importantly, it helps to maintain the security of your systems.