Microsoft.com Operations Team Blog

Scareware, a type of malware that mimics antimalware software, has been around for a decade and shows no sign of going away. The goal of scareware is to fool a user into thinking that their computer is heavily infected with malware and the most convenient...(read more)

We have a new document in our technet library. The Core Network Companion Guide has a section specifically about Group Policy Deployment. Check it out! Or just take a look at James McIllece’s blog post summarizing the deployment guide companion.

In the recent months, we have seen more and more targeted attacks towards our customers. A lot of them use a technique called Pass the Hash. This made us publishing a paper, which explains Pass the Hash but much more important shows some fairly simple to implement mitigations against this type of attack. As they are fairly prevalent currently, I would urge you reading through the paper and implement the mitigations:

This blog post is written by Judith, our technical writer, and based on an old blog post by Jeffrey Snover. (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2007/01/11/sorting-out-groupby.aspx) Jeffrey wrote a piece that showed how to sort system services with the Format-Table (ft) cmdlet and the –GroupBy parameter.

ZoomIt v4.41: This update fixes a bug in ZoomIt v4.4 that prevented it from running on 32-bit Windows XP.

DebugView v4.81: Version 4.81 of DebugView, a utility that logs user and kernel-mode
debug output messages,  fixes a bug that could cause it on some executions
to fail to capture debug output and enter a CPU-bound loop.

You may be asking yourself, “What does infrastructure status have to do with Group Policy”. Well, group policy depends on other technologies to ensure that policy settings are replicated throughout your environment so that end users / computers will get the settings that you configure.

Another change we made in Windows Server 2012 is in the Resultant Set of Policy reports. In previous versions of Server, you had to look at the results report, and the event log, and the tracing logs to find all the information you needed about why policy did or did not apply. Now, we’ve consolidated most of that information right into the results report to make troubleshooting Group Policy easier.