Jithin Alex's Blog, page 3

Microsoft best practices for ransomware protection

Microsoft best practices for ransomware protection

1) Prepare your recovery plan

 
This is the first phase, planning your recovery in the event of a ransomware attack. This will help the organization in limiting the damage and handle the situation efficiently and reduce the monetary loss. Ensure procedure to make accessing and disrupting the systems harder.
 

Identify and categorize your business-critical systems and apply best practices. Ensure that you have a working backup. For this make use of th...

Free Certifications and Training [Feb 2024]

Consolidated list of Active free certifications and training. [Feb 2024]

Course/Certification Link Kubernetes from KubeCampus https://kubecampus.io/ Veeam Product training & Certifications https://www.veeam.com/free-on-demand-trainings.html CC- Certified in Cybersecurity from ISC2 https://www.isc2.org/Certifications/CC EC-Council's Essentials Series from EC-Council https://codered.eccouncil.org/essentials-series-bundle Free Courses from L...

What is the use of Microsoft Learn XP?

You may be wondering if there is are any benefits of accumulating XP points in the Microsoft Learn website. The answer is No and there are options such as redeeming to get Certification vouchers or swags (as of today).  Learn XP is only a representation of your learning progress. 

To access the learn website : https://learn.microsoft.com

[FIX] yt_dlp.utils.DownloadError: ERROR: You have requested merging of multiple formats but ffmpeg is not installed

[ISSUE]

While running your python code : yt_dlp.utils.DownloadError: ERROR: You have requested merging of multiple formats but ffmpeg is not installed

[CAUSE]

Compiler couldn't able to find ffmpeg installed in your system.

[FIX]

Install ffmpeg in your system.

1) Download ffmpeg package from Git or already compiled executable from the official website.

 2) Once downloaded, extract the zip file and place it in your desired location. eg: C:\

 3) Now add the ffmpeg bin directory location in the user envir...

RUST errors due to outdated version | IDE

I haven't used IDE for a while and today, when i opened to do something, it was throwing me multiple errors.

Error 1 : error: Found argument '--filter-platform' which wasn't expected, or isn't valid in this context

The rust-analyzer invokes the command cargo metadata with the flag --filter-platform. This flag was added in Rust 1.41.0. The older versions will give the following error.

C:/.cargo/bin/cargo.exe metadata --verbose --format-version 1 --all-features --filter-platform x86_64-pc-windows-ms...

Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) Core Processes.

 Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) Processes.

1) Service Request Management
Focuses on requests and responses for the IT help-desk items. The processes should be established and uniform. To reduce the workload on agents, organization may consider implementing self service options or chat-bots.
2) Service Catalogs
Generally Service Catalogs is a central location/webpage with all the details for contacting the help-desk. It may also contain the self service options and solutions for com...

Download Microsoft Office 2019 offline installer.

When you do malware analysis of documents or office files, it is important to have Microsoft Office installed in your Lab machine. I am using flare VM and it doesn't comes with MS Office. Since Microsoft is promoting Microsoft 365 over the offline version, finding the offline installer is not that easy.
Here is the list of genuine Microsoft links to download the office .img files.

 Download Microsoft Office 2019 Professional Plus : https://officecdn.microsoft.com/db/492350F6-3A01-4F97-B9C0-C7C6D...

Enhance your privacy on Microsoft Windows.

Windows comes preinstalled with a lot of bloatware, telemetry and unnecessary services enabled. This results in higher resource utilization and less privacy.

This post introduces some free open tools that helps to enhance privacy on windows by disabling unnecessary services and bloatware.

1) Privatezilla
Privatezilla integrates the most critical Windows 10 privacy settings and allows you to quickly perform a privacy check against these settings. Active settings are marked with the status "Configur...

Top 10 Free Infosec Learning resources and platforms.

Consolidated list of  selected top 10 Infosec Learning resources and platforms.

Red Teaming

1) Beginner? Want to learn ethical hacking basics.
The best stepping stone is Practical Ethical Hacking course by TCM on freeCodeCamp's YT. FreeCodeCamp has other free courses related to programming, ethical hacking etc on their YouTube channel. Learn for free.
Link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kq1MIfTWCE

2) Try Hack Me (THM)
Learn and practice your cybersecurity skills such red teaming activities, blue...

[Fix] Windows shuts down automatically without warning?

Recently i encountered a very annoying problem. One of my Windows VM running on Virtualbox. This windows host keep shutting down on regular intervals. Initially i couldn't able to identify whether it is random or happening on fixed time intervals. I went through the settings, change active hours, change advanced startup options and went through the scheduled tasks suspecting something is triggering the reboot. Well, that didn't fix the issue. Then i went through the event viewer, and under Windo...