Windows Server Security

HTTP communications are fine for the average Web server, which just contains informational pages. But if you’re thinking about running an e-commerce site or other Web services that require secure transactions, you need to be able to encrypt communications between your Web server and its clients. The most common means is by the use of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which uses public key cryptography to protect confidential user information (such as credit card or bank account numbers) that is transmitted across the Web. In this article, we’ll discuss how SSL works and show you how to enable it on your Internet Information Services (IIS) Web servers.

This article reviews the recommendations of several recently released security planning guides from Microsoft that deal with securing administrator accounts and implementing smart card authentication in enterprise environments.

In this two part article, we show you how to install and configure DPM and evaluate how this can be integrated into your overall security strategy. In Part 1, we covered the process of installing the DPM prerequisite software, DPM itself, the file agent software and the end-user recovery client software. In Part 2, we’ll show you how to configure your DPM server to protect data, and how end users can recover their protected files without administrative assistance.

Every company has member servers at some capacity or another. Some companies have just a few, where others might have thousands. These member servers are the work horses of your network, providing the core production services for the company. From running the intranet, providing print services, SQL databases, e-mail services, file storage, and application support. With member servers providing all of these essential functions, it goes hand-in-hand with the fact that you need to protect these servers. This article will discuss some of key security configurations that can be made to help protect your member servers.

The beta of Microsoft's new Data Protection Manager (formerly called Data Protection Server) is now available to the public. DPM brings disk-based backup and recovery to enterprise networks as part of Microsoft’s new System Center product umbrella that also includes Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and Systems Management Server (SMS). In this two part article, we show you how to install and configure DPM and evaluate how this newest member of Microsoft's System Center product umbrella can be integrated into your overall security strategy.

Most organizations are either at Windows Active Directory or they are contemplating that move now. If you fall in the latter category, you have some decisions to make. You need to decide how you will get from where you are now, possibly a Windows NT domain(s), to Windows 2000 or Server 2003 Active Directory domain(s).

We shall now actually deface the web server’s web page, and pull off the hack as it were. Furthermore we will peek under the hood, and look at the packets to see just what transpired so that you might recognize it in the future.

Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 is a great solution for managing your Exchange, SQL and other servers — but what about security? In this article, we'll discuss some of the security issues related to MOM 2005, how Microsoft has made this version of MOM more secure, and best practices for deploying MOM in the most secure way possible.

Do you ever wonder why Microsoft has not built in more reporting tools to their operating systems? Have you ever wanted to email Microsoft and suggest that they at least allow some form of reporting on the security related details of user, group, and computer accounts? With the significant advancements that Microsoft has made with Active Directory over the past 5 years, you would think that they would have developed some form of reporting mechanism within Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 for user, group, and computer security related information. Well, they finally did!

In part two of this article series we shall take a more detailed look at how to actually pull off a web page defacement. The tool in use will be the outstanding open source security program Metasploit Framework. Detailed usage will be shown so you can recreate the scenario.