Windows Group Policy Management is the default — but that doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for your organization when it comes to cybersecurity and compliance. In this blog, we’ll look specifically at the current standard for compliance through CIS benchmarks and offer up a new way to approach policy management without the default.

Whenever an event occurs on your Windows machine, the operating system records an event log that includes details about the nature of the event (e.g., critical runtime error) or security identifiers (for audit events). Windows event logs not only record system and application activity but also user actions and background processes, making them an invaluable tool for monitoring the security and health of your systems.

A variety of factors, such as the pandemic and digital transformation, have moved organizations and all their data online, which has made backing up business data to cloud storage become more of the norm.

As the popularity of Windows Subsystem for Linux increases, the Ubuntu development team is committed to delivering a first class experience for Linux developers on Windows. To achieve this we’ve made improvements to our automated testing workflows via the creation of WSL-specific GitHub actions. In this post, Ubuntu WSL engineer Eduard Gómez Escandell talks us through the motivation for this approach and how you can implement these actions for your own CI workflows.

I remember as if it was yesterday. I participated at the OSMC 2014 and watched Bernd’s talk “Current state of Icinga”. In the live demo Bernd has showed some of the new things we’ve built. One of them he introduced somewhat hesitantly IMHO.

Is your Windows getting out of hand? Doesn’t it know how to behave in front of guests? Is it like those children usually other people have who break down to cry as if they were boiling them? Thankfully, Pandora FMS has the solution for you.

Event logging for Microsoft Windows provides a standard, centralized way for applications and the operating system to record important software and hardware events. The event-logging service (eventlog) stores events from various sources in a single collection called an event log. The system administrator can use the event log to help determine what conditions caused the error and the context in which it occurred. TechTarget have an excellent overview of Windows event logs available.

Nowadays many organizations still rely on classic Windows servers and virtual machines (VMs) for their business applications. Although Kubernetes is a trending topic, not everything running in the cloud is a container-based application. When it comes to monitoring Windows applications and infrastructure, many businesses leverage OSS Prometheus to get Windows metrics via its Prometheus Windows Exporter.

As the digital world becomes more interconnected, cyber threats evolve and become more sophisticated, putting businesses and individuals at risk. On February 14, 2023, Microsoft announced a critical vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) driver, known as CVE-2023-23376. This vulnerability allows attackers to elevate privileges and gain unauthorized access to sensitive data, potentially resulting in severe consequences for affected systems.