IT Pro Tuesday #259

Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

The latest Security Swarm Podcast: “What We Learned by Asking the Community About Compliance,” is an eye-opening episode recorded live at Infosecurity Europe in London. We dissect the results of a comprehensive IT compliance survey conducted by Hornetsecurity. In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, maintaining IT compliance has become a pressing concern for businesses worldwide.

Data has become an organization’s lifeblood, making its protection and recovery critical for business continuity. As data volume and complexity increase, IT administrators and professionals face the pressing challenge of implementing successful backup strategies. We’re delighted to introduce The Backup Bible: Your Complete Guide to Backup and Disaster Recovery, the ultimate resource for equipping you with the knowledge and tools needed to build and maintain a strong data protection system.

This new ebook features 150+ pages of practical information, industry insights, best practices, step-by-step guidance for effective backup and recovery strategies, and customizable templates. Download yours for free here.

We’re also looking for your favorite tips and tools we can share with the community… those that help you do your job better and more easily. Please reply or leave a comment with your suggestions, and we’ll be featuring them in the coming weeks.

As always, we’re updating the full list on our website here. Enjoy.

A Free Tool

Mattermost offers a secure, open-source solution for seamless collaboration throughout the software development lifecycle. Tailored to cater to technical and operational needs, it easily integrates with a wide range of third-party developer tools—to streamline development and engineering workflows. With self-hosted and private cloud deployment options, coupled with access to the source code, you have complete control over the data via a shared, adaptable, and extensible platform designed specifically for your team. Kindly suggested by Molasses_Major.

Training Resource

Jeremy’s IT Lab is an educational YouTube channel offering a wealth of knowledge and tutorials on Cisco networking as well as the broader realm of general networking. A comprehensive CCNP ENCOR 350-401 Course is his latest addition to the library, which joins a Complete CCNA 200-301 Course and the Complete CCNA Routing & Switching Packet Tracer Lab Series. Our thanks for the recommendation go to Maudib420.

Another Free Tool

SyncML Viewer presents the SyncML protocol stream between the Win10 client and the management system and adds some extra parsing to extract details that can aid your analysis. Uses ETW to trace the MDM Sync session, tracing what the client actually sends and receives. Can be very handy to troubleshoot policy issues, verify OMA-URIs and data field definitions, or get confirmation about queried or applied settings. A favorite tool of jdtomchick.

One More Free Tool

Alfred is a macOS app that offers hotkeys, keywords, text expansion, search, and other custom actions to control your Mac. aew3 likes this “launcher/search tool. Extendable. Instead of clippy i just use an extension for Alfred, saves another program running and does the same thing.”

Yet Another Free Tool

Raindrop is a highly capable, all-in-one bookmark manager. Oliver explains, “installs as a browser extension, desktop app, and phone app. Anything which has the option to share, you can share to raindrop… has a ton of cool features such as:

• Making an offline, indexed copy of whatever you’ve sent it. Not everything allows offline copy. BUT, if you search a raindrop for a keyword or phrase contained in the body of something you’ve saved, it will return that bookmark in the results.
• Gives you the option to embed specific raindrop collections (folders containing things you’ve saved). Illustrating: You save an article to the appropriate collection. That new article shows up on a landing page you’ve created for clients. Consider this for exploits, outage alerts, etc.
• Tagging things you’ve saved—these are similar but different than collections. Tags are easy to add to whatever, as when you put a comma it automatically makes a new tag.
• API and other extensibility. ‘Save every youtube video I like,’ ‘save every tweet I like’
• The offline & indexed version Raindrop makes can also, somehow, get around (most?) paywalls. You can share these offline copies using a perm link generated by raindrop.”

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

KeePassXC is an updated open-source, ad-free, tracker-free password manager that allows you to auto-fill the appropriate credentials into your favorite apps, so you don’t have to remember anything. draeath explains, “I prefer KeePassXC [to original version]. Generally looks and feels better for me, and it’s cross-platform without requiring Mono. Original used to run soooo slow (and look horrible) on a Linux workstation.”

mitmproxy is a versatile, powerful, open-source interactive HTTPS proxy that acts as a go-to companion for a wide range of tasks including debugging, testing, privacy measurements, and penetration testing. Effortlessly intercept, inspect, modify, and even replay web traffic across various protocols, so you can fine-tune your applications and gain valuable insights. Includes command line, web interface, and Python API options. InitializedVariable appreciates how it “allows you to analyze and modify HTTPS traffic.”