IT Pro Tuesday #315
Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!
First off this week, we’d like to invite you to take part in a 5-min survey on how ransomware is impacting the industry. Help us strengthen our collective knowledge on ransomware, and you’ll get a chance to win a Flipper Zero!
The latest Security Swarm Podcast: “How to Insulate your Business from Vendor Risk,” features guest Eric Siron, a Microsoft MVP in cloud and data center management. Eric works primarily with healthcare organizations and small-to-medium businesses, helping them navigate security and IT challenges. The episode focuses on the important topic of vetting and selecting third-party software vendors.
We’re looking for favorite tips and tools we can share with the community… those that help you do your job better and more easily. Please share your suggestions on the IT Pro Tuesday subreddit, and we’ll be featuring them in the coming weeks.
Now on to this week’s list!
A Free Tool
Claude AI is a business-focused, next-gen AI assistant for tasks involving language, reasoning, analysis, coding, and more. BulletSponge-Tech adds, “[it] does really well with coding… the free version is usually more than enough to get me usable code and enough troubleshooting if I can’t figure it out myself.”
Another Free Tool
IIS Crypto allows administrators to enable or disable protocols, ciphers, hashes and key exchange algorithms on Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019 and 2022. It also updates the registry using the settings recommended by Microsoft and updates the cipher suite order in the same way as the Group Policy Editor. Lets you create custom templates for different servers, which will work with both the CLI & GUI versions as well as their own built-in templates. Appreciated by techvet83.
A Tutorial
Is Your Organization Ready for Copilot for Microsoft 365? is a free whitepaper from Hornetsecurity that explains how you can be sure your permissions are configured correctly in order to avoid unauthorized access and protect your data once Microsoft Copilot is able to access all your documents, emails, and files.
A Tip
A truly wise career reminder that might save you from yourself, kindly shared by ElevenNotes:
“Work is a never ending process. Go home on time and take care of your loved ones.”
Yet another free tool
Stirling-PDF is a locally hosted web application for working with PDF files. This secure, private tool creates no outbound calls for tracking or record-keeping, ensuring complete control and privacy. Offers features like splitting, merging, converting, and more. pearfire575 adds, “We are looking into deploying these tools for our non-licensed users (whom may need something like that 3/4 times a year and a license of acrobat isn’t worth it).”
P.S. Bonus Free Tools
pipx is a specialized Python package installer that allows you to install and run Python applications in Isolated environments. muikrad explains, “pipx is awesome. Something I often do is to ‘pipx install . –editable’ from my source code when I develop CLIs. Then you can call your dev CLI from everywhere.”
Hoop.dev is an access gateway that masks sensitive data and reviews critical operations with a unique packet manipulation of protocols from databases, containers, and servers. Offers zero-trust access, session recording, just-in-time access, and chatbot approval workflows, universal compatibility and more. Our thanks for the suggestion go to andriosr.
