Hacking a Server Remotely Through Remote Desktop

I mentioned the other day that a local business owner whom I barter services with called me to take a look at his domain controller because he could no longer login to the domain with any domain accounts. It turns out that his server was hacked into by a mischievous hacker, and they did some minor destructive things to make this particular business owner’s life a little harder than it needed to be. Well after getting his domain back using this domain administrator password reset technique, I started looking into other things this hacker did, and it seemed like the hacker probably got in using Remote Desktop (RDP) over the internet. How is that possible you ask? Well, for one, RDP was open to the internet to that particular server, but mainly because there was no strong password policy or...

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PWN3D! Resetting The Domain Administrator Password After You’ve Been Hacked!

So I have this deal with a local business near me. I fix their computers, and take care of their network for them and they give me and my family free stuff. Fair trade right? Well, a few months ago I rebuilt their network, and domain controller and upgraded them from a Windows 2000 domain to Windows 2003. After the upgrade I noticed that they had very weak password policy. In fact, they had no password policy and they never changed their passwords. I told them they should consider going with a stronger password policy, but they were more concerned with ease of use. Ok, at lease I warned them! Well I got a call on Monday from the frantic business owner. His server was no longer accessible and none of his domain passwords worked any more....

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Error Upgrading Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging To SP1

You ever go to patch a server late one evening, after hours so as not to bother the users, and after about two hours into the upgrade everything goes to hell in a hand basket? Good, so I’m not the only one. In fact, you are probably reading this right now because of that very same scenario. Anyhoo, so what happened to me was I finally got around to upgrading my Exchange 2010 server to Service Pack 1. When running through the install everything checked out. All perquisites were green, and so I proceeded with the upgrade. Everything was going well until it got to the Unified Messaging Role. About 75% in the install failed with the following error: Unable to remove product with code 84a6e864-10a5-47c0-ac31-426fe71e4906. Fatal error during...

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History of The Internet

Despite what Al Gore says, he did not invent the Internet. In fact, the Internet has been around for a lot longer than you think! When your parents were smokin' pot, and dropping acid at Woodstock, early computer scientists were transmitting some of the earliest packets across the country's phone lines. Here is an interesting infographic that I found while surfing on Stumbleupon showing the timeline of the Internet's history up to 2009! [Source: OnlineMBA.com]...

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Upgrading MS-DOS 5.0 Through Windows 7

I know what you are thinking, someone had a lot of time on their hands. I am inclined to agree with you there. Still though, it's fascinating to see someone take the time to install every major version of Windows starting with MS-DOS 5.0 (Because early versions of Windows required it) and continue through to Windows 7 using only the upgrade processes. I first saw this on Facebook as it was posted by a former boss, and good friend of mine named Justin. Me being a big geek, I watched it and thought it was great! The guy performing the experiment is Andrew Tait of Andy’s Tech Experiments, and took him about 3 days to do it. Why did he do it? According to Andy: I got the idea from a 90s computer magazine article I vaguely remember (possibly...

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How To Set Multiple Password Policies in AD

I’m sure like many of you in your organization you have certain service accounts in active directory where the passwords don’t change that often. When you do change them, like when an employee leaves, sometimes you might miss a few on some old servers that you forgot you had, and all of a sudden, that service account is getting locked out. There are good reasons to leave it that way. For one, it protects your service accounts from brute force/dictionary password attacks. Also, if a service account gets locked out, you usually know right away because an application server will stop working. The problem with it though is although it may protect you from guessing password attacks, it could potentially leave you at risk for a DoS attack. Think...

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