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Searching multiple Word documents for keyword

Found myself in a situation I needed to search 20+ documents for a keyword and unfortunately Word cannot search files within a directory for keywords, only the current document. Thankfully we can automate this with PowerShell. The script below will: Accept a directory path and keyword Open each file found and search for the keyword […]

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Escalating Privileges to Domain Admin

This method may benefit from some social engineering but will require local Administrator on an machine within the network. Social engineering can be used to speedup the process of enticing a Domain Admin (DA) to login to a system and in-return provide us DA rights. Should you need to obtain local Administrator privileges and you […]

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Gaining entry into Windows as Administrator

This is an old but still relevant method of gaining access to an local Administrator account on any windows machine running Vista on-wards. Note: This method will only work when Bitlocker is not enabled on the machine. You can either use a live CD or Windows PE (From Windows installation media), this guide will use […]

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Setting up Sysinternals

Whilst Sysinternals can be downloaded and ran from the location to which they are extracted to, there is more preferable way to install on a system in which they will be used more frequently. Download Sysinternals from: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ Extract the downloaded zip contents to: C:\Program Files (x86)\SYSINT Extracting to this directory is useful for white-listing Run […]

Telnet response when connecting to the website

IIS Server Header Hardening

You may want to remove the server version from your HTTP response for security reasons, there are a couple ways you can go about this depending on how the header is being handled. Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0 If you are seeing the Server header Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0 then the header is being managed by HTTP.SYS driver and is not being […]

Finding users in AD and adding to distribution group

I had a scenario in which a group of users needed to be added to a distribution group hosted on Exchange online. So I thought Id made a little script which pulls users from the local Active Directory; checks them against the distribution group and if they are not present, adds them. You may want […]

WSUS Server Cleanup Wizard Crashing/Timing out

Whilst trying to cleanup and remove older Windows updates to free up space on my WSUS box I ran into the issue of WSUS crashing with the following exception: The WSUS administration console was unable to connect to the WSUS Server Database. Verify that SQL server is running on the WSUS Server. If the problem […]

Connecting to Windows Internal Database (WID)

Whilst trying to figure out issues with a service which uses Windows Internal Database (WID) I came into the issue of actually connecting and managing it… Steps to connect to WID: Download and install Microsoft SQL Server Manager (found here) onto the machine hosting the instance Run Microsoft SQL Server Manager (SSMS) as Administrator (if […]