Author Archives: Andrew Zammit Tabona
Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) – A Hyped up Marketing Term or a Security Concern?
It is not uncommon for marketing teams or advertising agencies to take a current IT ‘buzzword’ and use it as part of their campaign to promote a new product or service. Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is one of those buzzwords. …
Windows PowerShell: Essential Admin Scripts (Part 2)
In Part 1 of this two-part series, I covered the ‘Microsoft Troubleshooting Packs’ and ACL permission checks using PowerShell scripting. This article will focus on two more scripts, one to check if a host is alive and, if it is …
Windows PowerShell™: Essential Admin Scripts (Part 1)
In Windows PowerShell: Extracting Strings Using Regular Expressions, I introduced the Windows PowerShell and discussed the concept of regular expressions, giving an example of how to build a Windows PowerShell script to extract strings from a file using a given …
BYOD – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is a term used to describe employees who take their own portable device (e.g. iPhones, iPads and laptops) to the workplace with the intention of accessing firm resources to carry out their everyday jobs. The …
Windows PowerShell: Extracting Strings Using Regular Expressions
Windows PowerShell is a powerful (no pun intended!) command line scripting language built on top of the .NET framework. Version 2.0 of Windows PowerShell comes installed by default with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. On older platforms, it is …
Scanning Open Ports in Windows: A Quick Guide
When troubleshooting client or server side application network connectivity issues, it is often necessary to determine if access to a certain port that the application uses is being blocked. In this article we’ll take a quick look at how to …
Internet Monitoring: both sides of the table (Part 2)
In the first part of this article we saw the legal parameters within which organizations implement internet monitoring. It’s easy to understand why employees feel concerned about being monitored at work. After all it’s human nature to feel uneasy knowing …
Internet Monitoring: both sides of the table (Part 1)
The debate about internet monitoring in the workplace has been going on for years! Employees often feel their employers are yet another entity that is enforcing the big brother effect on them, yet on the flip side employers feel as …
A Quick Look at On-Premise E-mail Archiving
In a previous post, I discussed the concept of e-mail archiving in the cloud and ran through some pros and cons of hosting your e-mail archive off-site. Today we’ll take a quick look at on-premise e-mail archiving. Having an on-premise …
The Ins and Outs of Vulnerability Scanning
What are Vulnerability Scanners? Vulnerability scanners check your network against a database of known vulnerabilities; such a database is usually compiled from respectable resources such as CVE (http://cve.mitre.org) or OVAL (http://oval.mitre.org). They can also check for administrative oversights such as …









