During the recent months, spam originating from China has been hitting the mailboxes of users from all over the world. One interesting fact is that this latest wave of spam is constructed differently from its predecessors. What makes this spam …

For those who need to explore the intricacies of authentication mechanisms that are available on Windows operating systems, I would like to make a stop at Windows Digest authentication and make a few comments about how it works (or doesn’t). …

July 22nd 2009 - Steve Ballmer signed off the RTM builds for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 at the annual sales kick-off event in Atlanta. This is big news for us all at GFI. Video of signing: Windows …

The Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), part of Microsoft Windows, provides a mechanism to create consistent point-in-time copies of hard-drives and is used by backup applications such as GFI Backup. Further information on how VSS works can be found at …

Have you ever wondered as to how processor affinity influences a single threaded process on a multiprocessor machine? Well, I have. Today nearly all new machines come with 2 or 4 cores. If you’re lucky, you have an 8 core …

This is the third post of a three part series in which we explore the world of svchost.exe. In part 1, I introduced the topic of the multiple svchost.exe instances running on Microsoft operating systems; their implied usage; as well …

For a large number of hardcore Windows enthusiasts around the world, today is a big day. Today we are all waiting for the signal from Microsoft that the latest Windows 7 build is signed off and Released to Manufacturing (RTM). …

This is the second post of a three part series in which we explore the world of svchost.exe. In Part 1, we introduced the multiple svchost.exe instances running on Microsoft operating systems; their implied usage; as well as why it …

Computer running slower than usual? Most probably an application taking up too many resources. Up goes the task manager to have a look under the hood – nothing strange located in the default list. You click on “Show processes from …

Determining the fine line between security and usability is a hard task for everybody involved in IT security, from software developers to network administrators. The lack of balance between these two items is one of the main reasons that can …