Commanding your Philips Hue lights with PowerShell

A couple of years ago I bought a number of Philips Hue bulbs and put them in the living areas of my house. Typically we control them via the Hue App on our phones, or via the Google Assistant. This all works very well, but of course I’m a techie and have a bunch of other Internet of Things devices and it would be great to integrate the Hue lights with those.… keep reading

A synopsis of my first Microsoft (MVP) Summit

Last week I attended my first Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Global Summit. Compared to a lot of the conferences I’ve been to over the years this was tiny with just over 2000 attendees. The difference however is that every attendee is an expert in their field (associated with at least one Microsoft technology) and they come from over 80 countries.… keep reading

Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager v2, k-Anonymity and Have I Been Pwned

Microsoft Identity Manager - Have I Been Pwned

Background

In August 2017 Troy Hunt released a sizeable list of Pwned Passwords. 320 Million in fact.

I subsequently wrote this post on Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager which called the API and sets a boolean attribute in the MIM Service that could be used with business logic to force users with accounts that have compromised passwords to change their password on next logon.… keep reading

Checking and patching your Microsoft Windows computer for Meltdown and Spectre

Overview

A Google team named Project Zero in mid 2017 identified vulnerabilities with many Intel, AMD and ARM CPU’s that allow speculative pre-processing of code to be abused. Speculative pre-processing aids performance which is why it exists. However when used maliciously it would allow an attacker to use JavaScript in a webpage to access memory that could contain information present in a users environment such as key strokes, passwords and personal sensitive information.… keep reading

Provisioning Hybrid Exchange/Exchange Online Mailboxes with Microsoft Identity Manager

Hybrid Exchange/Exchange Online Mailboxes

Introduction

Working for Kloud all our projects involve Cloud services, and all our customers have varying and unique requirements. Recently one of our customers embarked on their migration from On-Premise Exchange to Exchange Online. Nothing really groundbreaking there though, however they had a number of unique requirements including management of Litigation Hold.… keep reading