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One-Liner Wednesday November 2, 2022

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Get-ADUser -filter {Enabled -eq $True -and PasswordNeverExpires -eq $False} –Properties "DisplayName", "msDS-UserPasswordExpiryTimeComputed" |
Select-Object -Property "Displayname",@{Name="ExpiryDate";Expression={[datetime]::FromFileTime($_."msDS-UserPasswordExpiryTimeComputed")}} | sort-object ExpiryDate

Here is a one liner that find very useful and hope you do to.

You can customize it even more, but for now this one grabs all the AD User accounts that are expiring and the ones expiring first at the top. I love using this to stay in front of users passwords expiring then they can’t connect or if they are off network and is a rush to get it done.

You could even sent this up as a scheduled task and have it pull the next 2 weeks of users. Then either you reach out to them, it emails them, or it notifies your help desk to reach out to them to help change their password.

Or you could have it in your dashboard so you’d always see the next 2 weeks of users passwords expiring.

Module Monday October 31, 2022

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Module Monday Halloween Edition!

Know how every year you use most of the same decorations, but forget certain ones or even forget where they go? This Module is to help prevent that when building Functions and/or modules. It’s called PSModuleDevelopment by Fred.

He gives you a few stock templates to start out with, but the real test to this module is you can create your templates so you won’t forget all the standard parts to a module for a certain task. You could create a function/module template for doing something in 365 and already have your connect and disconnect built in, and/or connecting to a certain tenant.

You can even version control your templates and call certain ones directly if needed, as well as delete versions.

I just started started use this module and already a fan of it, and if you like this one definitely check out his PSFramework!

GitHub:
PSModuleDevelopment

PowerShell Gallery:
PSModuleDevelopment/2.2.11.139

Read-Only Friday October 28, 2022

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It’s Friday and the day for no major unplanned changes to your infrastructure.

How does your team share documentation between each other? Is it all in GitHub, Teams, Sharepoint, OneNote, Notion, ConnectWise, BookStack, etc? Or is it simple as word docs on a network share? Would you recommend the current way you are doing it?

If you use a combination, I’d love to hear the process of how you have it setup. If you prefer, you can message me, and I’ll do a summary of what everyone is using.

I know I have friends in all different size companies, curious to see how some of the solutions scale.

One-Liner Wednesday October 26, 2022

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One Liner Wednesday Cyber Security Edition

Want to see the top Malware that hits your 365 Exchange? Try this one liner out

Get-MailTrafficSummaryReport -Category TopMalware -StartDate 08-01-2022 -EndDate 10-25-2022 | Select-Object C1,C2 | out-gridview

This will give you the different types of malware Microsoft has found and how many times it found in since August 1. Then it will display it in a grid view that you can filter. I normally export to Excel/CSV to keep the data as it goes away after 90 days. Bigger organizations I’d recommend pushing it into a database for longer term analytics.

Check out Microsoft Docs and my 365 GitHub Repository for more ideas!

Microsoft Documentation:
Get-MailtrafficSummaryReport

365 Exchange Security Dasboard(Very early stages)
365 Exchange Security Dashboard

My Microsoft 365 GitHub Repository:
Powershell365

Module Monday October 24, 2022

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It’s Module Monday…

Although this module could be on Read-Only Friday, I wanted to show you that not all modules change your environment, and they can be extremely helpful getting information for you so you don’t have to create it or yourself. And with it being Cyber Security Month, why not have an easy way to find changes in your Active Directory.

With that said, today’s module is Jeff Hicks ADReportingTools, which I think the name is pretty obvious of what it does, but definitely check out the GitHub for all the reporting it can do. Here are a few of my favorites.

  • Get-ADDomainControllerHealth – this checks storage space, physical memory, % of security log in use, and critical services not running
  • Get-ADUserAudit – which will search the event logs on your domain controller for that specific user events
  • Get-ADGroupUser – which will display all users in that defined group and who any disabled users in red
  • Get-ADSiteSummary – shows a quick view of your sites and subnets
  • Show-DomainTree – this will show your domain in a tree view in your console
  • New-ADDomainReport – I really like this one, it shows you a nice html formatted report of your domain

Hope you take a look at it and if you see any features you’d like, let Jeff know.

PowerShell Gallery:

ADReportingTools/1.4.0

GitHub:
ADReportingTools

Read-Only Friday October 21, 2022

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It’s Friday, so you know what that means!

I like todays, because it’s another one of those it’s easy, but we either forget to check or believe it’s working but it may not be.

What is it? Event logging and dashboards. I’ll admit the dashboard part isn’t easy, but the event logging is. And I’m not just talking about your scripts(which you should be adding event logging to them when possible), I’m talking about any of your infrastructure that you manage. Even if you have alerting on, how do you know the alerting is actually working? Maybe your script or application you are using to go through the logs has an update but you don’t see it since you haven’t checked it in a month thinking it just works?

It’s always better to be proactive than reactive. Also while going through the logs you may find something else you want to start alerting for. Maybe you adding a new feature to your firewall or you added a print server and you want to setup alerting for those?

Hope you take out some time today and go through your logs, and if you’ve done that, do you have dashboards and/or alerting in place? If so, check those as well, and see if there is anyway you could improve it.

What scripts/modules/applications do you use to manage your event logs and/or create dashboards with?