Comptia Security+ minor thoughts

Hello All,

I have been studying rather hard lately and completely forgotten to post in my blog!

To help my studying I have invested money in two different types of testing software (both for the syo-101) the first is from www.transcender.com and the second is from www.preplogic.com

They both are wonderful tests and they truly make you think. Out of the two the transcender exam is the harder one; however, the preplogic exam has four exams compared to the one single transcender exam.

Both exams ask you really make-you-think-questions and give you the opportunity to review and find the answers to the questions you missed.

Think of it this way — transcender is a laser beam while preplogic is a shot-gun; each has their advantages.

Take both if you can.

IE7 and RUNAS Part II

Here is a follow up to one of my older posts called IE7 and RUNAS — I found a slightly faster way to work around the problem of IE7 and the its inability to use the RUNAS function.

Side Note: This problem only exists in IE7 and XP; from what I have read Vista does not have this problem

Try this when working in a XP network:

Start — run and then:

runas /user:<your domain>\<administrative account> “explorer /separate”

So if your domain was named Friday and your administrative account was named Elvis it would look like this:

runas /user:friday\Elvis “explorer /separate”

Enjoy!

IE7 and RUNAS

One of the biggest headaches in using IE7 (I live in a Microsoft world) is the inability of using RUNAS in a corporate environment.

Using RUNAS gave one single application the ability to run as someone with more permissions, one single time. For example an end user might not have the rights to change settings on the desktop; however, me as an administrator could use RUNAS while still logged in as the end user and make changes with administrative rights.

This useful tool was removed from IE7.

I have finally found a work around (with some major help from a co-worker and Google)!

Start –> Run and type:

runas /user:<your domain name>\Administrator “rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL sysdm.cpl”

Replace sysdm.cpl with other applets such as:

access.cpl

desk.cpl

timedate.cpl

or a bunch of others.

Regards to all.

SY0-201 studies

Hello All,

The holidays have finally come and gone and I can get back to studying. I found an interesting website via the Comptia Security+ Study Guide called http://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/index.html.

The website is the basis for the new standards for computer security.

Real fast:

Seven levels are broken down into Evaluation Assurance Levels (EALs)

EAL1 — is the bare minimum that a system will operate correctly but threats to security are not viewed as serious.

EAL4 — is the benchmark for commercial systems.

EAL7 — is intended for extremely high levels of security

Just for reference Windows Vista is ranked as EAL1: http://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/products_OS.html#OS