Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

There is an update available for Forefront Client Security that could, potentially, result in less help desk phone calls for existing and future deployments. You will want to look into KB 940060.

Why less support calls? Mainly due to a change in "end-user notification when allowing an application that is blocked by default" and the fact that the FCS icon will no longer turn red for the user when the program has been marked by the Administrator to be "ignored".

Real world example: Numerous places use VNC everyday to administer pre-XP machines. VNC by default, the last I checked, gets marked as a suspicious program by FCS and Windows Defender. Most IT admins that are using VNC do not want their FCS icon to be red all the time, even though they have specifically set VNC to 'ignore'.

In a nutshell, this update fixes that issue plus a few others!

You can read more in-depth analysis about the update from the FCS guys here and read the actual KB article here.

I'm that EHLO World guy in the September 2007 MCP Flash, with a full question and answer section in the Microsoft Learning Peers section here, once the cache propagates.

Thumbnail image of the newsletter:


To view the full size version, click here.

Sidenote:

Our oldest daughter, Sabrina, turned 6 today. I'll will always be able to remember the day the newsletter came out due to this.

I've also lost 15 to 20 pounds since that picture was taken in February 2007. During that time, unknown to me, four wisdom teeth were becoming impacted and very infected. They were taken out last month and my whole face feels 100% better. No more 'chipmunk' look.

The reason I state this is due to the influx of spam coming from an e-mail address that is only used at Monster.com. I haven't been to the site in ages, but I was informed of the security breach earlier this year.

Whenever I need to setup an account with a company, I typically will put the name of the company as the e-mail address combined with one of the domain names I own.

A good example would be if there was a company called SuperWidgets and I setup an account with them, I would set my e-mail address for them as superwidgets@somedomainnameiown.com.

If I suddenly receive spam coming into that address, I know they have either sold my e-mail address without my permission or snuck it into a terms-of-service update without me catching it or someone has obtained the list of e-mail addresses.

If I don't want to deal with the company anymore or the spam associated with it, I will deactivate that e-mail alias on my domain. It can become a bit cumbersome to maintain but it is any excellent way to pre-whitelist or ban certain e-mail addresses without giving out your main e-mail address or domain.

I suspect my Monster e-mail alias is going to buh-bye shortly if this spam trend continues. Keep an eye out for increased spam to your Monster.com's e-mail addresses and please let me know if you notice it too.