Are you using strong certificate mapping in Active Directory? Richard Hicks returns to the show to talk about the impacts of KB5015754, issued way back in 2022, and how it turned into an enforcement event on February 11, 2025 that might have caused some serious problems for folks trying to authenticate to Active Directory. For most sites, the upgrade to strong certificates was pretty much automatic. But if you're using Intune SCEP, you needed to do some configuration - and if that was missed, there is trouble. There are workarounds for now, but come September 2025, enforcement will be mandatory and everything gets harder, so it's worth looking into it now!

Links

• KB5015754: Certificate-based Authentication Changes on Windows Domain Controllers
• Richard's Blog Post on Strong Certificate Mapping Enforcement
• Active Directory Certificate Services
• Create and Assign SCEP Certificate Profiles in Intune
• Heartbleed

Recorded February 17, 2025

What does it mean to be secure by design? Richard chats with Karinne Bessette about the scope of the problem around making more secure software. Karinne talks about the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) push to promote more secure software products. The conversation digs into some of the more famous exploits in recent years and some of the challenges of dealing with development tools that require super-user privileges, getting security testing done promptly and responding to exploits effectively when they happen.

Links

• Women in Teams
• CISA Secure by Design
• Azure Kubernetes Service
• Microsoft Security Response Center

Recorded February 21, 2025

What is it like to take care of an Exchange Server in 2025? Richard chats with Michel de Rooij about his work with Exchange, including the many scripts he has written and published over the years to help sysadmins solve problems. Michel discusses how staying on-premises with Exchange is getting harder - the new version will be subscription-based! The conversation also digs into the new version of Outlook, the challenges of securing email, and Michel's latest book Pro Exchange Administration.

Links

• Remove DuplicateItems Script
• Unarchive Script
• Pro Exchange Administration
• Office 365 for IT Pros
• Microsoft Defender for Office 365

Recorded January 9, 2025

How do you manage your CI/CD pipeline resources? Richard chats with Eliza Tarasila about Managed DevOps Pools in Azure DevOps. Eliza tells the story of discovering that teams were using Azure DevOps internally at Microsoft but would need to build their tooling to stand up the resources for testing and deployment. Managed DevOps Pools became the standard way to specify resources like virtual machines and assign them to projects so that they would start up automatically. The resources in the pool can be custom resources in Azure or even on-premises servers! And, more importantly, you don't need to care and feed for the infrastructure used in the pipelines, Azure DevOps will do it for you.

Links

• Azure DevOps
• Create and Manage Pools
• Managed DevOps Pool Origin Story
• Azure DevOps Pricing
• Azure Spot Virtual Machines
• Managed DevOps Pools Documentation

Recorded January 6, 2025

Ready to upgrade to Windows Server 2025? Richard talks to Robert Smit about his experiences doing an upgrade—with a few important dos and don'ts! Robert talks about dusting off your Active Directory setup and ensuring you're at the Server 2016 functional level. The conversation also dives into the new-build-versus-upgrade options, taking advantage of SMB over QUIC and SMB Compression, and much more!

Links

• Windows Server 2025
• Upgrading to Windows Server 2025
• Azure Arc
• Windows Admin Center
• SMB Compression
• Windows Tools
• Remote Server Administration Tools
• Configuration Manager
• Azure Arc-enabled System Center Virtual Machine Manager
• Live Migration with Workgroup Cluster

Recorded January 7, 2025

How can Entra ID Protection help keep your organization resist security breaches? Richard talks to Corissa Koopmans about thinking beyond authentication and authorization and into conditional access - knowing what is normal and abnormal behavior for your users. Corissa recommends looking at the Entra ID Protection Dashboard - whether you have configured anything or not - to see what potential risks you have today. Whether it's logins from places where you have no workers or some "impossible travel" or weird browser connections, ID Protection detects and identifies those events. When combined with conditional access, Defender for Cloud, or even Microsoft Intune - you get a "better together" effect that makes it easier to know when something bad is happening!

Links

• Microsoft Entra ID Protection
• Azure Active Directory Conditional Access
• Entra ID Protection Dashboard
• Log Analytics Agent
• Microsoft Intune
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Microsoft Sentinel

Recorded December 10, 2024

Do you Kusto? Richard talks to Mark Morowczynski about his new book, The Definitive Guide to KQL, and the power of Kusto to look across your Azure tenant and understand operational and security issues. Mark talks about being able to query across all log sets, telemetry, the M365 graph, and more - to help understand issues. The book provides example queries you could run today, including knowing the first and last time a user logged on and what devices they used. There are examples of calculating baseline behavior for an account so that you can see when unusual activity starts. There are a ton of excellent queries for operational excellence and cybersecurity - get started today! And for RunAs listeners, you can use code KUSTO to get 30% off the book!

Links

• Threat Intelligence Blog
• Phishing-Resistant Passwordless Authentication
• Kusto Query Language
• Microsoft Sentinel
• Microsoft Security Copilot
• KQL Guide on GitHub

Recorded December 19, 2024

What about SQL Server in Microsoft Fabric? Richard chats with Anna Hoffman about the preview release of SQL 2025 in Microsoft Fabric and the power of having your data store where you are doing your analytics and machine learning! Anna talks about new applications being developed using AI technologies like large language models and that often those applications need a data store - so why not keep it with the application in a configuration ideally suited for that work? The conversation digs into the relationship between existing SQL data stores and Fabric, how interconnections can happen, and perhaps a future of motion between them - but for now, it's a preview, so take a look!

Links

• SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric
• Microsoft Purview
• Microsoft Entra
• Azure Private Link for Azure SQL Database
• Microsoft Copilot for Azure SQL Database
• sp_invoke

Recorded December 16, 2024

Are your docs part of your DevOps cycle? Richard chats with Mattias Karlsson about automating documentation for APIs, cloud resources, and more! Mattias talks about using tools to build text files that contain every Azure resource being utilized, hopefully per application, along with API info, NuGet packages, and more. He also digs into the different audiences for that documentation - business wants to know what website exist, both interior and publically facing. Operations need to know what resources are consumed on-premises and in the cloud. Development is always looking for versions of APIs, calling approaches, etc. Maintaining documentation by hand is tedious and perpetually out-of-date. But if you can get up to speed with the tooling, you can make your documentation generate at the speed of deployment!

Links

• Bicep
• Azure Resource Inventory
• Azure CLI
• Pulumi

Recorded October 29, 2024

How is least privilege different in 2025? Richard talks to Bailey Bercik about the ongoing efforts to minimize users, administrators, and applications' privileges in 2025. Bailey talks about the power of Entra Permissions Management to help you see what permissions are going unused on various accounts so that you can tailor rights to individual accounts without things becoming unmanageable. Artificial intelligence is a forcing function for many permission issues, with these new tools potentially creating problems when given unnecessary rights. But those same tools can help you understand where permissions are being underutilized and help protect your systems!

Links

• Principle of Least Privilege
• Enable Permission Management
• Entra Permissions Management
• Microsoft Security Copilot
• Copilot in Microsoft Entra
• SEC545: GenAI and LLM Application Security
• How Attackers Use Apps to Attack Video

Recorded December 16, 2024