Do you ever wonder why you have to add an uppercase letter or an exclamation point when you create a password? You can thank Bill Burr for that. In 2003, Bill Burr wrote password security guidelines for National Institute... Read More
Specops Software Blog
Winners from our Sysadmin Day meme contest
Happy SysAdmin Day! In the run up to this important day, we encouraged sysadmins to share with us a funny meme of their creation illustrating stereotypes associated with their jobs. The results illustrate a widely misunderstood profession – by users, colleagues and the society! All the winning submissions made an attempt at humor. Are you in for a chuckle? Here is the list of winners: Christopher,... Read More
How to show appreciation on Sysadmin Day
Have you heard of System Administrator Appreciation Day? The last Friday of July, which this year falls on the 28th, is dedicated to those unsung heroes who make sure your network is secure, your computer is up and running,... Read More
3 reasons why a client is not PXE booting and how to fix it
In this blog post, we will go over a few scenarios where a client might not PXE boot as expected. If you’re not familiar with the PXE boot functionality used by Specops Deploy, you might want to start here.... Read More
Office 2016 Silent Install with Specops Deploy
In this blog post, I will walkthrough how you can silently install Microsoft Office 2016 on machines on your network using Specops Deploy / App. To get started, you will need to run the Office Customization Tool, and create... Read More
3 passphrase best practices
A strong password is long and complex. Adding upper case, numbers, and special characters make it harder to crack. However, considering user behavior, complex passwords have proven too difficult to remember. To cope with complexity requirements, users default to... Read More
Credential stuffing – the password breach aftermath
RIP Passwords – the 2017 Data Breach Industry Forecast by Experian anticipates your demise. Until then, experts are predicting “aftershock” breaches. In 2016, there were 1,093 security incidents involving loss of sensitive data, and three billion credentials stolen worldwide.... Read More
What the password quiz taught us
In celebration of World Password Day we ran a password quiz that presented participants with five pairs of passwords, and asked them to pick out the stronger one from each pair. The results? Only 12% of participants answered all... Read More
Reduce vulnerabilities to the WannaCry/WannCrypt Ransomware outbreak with Specops
The first line of defense in this scenario is to run the latest Operating system(s) fully patched. The exploit code used by WannaCrypt was designed to work only against unpatched Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 (or earlier OS) systems,... Read More
Remove Specops Authentication Client Start menu shortcuts
The Specops Authentication is a shared Client that provides functionality for Specops Password Policy, Specops uReset, and Specops Password Reset. For uReset & Password Reset, the Client provides Start menu shortcuts, a Reset Password link on the login screen,... Read More