This blog describes how to configure Sonicwall firewalls and their security services to work better with the streaming audio and video network traffic in Microsoft Teams. This same procedure can be used for additional streaming services such as Microsoft Skype, Skype for Business, Slack, Zoom and more. Sonicwall firewalls are fantastic devices that provide some of the most innovative security services on the market. Sonicwall services monitor various aspects of network and application security services, but in this article we are going to focus on the gateway security services. While these gat ..read more

Are you looking to connect using PowerShell to your Microsoft Teams environment? Then this is the blog for you where I will provide step by step instructions along with screen pictures to show you how it is done. Steps: Open PowerShell on your Windows desktop. Do this by simple typing PowerShell in the search area. Make sure you choose the Run as Administrator option. You could already have the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module installed. Check your system using the command: Get-Module *teams* Notice in this screen capture that I do not have any results, meaning the module is not loaded ..read more

Several years ago I wrote a blog about how to setup Extension Dialing for Skype for Business Online. It turned out to be one of my most popular blogs (of the almost 100 blogs I have written over the years) to date, indicating to me just how many people were interested in this feature. I have had several requests to create a similar blog about how to setup extension dialing in Microsoft Teams, so here it is! First of all, what is Extension Dialing and why would an organization need to set this up. Extension Dialing has been around for decades and is a way for people in an organization to reach ..read more

Windows 11 was announced on June 25, 2021 and I am really excited to see all of the recent feature updates. The announcement video was simply amazing! One of the items in the Windows 11 hardware requirements specifies TPM 2.0.  In this blog I will briefly describe what TPM is, explain how systems purchased in the past 5-6 years already have it, and how to enable TPM 2.0 to install Windows 11 (if not already enabled). Trusted Platform Module(TPM) 2.0 is the latest version of this type of crypto processor(TPM 1.2 was an earlier version not supported by Windows 11). TPM provides hardware bas ..read more

Windows 11 is here! Well, as of this blog being published it is available in the Windows 10 Insider Preview Development Ring. I decided to download it onto a lab system to start checking it out and ran into a stop notification not long after I started the process. The Windows 11 Setup check displayed a notice, “This PC Must Support Secure Boot.” This blog documents a workaround for the issue I had on my system (you may have a different system with a different issue/solution). To be clear, this is the noticed displayed by Windows 11 Setup: Caution: I do NOT recommend installing the Windows 11 ..read more

This is the third blog in a three part series designed to teach an administrator of Microsoft Office 365 environments how to add notifications to every email sent from outside an organization. As stated in Part One, marking all externally sourced emails like this provides a huge advantage to any organization as it makes it much more difficult for attackers to trick users into clicking on malicious emails. Blog Series Links: Part One: Office 365 External Email Notice Configuration – Part 1 Part Two: Office 365 External Email Notice Configuration – Part 2 Part Three (this one): Office 365 Extern ..read more

This is the second blog in a three part series designed to teach an administrator of Microsoft Office 365 environments how to add the word [External] to the subject line of every incoming email from outside an organization. As stated in Part One (link), marking all externally sourced emails like this provides a huge advantage to any organization as it makes it much more difficult for attackers to trick users into clicking on malicious emails. Blog Series Links: Part One: Office 365 External Email Notice Configuration – Part 1 Part Two (this one): Office 365 External Email Notice Configuration ..read more

The Exchange Online service in Microsoft 365 is one of the best in the world for email and collaboration services. When combined with services from Hotmail.com, Outlook.com and other Microsoft email systems, you can imagine the jaw dropping scale at which Microsoft operates. With the huge popularity of its services and the volume of email Microsoft processes every day, it, along with Gmail, Yahoo mail, and other services have also become a large target for phishing, spoofing, and other types of malicious emails. The number one goal of an attacker is to get the user to click on something. Often ..read more

Every year I review several annual threat reports by different companies who excel in the area of Cybersecurity. The reports from Verizon, Microsoft, Cisco, and SonicWall are some of my favorites to read as they provide a lot of great indicators of how attackers have and continue to shift their targets and strategies. It is very interesting to see the independent analysis of such large sets of signals by four very different companies with unique data sets, only to see very similar trend lines. I recently viewed the SonicWall 2021 Threat Report presentation that was released on April 1, 2021. A ..read more

If you read my blog just prior to this one about the new Microsoft Edge Password Monitor, you already know how great this feature is to help identify which of your credentials are floating around the Dark Web. Armed with information about which usernames/passwords you need to change, now you need to come up with passwords that look nothing like one another, keep them saved somewhere safe, and while all of that sounds simple, in reality it is not. So what is the next step? The answer comes from one of the most unique features of the new Microsoft Edge browser called Microsoft Edge Password Gene ..read more