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Practical articles from KomuraSoft LLC about website development, SEO, Google Ads, Windows development, legacy asset reuse, and bug investigation.
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Windows Security Audit Policy and Event Log Investigation in Practice — Becoming an IT Team That Can Read Event 4625
A practical guide for answering "please look into the failed sign-in logs." It covers the relationship between basic and advanced audit policy, the subcatego...
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A Practical Guide to Windows LAPS — Retiring the Shared Local Administrator Password Across All PCs
A shared local administrator password across every PC is fertile ground for Pass-the-Hash attacks, where the compromise of one machine spreads to all of them...
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The Windows Certificate Store in Practice — User or Computer, Which Should You Use?
Should a client certificate go in the user store or the computer store? This practical guide works systematically through the classic certificate mistakes — ...
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The Windows Firewall and Business Applications — Register Inbound Rules From the Installer
"It works on the dev machine but the client can't connect" almost always traces back to the Windows Firewall. This article covers the default-block-inbound b...
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Windows Update Management After WSUS Deprecation — How to Choose Between WUfB, Autopatch, and Intune
Microsoft announced the deprecation of WSUS in September 2024. It is not stopping immediately, but new feature development has ended. This article lays out f...
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BitLocker Practical Guide — Drive Encryption Starting With Recovery Key Management
From Windows 11 24H2 onward, clean installs enable device encryption by default, and "suddenly finding out it's encrypted" incidents are now happening in pra...
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Why Are Passkeys Secure? — An Illustrated Guide to Authentication That Never Sends a Secret
An illustrated explanation of why passkeys are secure: the public-key cryptography that keeps the private key off the server and off the wire, why phishing c...
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The Depths of Windows I/O (Part 6, Final) — Filter Drivers and Minifilters: Why Procmon and Antivirus Scanners Can Intercept I/O
The final instalment of a series illustrating Windows filter drivers and minifilters. It covers the Filter Manager and altitudes, pre/post callbacks, how Pro...
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The Depths of Windows I/O (Part 5) — NTFS Internals: Understanding the File System Through the MFT
Part 5 of a series explaining NTFS internals with diagrams. Covers the MFT and file records, multiple data streams (Zone.Identifier), hard links and 8.3 name...
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The Depths of Windows I/O (Part 4) — Cache Manager: When Does Your WriteFile Actually Reach the Disk?
Part 4 of an illustrated series on the Windows cache manager. It covers the cache implemented as a file mapping, read-ahead and lazy writing, how to choose b...