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On one of the security mailing lists I follow, someone had an interesting conundrum. His management wants a 100% effective spam stopping solution. My bosses are demanding 100% spam prevention, and I’d like to find some industry papers, articles, etc … that explains why that’s not advisable (if even possible). My understanding is that spamRead more

I came across a blog post from Virus Bulletin today, explaining that anti-spam solutions displayed significantly lower spam catch rates [in their latest test] than in other recent tests. To explain this drop, Virus Bulletin hypothesized that spammers are doing a better job at avoiding blacklists. This reminded me of a blog post from John Levine,Read more

In my previous article, I outlined how one could monitor a performance counter and send alerts to a pager or smartphone on a Windows 2003 server. This is how to do it on Windows Server 2008: Create a command-line script (batch file) that will be called to send the alert. First, I usually create aRead more

As an administrator, developer, support technician, or a quality analyst who works with email or network solutions, you probably often face issues caused by a network component that fails randomly. For example, a DNS server could time out sporadically, or the SMTP server rejects recipients because it doesn’t feel like accepting them. So you startRead more

Before investing in an expensive tool to monitor the performance of your various applications, it’s important to know that Windows is equipped with many of the tools you need.  If the applications provide performance counters, the Performance Monitor utility makes it easy to keep track of dynamically changing statistics. I’ll use an example to illustrate:Read more