Kurt Shintaku's Blog

One of the largest attack vectors for malware writers is the browser.  90 percent of phishing emails, for example. use the browser to initiate attacks, which can then be used to help attackers establish a beachhead inside a company

To address this, we are announcing Windows Defender Application Guard: A new feature coming to Microsoft Edge in Windows 10 Enterprise (E3 or E5).

Coming in H1CY17, Windows Defender Application Guard essentially quarantines the browser. It will run unknown web sites within a virtualized container generated by Windows 10 Hyper-V, isolating it from the system & protecting the user.

In this way, any potential malware that the user stumbles upon is sandboxed & never gets access to anything real on the user’s system.  No real OS, applications, code, or hardware APIs are ever available to the malware.

Here’s a video on how this works.

For more information on this upcoming feature for Windows 10 Enterprise subscribers, visit:

• ANNOUNCEMENT: Introducing Windows Defender Application Guard for Microsoft Edge
  https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/09/27/application-guard-microsoft-edge/#O0fbT5EBdhFedI8i.97

Heard of AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, or any number of ad blockers, privacy shields, and other such add-ons for browsers? 

A fellow named Nik Rolls has ported an open source add-in to Microsoft Edge called “uBlock Origin” that is somewhat of a lesser known tool to consumers but is highly respected in the technical community.

uBlock Origin Adblocking, Privacy-shielding add-on for Microsoft Edge

WHAT IS IT?
uBlock Origin, simply put, is a highly efficient browser filter that is both light on CPU usage & extremely extensible.

• CPU USAGE
  The creators tout uBlock Origin to be optimized to not impact the user experience.  In my experience so far, they’ve done a stunning job compared to other tools which really bog down your browser experience with unexplained intermittent pauses, “not responding” freezes of the browser, HTML frame rendering that takes forever, etc.  This is a major win for this tool already in my mind compared to other blockers.
• EXTENSIBILITY
  This part is crazy.  uBlock Origin doesn’t just protect you using a single list of known ‘bad’ sites/domains.  Take a look at the following table that comes from the “uBlock Dashboard”, i.e. the configuration panel:
  

  This is a small example of the filters it comes with out of the box.  Filters for:

• Known malware sites
• Privacy-violating tracking sites
• Ads & banners
• Host lists of tracking services
• Sites known to use technical tricks to circumvent adblocking & anti-tracking tech
• Spam sites
• etc. etc.

And yes, the tool is FREE.

The one catch is that it’s still in ‘preview’, although it’s actually been available for several months now and there’s been very little that I’ve had a problem with.

I wholeheartedly encourage folks that are using Microsoft Edge to give uBlock Origin a try.  It’s been a real delight for me & provides a much better experience than many of the other adblocking, privacy shielding tools I’ve used to date.

• DOWNLOAD: uBlock Origin (PREVIEW) for Microsoft Edge
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/ublock-origin/9nblggh444l4

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A WORD ABOUT MICROSOFT EDGE
If you’ve gotten this far, it means you haven’t completely ruled out using Microsoft Edge as a browser – and that’s good. 

I’ve recently become a convert from IE/Firefox as my default browser to Edge.  Why?

1. Edge is FAST.  Everything renders extremely quickly relative to IE or Firefox.  It is missing a few features here and there but nothing has been a dealbreaker for me.
2. Edge is POWER EFFICIENT.  I can summarize the value of this in one sentence:  I have increased by laptop’s battery life by nearly ~40% ever since using Edge instead of Internet Explorer or Firefox.
3. Edge is SECURE. It has numerous protections built into it that make it the most secure browser… but it is also the only browser that will be protected by Windows Defender Application Guard for Windows 10 Enterprise. (E3 or E5)
   This feature, coming in H1CY17 quarantines the browser: It will run unknown web sites within a virtualized container generated by Windows Hyper-V, isolating it from the system & protecting the user. 
   Here’s a video on how this works.  
   Windows Defender Application Guard for Microsoft Edge

Version 16.1.0.456 of Skype for Business for Mac was announced last month.

Here’s a few of the items updated in this release:

• Contact group management features for Office 365 / Skype for Business Server 2015 customers
• Contact tagging for status changes
• Improvements to meetings reliability, sign-in, and chat

Read the announcement & download the bits from below if you don’t have Microsoft AutoUpdate turned on.

• ANNOUNCEMENT: "Skype for Business on Mac CU1 Released!"
  https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/nexthop/2016/11/22/skype-for-business-on-mac-cu1-released/
• DOWNLOAD: Skype for Business on Mac CU1
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54108

At Microsoft Ignite 2016 the Office 365 ProPlus deployment team released a brand new guide focused on making your organization’s Office 365 ProPlus deployment a success.

This guide has been created by a team of subject matter experts from the Office 365 Product Group, Office 365 Product Marketing Group, and delivery experts from Microsoft Services which provides a single source for the Office 365 ProPlus deployment guidance that you need to successfully deploy and manage Office 365 ProPlus, including recommended guidance for discovery of applications, preferred deployment scenarios and practices, recommended approaches for channel management, and reporting capabilities for licensing and usage.

Note: The guide is actually an 8.46MB OneNote notebook so you’ll need to have OneNote installed to use it.  Download it for free for Windows 10, Windows desktop, Windows Phone, Mac, iOS, & Android at https://www.onenote.com/Download.

• DOWNLOAD: Introducing the “Preferred Practices guide for Office 365 ProPlus Deployment”
  http://www.deployoffice.com/preferred-practices/

Fasttrack is a Microsoft service that comes with subscriptions to Office 365, Enterprise Mobility + Security Suite, Intune, & Azure RMS.  It provides engineers & architects to help folks onboard & deploy these cloud services – at no additional cost to you.

There’s a great presentation & video recording from Ignite 2016 out there called “Accelerate your Office 365 deployment with FastTrack”. The presentation goes over:

• What services Fasttrack provides
• What geographical coverage it supports
• Scenarios, resources, and the expectations you should have of Fasttrack
• Technical On-boarding capabilities of Fasttrack for
• Exchange Online
• SharePoint Online
• Skype for Business Online
• OneDrive for Business
• Office Pro Plus
• Yammer Enterprise
• Process & how to get started

View the presentation here:

• BRK3065 – Accelerate your Office 365 deployment with FastTrack
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Ignite-Content/BRK3065-Accelerate-your-Office-365-deployment-with-FastTrack/td-p/10458

PASStv is your virtual ticket into SQL PASS Summit: Keynotes, Women In Technology luncheon, sessions, & more!

And it’s FREE.  Here’s a list of sessions with recordings to view on-demand from Oct 26-28, 2016:

Wednesday, October 26

• 08:10 AM Interview: Patrick O’Keeffe, Dell Software & Denise McInerney, VP of Marketing, PASS
• 08:15 AM Day 1 Keynote – Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President of the Data Group, Microsoft
• 09:45 AM Interview: Neil Garrett, Idera and Argenis Fernandez, PASS SQLSaturday
• 10:45 AM Intro to Internals: How to Think Like the SQL Sever Engine by Brent Ozar
• 01:23 PM Interview: Rob Wallace, Pyramid Analytics & Ryan Adams, PASS Director, Chapters
• 01:30 PM Mobile BI and Dataviz with SQL Server 2016, R, and PowerBI by Jen Stirrup
• 02:45 PM Interview: Richard Macaskill, RedGate Software & Tim Ford, PASS Director Membership
• 03:10 PM Interview: Wendy Harms & Maurice De Vidts, HPE & Adam Jorgensen, PASS President
• 03:15 PM The Many Latencies of TempDB by Gail Shaw
• 04:45 PM This Batch-Mode Window Aggregate Operator Will Change Your Life! by Itzik Ben-Gan

Thursday, October 27

• 08:10 AM Interview: Bill Preachuk, Hortonworks & Adam Jorgensen, PASS President
• 08:15 AM Day 2 Keynote "Data Warehousing in the Cloud" by David DeWitt, Adjunct Professor, MIT
• 09:45 AM Interview: Thomas LaRock, SolarWinds & Wendy Pastrick, Director, PASS Virtual Chapters
• 10:15 AM SQL Server 2016: It Just Runs Faster by Bob Ward
• 11:30 AM Interview: Kellyn Gorman, Delphix & Allen White, Director, PASS Program
• 11:45 AM Women in Technology Keynote: Leadership, The Missing 33%, and Career Success for Women, presented by Kelly Lockwood Primus, Leading Women
• 01:15 PM Interview: John McAllister, Profisee & Wendy Pastrick, Director, PASS Virtual Chapters
• 01:30 PM Recovery Models Made SIMPLE by Kalen Delaney
• 02:45 PM Interview: Kevin Kline, SentryOne and Ryan Adams, Director, PASS Chapters
• 03:15 PM Power BI for the Enterprise by Sirui Sun, Sivakumar Harinath
• 04:45 PM UNPLUGGED: SQL Server 2016 by Scott Klein, Rohan Kumar
• 06:00 PM Building an SSRS Monitoring System by Stacia Varga
• 07:15 PM Safe-Guard Your Career: How to Work Better as a Team and Between Departments by Richard Bolesta

Friday, October 28

• 08:00 AM Optimizing Multi-Billion Row Tables in Tabular by Marco Russo
• 09:15 AM Interview: Kevin Petrie, Attunity & Jen Stirrup, Director, PASS Business Analytics
• 09:30 AM Advanced Power BI: Solving the Hard Problems by Devin Knight
• 11:15 AM How to move databases around in Azure by Andre Kamman
• 12:45 PM Database Security in SQL Server 2016 and Beyond by Denny Cherry
• 02:00 PM Developing Highly Concurrent Databases by Michael J Swart
• 03:30 PM Mitigating a SQL Server Upgrade Disaster by Victor Isakov

View the recordings site here:

• VIDEO: SQL PASS Summit 2016 “PASStv” On-Demand Recordings
  http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2016/PASStv.aspx

I really like this list as a guideline for folks considering security for their cloud solutions.  Here’s consideration #1, pictured to the right.

It’s part of the Microsoft Secure blog, a blog dedicated to Microsoft’s point of view on security, privacy, reliability, and trust. It’s the place to go for in-depth articles on Microsoft products and services, as well as tips and recommendations for improving security in your organization.

Here is a larger list of 8 questions to think about for adaptive cloud security. Step 1: Check your budget.

To read the full list, visit:

• BLOG: Managing cloud security: Four key questions to evaluate your security position
  http://blogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2016/08/15/managing-cloud-security-four-key-questions-to-evaluate-your-security-position/?wt.mc_id=DX_873533

On October 25-28, 2016, SQL PASS 2016 took place in Seattle, WA – the world’s largest gathering of SQL Server and BI professionals.

If you’re interested in downloading the SQL PASS 2016 Keynote from Day 2 entitled, “Datawarehousing in the Cloud” by David J. DeWitt & Willis Lang, I’ve got the deck below.

• DOWNLOAD: PASS 2016 Keynote – “Datawarehousing in the Cloud”
  https://1drv.ms/p/s!Ao0Dfn8MQdoApJc5LsLGdXZpZ8Tp9A

Starting in February 2017, Microsoft will no longer support Project 2013 (through Office 365 or MSI) connecting to Project Online. Customers who need to connect to Project Online will need to move to Project 2016.

For more information, please check out Premier PFE, Brooks White’s blog here:

• After February 2017, no more support for Project 2013 with Project Online
  https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/brookswhite/2016/10/29/after-february-2017-no-more-support-for-project-2013-with-project-online/

We announced 2 new support offerings: Windows Server Premium Assurance and SQL Server Premium Assurance. These offerings add 6 more years of product support for Windows Server and SQL Server, allowing for a minimum of 16 years of total support:

• 5 years for Mainstream Support
• 5 years of Extended Support
• 6 years of Premium Assurance

The additional support period provides Security Updates and Bulletins rated “Critical” and “Important” (see the Security Bulletin Severity Rating System for definitions) for both products.

To learn more about Windows Server Premium Assurance and SQL Server Premium Assurance, and the six additional years of product support they provide, read the datasheet. The new offerings will be available early next year.

For more details, read the announcement blog post here:

• BLOG: Introducing Windows Server Premium Assurance and SQL Server Premium Assurance
  https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/hybridcloud/2016/12/08/introducing-windows-server-premium-assurance-and-sql-server-premium-assurance/