Manage User Rights With Group Policy

Group Policy is nothing but flexible and extremely powerful when it comes to both configuration management and installation of software.  In addition, Group Policy is one of your best tools for securing your endpoints.  You can manage anything and everything from Firewall rules, account privileges, application white-listing, etc.  You can also manage user rights as well.

Computers and Users in your environment have a lot of rights, by default, that they don’t need.  Using Group Policy, we can manage these privileges and start to lock-down our environments without making it burdensome for our end users.  One such privilege is the ability to Log on Locally.

Cattle vs Unicorns

When organizations begin to think of users as cattle instead of unicorns we begin to remove their pride for, and their responsibility to, an organization.  When responsibility for their actions are only out of necessity or self-preservation then you have lost the battle, but not necessarily the war.  You can change people’s mindset but it just may take a little more effort.

I believe that people are the answer to most security problems.  Empowering people by making them part of your security team enhances their awareness and fosters a sense of shared responsibility.  Organizations that encourage (and consistently preach) a shared responsibility will have continual communication and awareness of their responsibilities in order to protect themselves and their fellow employees.  Those organizations that treat employee’s as another expense (or cattle) will push their employees away which allows them to disassociate themselves from their responsibility.  You have now created more resistance, and ultimately your security team has another force fighting against them - and not with them.

Understanding Group Policy Order

Group Policy order can be confusing. To understand how exactly Windows applies one GPO (Group Policy Object) versus another, you can use the “LSD OU” rule.

You should always ask yourself two questions when dealing with Group Policy:

1. Where are you (local, site, domain, or organizational unit)?
2. What are you (computer or user)?

Run Powershell Scripts as Immediate Scheduled Tasks With Group Policy

To run a PowerShell script on multiple computers via Group Policy, you can work with an Immediate Scheduled Task. The main advantage over logon scripts is that you can execute your script with admin rights.

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Add and Remove Users to Ad Groups With Group Policy

Group Policy allows you to add and remove users to an Active Directory (AD) group. Using this feature improves security because you can ensure that high-risk security groups only contain the users that you specify via Group Policy.

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Download Files From Github Without Git Using Powershell

Have you ever needed to download code or a repository from Github, but didn’t want to download and install Git on a machine, create an SSH key, etc. If so, I have something that you may like.

You can find the entire function here: https://github.com/MSAdministrator/GetGithubRepository

To use this function, you will need to know the path to the Github repository (of course) you want to download.  Once you have that URL, you will need to pass each piece of the URL into a parameter on the function.

Logging to the Windows Event Log in Your Powershell Scripts

As I discussed in my previous post, you can log information to a file, but sometimes you may want to log to the Windows Event Log.  To log to the Windows Event Log, you will need to use the following cmdlets:

• New-EventLog
• Write-EventLog