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Original release date: October 17, 2019
Summary

On January 14, 2020, Microsoft will end extended support for their Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems.[1] After this date, these products will no longer receive free technical support, or software and security updates.

Organizations that have regulatory obligations may find that they are unable to satisfy compliance requirements while running Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Technical Details

All software products have a lifecycle. “End of support” refers to the date when the software vendor will no longer provide automatic fixes, updates, or online technical assistance. [2]

For more information on end of support for Microsoft products see the Microsoft End of Support FAQ.

Systems running Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will continue to work at their current...

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Digging into old software, or software written on different systems, often ends up resulting in a mismatch in encoding types. Given how common this can be, most flavors of Linux and macOS come with a built-in utility for converting files between various encoding types in iconv. To use it, simply provide the source format as a -f and the target format as a -t. In the below example we’ll also bring a sourcefile.txt in using the < and kick out a targetfile.txt, or the file with the source converted using a >:

iconv -f KOI8-U -t utf-16 < sourcefile.txt > destinationfile.txt

You could also pipe the output of an echo into a screen if there isn’t that much text. In the above example we’re bringing in a file using an old Russian encoding scheme and kicking it out as UTF-16; however, there are dozens of encoding standard supported. To see a list of them, use –list with the command:

iconv --list

The post...

The nc (or netcat) binary is useful for a variety of TCP or UDP operations. You can open a listener, proxy connections, open a connection to another device, and port scan a device. And you can do it all through TCP and/or UDP, define ports, and scripting with nc is pretty easy.

So in the below code we’ll start a while loop and then execute an echo of a header so a browser knows how to interpret what we’re sharing, which is a cat of our file. Then we’ll pipe that into netcat with a -l option so we can define the port and end the loop.

while TRUE; do { echo -e 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n'; cat /Users/ce/Desktop/fancy.pdf; } | nc -l 8000; done

You’ll then see standard agent information about visitors to your web server as follows (From a Firefox browser running on a Mac):

Host: 10.15.43.212:8000
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0
Accept: image/webp,/
Accept-Language: en-US,en;...

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I’ve written about .DS_Store files before (e.g. https://krypted.com/mac-os-x/no-more-ds_store-files/ to remove the files on file shares ). The .DS_Store is a ***file*** that has some custom attributes of the folder it’s in, such as a background image for the folder (e.g. in disk images with installers that get expanded and then show you a little arrow to copy the folder to the hard drive /Applications is a common use), spotlight comments, and then the .DS_Store also contains icon positions. This all goes back to Finder apps interpreting objects in a foreign file system kind of world.

Turns out that that a number of vendors have built exceptions for .DS_Store files because it makes programs run improperly sometimes. Therefore, if you call a folder .DS_Store, it’s a cute and fun place to hide things. Data needs to be set free and shouldn’t be hidden...

This document describes the security content of iOS 12.3.