Virmansec Event Success!

Elhamdulilah, the presentation I gave on conficker at the Microsoft Innovation Center, Riyadh was a success.

The presentation can be downloaded from here:
http://staff.kfupm.edu.sa/coe/shafei/downadup.zip

The powerpoint slides is mostly pictures and it may not be of much benefit to those who havent attended. However, a lot of the technical information has already been mentioned here this blog. The presentation style was inspired by the best presentation gurus such as:
- bio/intro and overall structure as by Garr Reynolds
- slides and graphics as by Dick Hardt and Seth Godin
- speaking freely as by Guy Kawasaki
- walking freely as by Steve Riley

Running the powerpoint will be a bit heavy on a windows OS. had to optimize my operating system in order for it to run smoothly on a projector with completely no lag. This is what I have done to have a lag-free presentation:
1. Disabled all real-time protection tools including firewall. (assuming you are not connected to the internet)
2. Disabled automatic updates
3. Disabled Task Scheduler via services mmc
4. Disabled screensaver, and all power saving options.
5. Disabled wireless connection and all related processes. (left bluetooth on for my bluetooth mouse/pointer)
6. Disabled all unneccessary processes. In my task manager I had a total of 28 processes left running on an XP machine. I preferred not to disable other OS processes because I had to run a demo on the same machine.

Conficker Presentation at Riyadh

God willing, I will be doing a presentation at the Microsoft Innovation Center on fighting the Conficker worm. This a highly technical presentation mainly targeted towards enterprise environments. The presentation includes live demos on infected machines. Microsoft Corporation (MSFT), Virmansec and R-Tech will be sponsoring the event.
The presentation covers all possible techniques in detecting and removing conficker for enterprises.

Attendance and registration is for free. Snacks and refreshments are also for free. If you are in Riyadh, please take the time to read and register for the event here:
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/472252520

Advanced knowledge about windows NT operating systems and active directory is a must.

Server 2008 RMS Installation Problem

I spent a few days trying to implement a simulation environment to test windows Rights Management Services and some third-party plugins on a server 2008 native. Every time I attempt to install RMS 2008 I was confronted with the following error message:

Error: Attempt to configure Active Directory Rights Management Server failed. An error was encountered while trying to provision AD RMS. Remove and re-install AD RMS to attempt provisioning again.

Despite uninstall/reinstalling the RMS service several times and verifying all the pre-requisites the error message still popped-up. I have followed every single line mentioned in the microsoft guide but yet the error re-appeared. There were absolutely no log files or events to explain the acause of the error. Also I couldnt find any solution on the internet that worked.
Almost giving up, my partner and I resorted to an unexpected solution..... changing the AD domain name.
RMS 2008 seemed to distaste single lettered domain names such as A.com and B.com that we initially tried to use. This was a bit strange since RMS 2003 worked fine using these same test domain names.

So after the changing the domain name to demo.com seemed to work with us in getting rid of the mysterious error message.

With courtesy of Samer Alotaiby.