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CryptoWall 3.0 Ransomware – Ouch, It Hurts So Good…Get Out the Backup Tapes. You’ve Got Those Right?

Being the badass network admin that you are, you try to keep your servers up to date with all the latest Windows updates, you run antivirus on all your machines on your network and scan daily, you have made sure that none of your users have local admin rights to their machines so they can’t install any software, and so you think you are fairly well covered when it comes to viruses and spyware, well think again.

My company just got hit pretty hard with this new CryptoWall 3.0 virus. If you are unfamiliar with it, basically it encrypts any user accessible data on local and network shares that it has permissions to and holds it ransom for BitCoin payments. Continue reading “CryptoWall 3.0 Ransomware – Ouch, It Hurts So Good…Get Out the Backup Tapes. You’ve Got Those Right?”

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Windows Terminal Server – Three Ways to Disable AVG Tray Icon via Group Policy

I scoured the internet forever and a day to find a way to disable the AVG tray icon in a Windows Terminal Server environment because as with most people, even though to make any major changes in the AVG settings it does require an admin password, I didn’t want my users to be able to toy around in there even, let alone run a bunch of malicious scans and slow the server down for everybody or gain access to view our AVG Business license key. I even contacted AVG technical support and they didn’t have a solution to my problem and I find it extremely hard to believe that I am the only person out there in the world facing this issue.

Well, today I finally figured out a way to disable the AVG tray icon via Group Policy using Software Restriction Policies. By creating a rule to prevent the running of the “avgui.exe” process, you can essentially disable the tray icon. As long as you have your group policies structured so that your users OU get a different group policy than say the admins OU, then the admins can still get into AVG, run any scans, or change any settings inside AVG. I guess I should mention that you could use this for any OU for that matter that you didn’t want to have access to the AVG UI, it’s not just limited to Remote Desktop Servers. Pretty sweet!
Continue reading “Windows Terminal Server – Three Ways to Disable AVG Tray Icon via Group Policy”