SQL Under Siege: The Hidden Threats Lurking in Your Databases

GroupPolicy Module When you create a new Group Policy, you can set a comment (or description). There is no apparent way, however, to change the description later. Here is code that allows you to retrieve a group policy, then read and/or change the description. Make...

All PowerShell versions With Get-Acl, you can output the security information from files and folders as plain text in SDDL format (Security Descriptor Definition Language): $FolderToRead = 'C:\folder1' $securityDescriptor = Get-Acl -Path $FolderToRead...

All PowerShell Versions Here is a clever trick how to find out how many lines a string (not a string array!) contains: $text = @' This is some sample text Let's find out the number of lines. '@ $text.Length - $text.Replace("`n",'').Length...

All PowerShell Versions To find the smallest and largest item in a range of numbers, use Measure-Object: $list = 1,4,3,1,3,12,990 $result = $list | Measure-Object -Minimum -Maximum $result.Minimum $result.Maximum This works for any input data and any data type. Here...

All PowerShell versions When you use Get-ChildItem to get a list of files, you may have noticed that the -Filter parameter occasionally returns more files than you’ve expected. Here is an example of this. This line does not just return files with a...

Test-Path can test whether or not a given file or folder exists. This works fine for paths that use a drive letter, but can fail with pure UNC paths. At its simplest, this should return $true, and it does (provided you did not disable your administrative shares):...

Credential objects contain a username and a password. You can create them using Get-Credential, and then supply this object to any cmdlet that has the -Credential parameter. However, what do you do if you want your scripts to run without user intervention yet...

Beginning in PowerShell 3.0, there is a new automatic variable available called $PSScriptRoot. This variable previously was only available within modules. It always points to the folder the current script is located in (so it only starts to be useful once you actually...

By default, Active Directory returns only the first 1000 search results when you use an ADSISearcher. This is a security mechanism designed to prevent unspecific LDAP queries from causing domain controller load. If you do need all search results and know that it will...

Converting SID from Binary to String Active Directory accounts contain the SID in binary form. To convert the byte array into a string representation, use a .NET function like this: # get current user $searcher =...

When you export Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to CSV files, Excel by default saves CSV files in ANSI encoding. That's bad because special characters will break once you import the data into PowerShell using Import-Csv. Ensuring UTF-8 Encoding for CSV Files To make sure...