PrtScn

If you liked my earlier post about Snip and Sketch I've come across another feature of this. Remember that this capability was introduced in Windows 10 1809.

Go to Settings and search for Print Screen.

Click on "Use the Print Screen key to launch screen snipping".

Slice this button to "On".

Now when you press the PrtScn key the new Snip and Sketch control will be presented.

Clicking on the screen icon will capture the entire screen.

Don't forget the old capability of holding the Alt key when you press the PrtScn to capture just the active window. This still works with the PrtScn key remapped. As well, if you press the PrtScn key first and then hold the Alt key while you click on the screen icon you'll only capture the active window.

Try it.

VPNs

Recently one of my co-workers sent me this article (archive.is). He asked:

What do you think of his assessment that VPNs are worthless and you are better off with HTTP Anywhere, etc?

That's not going to be a quick answer.

Just before a promotion for a commercial VPN service, the author says:

VPN services don’t make you more secure on the internet. Install HTTPS Everywhere, install an ad blocker and change your DNS settings to Quad9 or Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1.

There are 3 points in there:

1. Install HTTPS Everywhere
2. Install an ad blocker
3. Change your DNS settings to Quad9 or Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1

HTTPS Everywhere forces HTTPS connections to any site that supports HTTPS even if the initial request is HTTP. I haven't tried HTTPS Everywhere but that's a good idea. Personally most sites that I use already force me to HTTPS anyway.

Oh, HTTPS can be spoofed. If someone has put a root certificate authority (CA) certificate on your device it could self-sign an HTTPS certificate and take a man-in-the-middle position decrypting your supposedly HTTPS traffic. At that point they could send it as HTTP or just scrape off your confidential information. This has happened more than once.

At one time, Google's Chrome validated the HTTPS certificate in use for Google sites to the one that they had issued and complained it there wasn't a match. I've heard that that is no longer happening.

To mitigate this risk, run sigcheck.exe (my blog) regularly.

And to ad-blockers.

I use uBlock Origin. Here's a comparison of cnet.com without and with uBlock Origin active.

Without

With

Not only does a good ad-blocker block the presentation of ads but it blocks any malware that potentially goes along with it. And it significantly reduces the bandwidth required.

Now to DNS.

While changing your DNS to or 1.1.1.1 or 9.9.9.9 seems like a good idea, it's not that simple.

If your scope of control DOESN'T include the Internet facing router, e.g. in a network that's not YOURS, then you really don't have ANY control over what server resolves your DNS queries. Even if your device sends a DNS request to 1.1.1.1, a malicious router can map that to a malicious DNS server and you'll get the response back from it. It can even NAT the responding IP address back to 1.1.1.1 so you'll never know.

If your scope of control DOES include the Internet facing router, e.g. in a network that is YOURS, then set the DNS server in your router to 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, or 9.9.9.9. I don't really distrust Comcast's DNS servers but why not use one whose goal is to be secure and fast?

But back to the non-owned environment. Since you really can't trust legacy DNS resolution you have a couple of choices.

First, you could use a VPN provider that you trust. You do need to make sure that the VPN sends DNS requests through the tunnel and not just lets the local network (malicious?) resolve them. I'm not sure how to determine that but there's probably a way.

Second, you could use a client app that implements DNS over HTTPS (DoH) or DNS over TLS (DoT). Both of these protocols send DNS requests through an encrypted session so it can't be intercepted in flight. Even then you have to trust the DNS server that is at the end of the encrypted tunnel. There's a deep dive on this here (archive.is). There's a cryptic article from Google here (archive.is).

This is not a simple discussion.

Chrome Password Checker

If you're not using Google's Chrome browser you should be.

Now that you are using Chrome, install the Password Checker extension.

This new extension will automatically check whether your user id / password has been exposed in a data breach. If it finds a match it will warn you.

Friends Don't Let Friends

Microsoft Azure has had another round of problems.

Microsoft Office 365 users in Europe unable to access mailboxes for a full day

Microsoft cloud services see global authentication outage

Microsoft threw Level 3 under the bus on the second outage.

On the Azure status page, Microsoft indicated that the source of the problem is with Level 3, an US-based ISP that provides connectivity and various other services to Microsoft data centers.

At least customers could get to the Azure status page this time.

So I went of to downdetector.com. Here's what they showed several hours after the problem seemed to be resolved.

1600 incidents reported to downdetector.com at the peak.

And impacting several continents.

But Level 3 (CenturyLink) is a backbone provider. Shouldn't a Level 3 problem have affected many service providers?

So back to downdetector.com. Here's what they reported for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

No apparent correlation to the time of the Azure outage and less than 10 incidents reported in the worst hour.

So it must not be a backbone issue impacting multiple service providers?

Not so quick.

AWS' incidents were from the same geography as Azure's.

My assessment:

• Level 3 (or some backbone provider) probably had an incident that affected all its customers.
• AWS was able to tolerate the backbone outage better than Azure.

YOU get to decide where you want to put YOUR data.