Category: How-Tos
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Practical Retrieval Authorization Patterns for RAG Systems
Teams are adopting AI assistants fast, often without treating retrieval as a new access path. This practical guide explains how to secure RAG systems with real authorization patterns: preserve permissions through chunking, enforce policy at retrieval time, separate trust zones, and keep adoption moving with guardrails instead of friction intact.
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Secrets and Tokens: Rotation SLAs, Blast Radius, and Attacker Dwell Time
Long-lived secrets are not harmless leftovers. They are blast radius waiting for an incident. This post breaks down rotation SLAs, attacker dwell time, delegated OAuth risk, and the operational habits that keep non-human credentials from becoming tomorrow’s breach path. Built for practitioners who have to run the mess in production.
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Agent Inventory and the Agent Register: The Control You Need Before Agent Sprawl Becomes Identity Debt
AI agents do not create a new governance problem so much as a faster identity problem. This post explains why agent inventories, Agent Registers, and ownership discipline matter, how discovery differs from authorization, and what teams need to prove scope, effective access, lifecycle, and accountability before something breaks in production.
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Configure Windows NTP Time Sync (Windows 10 / Windows 11)
I first wrote about this after getting smacked by what is, these days, an edge case IT problem: bad time sync, causing problems that looked like something else. This was at the start of COVID. Our team was all now working remotely, and one of our first in-person syncs during…
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Use Device Groups to Automate Investigations in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Back in 2019, I wrote about using machine groups in Microsoft Defender ATP to automatically resolve investigations on selected systems. The core idea was simple: not every endpoint should be handled the same way, and security teams need a way to apply different remediation behavior to different classes of machines.…
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Create an S-Mode Image of Windows 10
A Quick Guide for the IT Pro With the latest Windows 10 (Build 1809) release Windows 10 S was moved from an independent image on the installation media, to a mode you can apply to any SKU of windows 10. While in principle, this is a great addition to the…
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