Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I had on my list to talk also about another Windows internals site that includes some great tools and also great information. The site is www.sysinternals.com. I had planned to talk about this site on my blog todo list but it has jumped up my priorities a bit as http://www.groundside.com/blog/content/DuncanMills/ - (broken link) Duncan Mills and Damon Cortesi both emailed me to suggest that sysinternals is a great site, up to date and full of great tools that cannot be done without if you run on Windows. I first came across sysinternals quite a few years ago partly because they used to get a mention from time to time in DDJ or MSJ or Windows Developer or one of the other many magazines I read and used to read. I think, I first visited the site a few years ago because someone recommended FileMon for use to solve a problem we had at the time on a job I was working on.

Sysinternals is a site run, created and maintained by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. It includes a good array of free tools, source code and technical information useful to those exploring Windows itself or those wanting to monitor what a program is doing whilst it is running. This is something hackers and crackers do so you should be aware of the tools that hackers could use. Of course most if not all of these tools are also valid options for general monitoring and maintenance..:-)

The site includes a very impressive array of utilities including file and disk tools, security tools, networking tools, process and thread tools, system information tools and miscellanious tools. There is also a lot of source code for utilities, http://www.sysinternals.com/Information.html - (broken link) information, forums, newsletters etc. This is again a superb site for the depth of information and the large collection of free tools.