runas and UAC token filtering: why your admin window is not elevated
runas starts a program under a different account than the one you are signed in with. It is the built-in answer to…
Security and access
Permissions, elevation and certificates: icacls, takeown, runas and UAC, certutil and OpenSSL.
whoami /all in Windows: read your access token correctly
whoami does not ask Windows who you are. It prints what is already inside the access token that Windows built for your…
takeown in Windows: take ownership of files and folders safely
Administrator rights do not grant access to a file. They grant the ability to take ownership of it, and ownership is what…
RDP security warning after April 2026 Windows update (KB5083769): what it is and how to respond
After installing the April 2026 Windows security update, users started seeing a new dialog every time they open an .rdp file —…
ICACLS command in Windows
NTFS permissions control who can read, write, and execute files and folders on Windows. icacls is the command-line tool for viewing and…
How to Generate SSL Certificates with OpenSSL
OpenSSL is the standard command-line toolkit for working with certificates, keys, and SSL As a system administrator, you will use it to…
Discovering Certificate Authorities (CAs) in Your Domain
You are on a domain-joined Windows machine, someone asks you to submit a CSR to the CA, and nothing in front of…
certutil -encode and -decode: Base64 encoding files from the Windows command line
certutil is a built-in Windows utility primarily used for certificate management, but it also supports Base64 encoding and decoding of files directly…