Reformatting a flash drive formatted as ISO

By | October 4, 2023

Typically, when a flash drive is formatted from an ISO image, the flash drive will be formatted as an ISO9660 type and not want to be re-formatted or erased easily. Take a look at Gparted showing a flash drive below with the Linux Mint ISO on it.

When I attempt to delete the Partition in GParted, it is greyed out. If you try to format it, you will also get an error. The proper method is to use a command like:

sudo dd status=progress if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sde bs=4k && sync

The problem is this takes forever to run and zero out the entire flash drive. What I do is probably considered some hillbilly method but it works and works fairly quickly. I only seem to need to use this method when I want to reformat a flash drive shown as an ISO format. I run the shred -v command and let it run for about 10% to 15% (Which takes only a couple of minutes typically). I then hit CTRL C to cancel the operation.

Remove the flash drive and re-insert it. Now go into Gparted and create a partition table and format the flash drive any way you want.

Now I format the flash drive however I want. In this case, I formatted it as a Fat32.

Formatted to Fat32 and ready to be used.

Maybe I’ll post a more proper method later, but the above is down and really dirty but works quickly.

Using Powershell to read registry HKEY_USERS

By | August 30, 2023
Script execution. Shows the wallpaper path and file used for each user account in HKEY_USERS of the Windows registry.

Download files from website via Powershell

By | August 11, 2023

A simple method I like to use when I want to quickly run a powershell script to download a file from a webserver. I use this when endpoints are not on an internal network so a network share is not always available, but since I am usually remotely calling the powershell script, Internet access is established.

The commandlet I use is Invoke-RestMethod. I provide the source url for the file on a webserver to download and the destination, and I’m done. Extremely simple and extremely effective. There are so many ways to do this, but this is the method I personally use the most.

The below example is what I have used to download the CleanZoom utility from Zoom that will remove any installed versions of Zoom on an endpoint, save the file in a temporary directory and then execute the utility.

Scareware is not dead

By | June 19, 2023

An email was forwarded to me that came from a security MSP trying to stir up business with someone at the company I work at. Their quasi-scareware email was funny, but a horrible way for us to take seriously. Only thing missing was a sentence asking for bitcoin.

I remember several years ago, companies were scanning their web server logs and doing DNS look-ups to find out what companies visited their website. Then the Spam and cold call of sales would begin. That tactic finally died off……mostly. The below email was not sent to our company from a DNS look-up scrape (I know, as our external IP’s at work can barely can tell you what state we are in), it was pure spam. Probably someone going through Linkedin and such finding contacts.

If you send an email that begins like this, we cannot take you seriously.

Ah, remembering the good ole days, when the scareware looked like an actual alert: