Software Update: Sysinternals Suite 2014-08-05

Microsoft has released a new version of the Sysinternals Suite. This package is a collection of useful tools for managing systems and obtaining comprehensive information about the computer. In this way all kinds of problems can be detected and remedied.

The individual tools are developed by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, initially for Sysinternals and since 2006 for Microsoft. Some examples are Process Explorer, Bginfo, contig and disk mon. In total it concerns a collection of 70 different tools. By the way, the latest versions of the individual programs can also be here are being found. In the past three months, the following parts of the Suite have been updated:

Sysmon v1.0:
We’re excited to announce Sysmon, a new Sysinternals utility that monitors and reports key system activity via the Windows event log, including detailed information about process creation, network connections and file creation timestamp changes. With Sysmon installed on your systems, you can collect and analyze these events to identify the presence of attackers, and correlate events across your network to track them as they traverse your network.

Autoruns v12.01:
This update to Autoruns, a utility that comes in Windows application and command-line forms, has numerous bug fixes, adds a profile attribute/column to CSV and XML output, and interprets the CodeBase value for COM object registrations.

Core Info v3.3:
Coreinfo is a command-line utility that reports comprehensive information about a system’s processors, including their cache sizes and topology, memory latency, and processor features, now reports virtual memory address width as well as support for many additional instructions, including PT, SHA, MPX, CFLUSHOPT, and AVX variants.

Process exp v16.03:
This release of Process Explorer, a process viewing and control utility, fixes several bugs, including one where moving the mouse over the information graphs could cause it to crash and another that could cause a crash when checking Virus Total results.