Russ McRee over at HolisticInfoSec.org wrote a great article talking about Mandiant Highlighter that I and Jason Luttgens wrote. We just released a minor bug fix version, 1.1.3. Here’s the link.

holisticinfosec.blogspot.com/2011/10/toolsmith-log-analysis-with-highlighter.html

Here’s the link to the download:

www.mandiant.com/products/free_software/highlighter/

Here’s a link to the forums:

forums.mandiant.com/forum/highlighter

I’ve been using Window 7 pre-release on my home desktop for a couple weeks now and it’s probably a decent time to jot down some thoughts.

I really dig most elements of the user interface: the organization of the screen, as well as the addition of Mac-ish features like preview from the taskbar, make it pretty easy to find directories (aka folders) when you aren’t necessarily good at navigating that sort of thing. I believe there are a few more elements from Vista-land that Vista users have shown me, but I forget to check it when I get home.

I’m am not sure I like the way Win7 handles the congregation of the My Documents folders. I haven’t looked too far into this, but the requirement that I add folders to My Documents instead of just switch where that folder is located is sort of annoying.

The thing that I truly dislike is how hard it is to act like an administrator. When I’m an admin, I don’t ever want to have to use the “Run as administrator” option. I even disable UAC and still am hamstrung when installing or trying to delete certain files. It’s very frustrating when I’m so used to the XP experience, so I’m going to definitely check out what I’m doing wrong there.

Overall I report positive things. I think the average Windows user will like the changes. Being a true power-user, there are a few things I would like to see or use differently.

My computer died… all of a sudden… for no apparent reason.

My main home desktop is was Windows XP SP3.

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let you know that MANDIANT Highlighter v1.1.1 is released and ready to rock and roll!

MANDIANT is proud to announce a new version of Highlighter (version 1.1.1).

We use Outlook 2007 at work to manage all our emails, calendars, and contacts.

Ok, so Highlighter is that log file analysis tool that Jason Luttgens and I created and Nick Harbour contributed a huge amount to in version 1.1 (thanks Nick!).

Jason Luttgens and I were interviewed by Bret Padres and Ovie Carroll over at the CyberSpeak podcast regarding our log analysis tool, Highlighter. Take some time to listen if you’re interested — the interview begins at 18m 10s, though I recommend listening to the whole podcast because those guys are fun and their content relevant.