Servant-of-Inos

A lightweight method to detect portable or unauthorized software in a Windows domain environment.

Uses Group Policy, Scheduled Tasks, a VBScript wrapper, and PowerShell to scan endpoints and collect results centrally without relying on SCCM or traditional inventory.

That’s actually pretty interesting

I’m not very optimistic given how tightly this thing is coupled to Windows and ActiveX, but I might still give it a try just out of curiosity.

You are absolutely right. From a strategic and business standpoint, hiring a specialized engineering firm to overhaul this is the only correct long-term move. I entirely agree.

However, I'm the systems administrator tasked with keeping the lights on and securing the endpoints today. I don't control the hiring budget, the strategic roadmap, or the checkbook. My immediate goal is practical risk mitigation: stripping local admin rights from standard users to secure our network, while keeping this legacy ship afloat until management approves that multi-year overhaul. Hence my current trench warfare with Procmon and shims.

That's a valid point, but the scale makes it far from trivial. We are talking about the energy sector here, it's high-stakes and high-load. The current backend isn't just a simple SQL instance; a standard MySQL/Postgres setup would likely choke under the sheer volume of real-time sensor data coming in every few seconds.

Rewriting the client isn't just a matter of "money", it's about finding specialized engineers who understand these specific industrial protocols and high-throughput architectures. In our field, "intermediate solutions" can take years to certify and deploy. That’s why we’re forced to maintain this legacy IE/ActiveX stack in a secure way while we evaluate long-term infrastructure overhauls.