FW Editor: What are your plans or objectives for the near future?
Steve Chaison: Helping others to understand how vulnerabilities in their applications can be attacked is important. Building defensible software products that are resilient to attack can save companies high clean up costs in the long run. I plan on giving some demonstrations to various technical folks on how some tools freely available on the Internet are used for both benevolent and malicious purposes. Of course, ADVantage Security Monitor is one of my 'beneficial' tools of choice as it provides administrators insight into interesting host activity in Active Directory® domains.

FW Editor: How and when did you start writing the code for ADVantage Security Monitor? What inspired you the most? Do you plan to develop new software, or are you more focused on optimizing the current ones?
Steve Chaison: I started writing ADVantage Security Monitor in 2007. It went through several style changes from console application to being a service to what it is today, a graphical UI that admins launch when needed. While the other styles of ADVantage had certain qualities that may be preferred in some situations, the latest version is, I think, better suited for the typical usage scenario.

FW Editor: Which is your favorite ADVantage Security Monitor feature? Why?
Steve Chaison: My favorite feature of ADVantage is its ability to log associated interesting information from Windows® hosts while running. Of course, this is common for a number of different types of monitoring software. As we know, not many of us have the luxury to sit and stare at an output window in order to catch interesting events.

FW Editor: Is there any limitation of how many computers can be tracked using ADVantage Security Monitor?
Steve Chaison: ADVantage Security Monitor can watch detailed process and network activity on one computer at a time. Just stop any active monitoring you may have running though, and point the application to a different target computer to monitor a different host.

FW Editor: What makes ADVantage Security Monitor so unique? Why it is superior to any similar software?
Steve Chaison: I had a need years ago to watch hosts and their network connections / processes in near real time and couldn't find one that easily did what I was looking for. I wrote ADVantage myself to achieve what I wanted. I added some administrative features like the ability to kill rogue remote processes and get host MAC address information which helped with incident response and communicating certain findings to other engineering staff so that they could assist in taking action where needed. I don't know of any other utility that does exactly this sort of thing for this particular environment and is free.

FW Editor: ADVantage Security Monitor is a great application and personally I love it. However, there are still many people who prefer to use similar software. What can you tell to convince them that ADVantage Security Monitor is better?
Steve Chaison: Well, other software often times requires users to have some level of special scripting knowledge or may time out and require payment to continue using it or unlock advanced features. ADVantage Security Monitor is intuitive and free and can target both your local workstation and remote hosts.

FW Editor: How can you characterize ADVantage Security Monitor in just a few words? Why?
Steve Chaison: ADVantage Security Monitor is an excellent tool that can be used for surveillance or troubleshooting and user support. Why? - It's built on technology that is made, by design, for Active Directory administrators to accomplish these tasks.

FW Editor: Do you have offer customer support for the ADVantage Security Monitor users?
Steve Chaison: Support is available when I have an opportunity to help. I'm a one man shop so I built ADVantage Security Monitor to be pretty intuitive added built in documentation to minimize the likelihood that users would require support. So far, that's been pretty successful. If users have questions, e-mails are welcome.

FW Editor: To end with, is there any message you would like to send to the ADVantage Security Monitor users?
Steve Chaison: Having managed Active Directory environments and networks myself for many years, I empathize with engineers and administrators who are tasked to do much more with less these days. I hope ADVantage Security Monitor helps in your particular case.