Oh, and very importantly, It’s that time of the year! Security Bloggers Meetup invites have gone out.

Open Tabs 12/18/11:

• California creates special unit to fight computer crimes – It’s about time.
• Silicon Valley execs blast SOPA in open letter – I’m afraid that no matter how much we blast this piece of crud, it’s going to happen.  They’ll slip it by us some day, just watch.
• Mandates can’t alter facts – Here’s the letter itself, explaining why SOPA wouldn’t work in the long run
• China-based hacking of 760 companies reflects an undeclared Cyber Cold War – At least they didn’t say ‘APT’. 
• China’s cyberwar - More on the situation with China
• French President’s residence ‘busted’ for BitTorrent piracy – I wonder what it would look like if we started looking at our own Congressmen’s IP’s in YouHaveDownloaded.com?
• Researchers:  Google gamed browser report that dissed Firefox – NSS Labs is disputing findings in a recent report by Accuvant.  

Oh, and the kids got me to start playing Minecraft as well.  Good thing there are a lot of long holiday weekends coming up.

Open Tabs 11/22/11:

• Death by Exception – As a recovering QSA (the taint doesn’t wash off), I can sympathize with Michelle’s frustration with exceptions.  It really isn’t an ‘exception’ once it becomes the rule.
• The “Off the Record” track – There’s really no such thing as “off the record”.  But for some reason, I’ve noticed that people become more guarded and less likely to talk when they first 
• AT&T tells users of ‘organized and systematic’ hack attempt – Glad to see they’re warning people and not invoking the “APT” card.  Yet.
• Hacker says Texas town used three character password to secure internet facing SCADA system – I wonder if the three letters were “APT”? 

If you know a veteran, today would be a good day to tell them thanks.  I ‘repaired’ radios long ago and far away on a little artillery base in Germany.  I put repair in quotes because our job was to say “Yep, it’s broken”, replace the radio and send the broken one off for repair by someone who actually did electronics troubleshooting.  I was lucky and my enlistment was during a relatively peaceful time, but we have hundreds of thousands vets out there who saw events and actions most of us can’t even imagine.  Please respect them for their sacrifices.

I haven’t done this in a few days, so there’s a lot of built up articles.

Open Tabs 11/11/11:

• Anonymous blasts El Salvador offline – I guess they found some soft targets.  
• How your signature can propel your security career – How are you putting your signature on the security at your company?  Don’t do what everyone else has done.
• Top 10 Security Voices on Twitter – I didn’t like @jgamblins list; half of the accounts on it are businesses.  Who would be on your Top 10 Security Voices list?
• Supreme Court justices concerned about pervasive, technology-enabled government surveillance – As they should be!  Wait until the government admits they’re also turning on the microphones and other sensors in your phone.  And don’t think they aren’t.  
• Judges weigh phone tracking – A little more to feed your paranoia.
• Doom, gloom and infosec – Of course our career field isn’t all feces and stench, but it’s not roses and cake either.  
• Cisco CSO:  Infosec pros should get back to basics – Yes, let’s quit buying all of Cisco’s blinky light solutions and get back to patching and policy.  That’s what he meant, isn’t it?
• ‘Biggest cybercriminal takedown in history’ – The hyperbole isn’t Brian Krebs’, but the rest of the article is some great stuff.  DNS can be dangerous stuff.
• Steam database hacked.  Encrypted credit card information and passwords compromised – First thing I had the spawn do when they got home from school yesterday was change their passwords!

If you follow me on twitter (@mckeay) you’ll know that I occasionally write about some of the things my family do and/or say.  Even if they sometimes only do and/or say the things I attribute to them in my head.  And whenever I mention their actions, real and imagined, I refer to them as “Wife0″, “Spawn0″ and “Spawn1″.  Which causes me to get a lot of questions about why I call them that.  As well as the occasional joke about “Does that mean you plan on instantiating Wife1?”  To which I reply, “No, since instantiation of Wife1 would require the utter destruction of the Martin parent process”  Oh, geek humor.

Why don’t I just refer to them by name?  Partially because it’s become a running joke in the family and it amuses me.  But mostly because the names of my family are none of the business with 99% of the people who follow me on twitter and of 99.99% of the people on the Internet!  If you know me well enough that I feel like telling you or if I know you well enough that I’ve actually introduced you to my family, then you have a right and need to know what their names really are.  But if you’re an ‘internet friend’, someone I meet every few months at a conference or simply someone who’s decided to follow me because I’m sometimes entertaining on twitter, there’s no need or reason for you to know what I call my family at home.  I always refer to Wife0 as Wife0, Spawn0 as Spawn0 and Spawn1 as Trouble… er, Spawn1. 

Seriously though, there’s enough information leakage that I knowingly let out on twitter and the blog.  And I leak a fair amount of information about my wife and children just by talking about them from time to time.  If someone really wanted to, it wouldn’t be that hard to look them up and find out who they are, where we live and any number of other facts about my family.  But I see no need to make that any easier by spewing out their names every time I want to share an amusing anecdote with my friends and followers on the Internet.  I give them some small manner of anonymity by not referring to them by name and by making no guarantees that anything I’ve ever said about them was based on reality.  And there’s a fair portion of what I say about them on twitter really does only happen in my mind.  But that doesn’t mean it amuses me any less.

Playing on someone else’s server is fun for the boys, but since Minecraft is a game of mining resources and constructing almost anything you can imagine, an eventual request came to build the boys their own server.  Minecraft isn’t very resource intensive, it’s a Java based program that runs pretty decently on a low end server, at least if you only have two or three people using the server at a time.  Since, like most geeks, I have several computers that are running 24/7 and have some spare memory, I was able to throw up our own home Minecraft server without too many problems.  And as Minecraft has matured and added plugins, I could give the boys additional capabilities and superuser access so they can give themselves whatever resources they want to build anything they want.  This kept them happy for a little while and gave me something to hold over their heads to get their homework done.  It’s a lot easier to deny them access to the server when you can shut it down in a couple of seconds.

The next step came when the boys told their cousin about Minecraft and he started playing as well. It’s a community game and they often play together on public servers, but the lure of having superuser accounts and just having control of their environment with their cousin was strong.  So the continuing plea of ‘Dad, can we make our Minecraft server public?” started.  With the continued reply of “No.” to go with it.  They tried several tactics, such as explaining the white and black listing capabilities of Minecraft, offering their cousin’s server instead if I’d tell them how to make it public, as well as several other plans that only a pre-teen could come up with.  All of which were still denied.

It’s not that I don’t want my sons to have their own Minecraft server, it’s just that the security of my home network is more important to me than them playing a game that necessitates poking a hole in my network to the outside world.  I’m a security professional and I know that despite that, I don’t know enough to lock down any program with 100% certainty once I’ve opened it up to the Internet.  I do not currently allow any services to be served to the Internet from my home network and I have no intentions of changing that in the near future.  I’ve also had several discussions that lead me to believe that while Minecraft doesn’t have any currently know publicly exploitable vulnerabilities, security is not a major concern of the developers and it’s only a matter of time before someone turns their full attention to rectifying the lack of exploits.  Especially considering how popular Minecraft has become.

I’m the kind of father who wants to give their kids as many geek toys as he can, first to test my own abilities and second to give them something to stretch their own capabilities.  Or perhaps it’s the other way around.  In either case, I wanted to give my kids what they wanted, a publicly accessible Minecraft server that was not part of my home network and did not put any of my resources at risk, however minor.  Which is when I realized I had a technology I’ve been meaning to learn more about and was just looking for an excuse to play with:  the Cloud!  I’ve been remiss in my duties as a geek and security professional in that I’d been reading about Cloud technologies, I’ve been listening to what others have to say and I’ve even given a talk about PCI in the Cloud, but I’d never actually signed up for a cloud service and created my own server because I didn’t have a real use for one.  Setting up a Minecraft server on Amazon’s EC2 this weekend became the perfect solution to both issues, giving the boys a Minecraft server that I didn’t care who connected to and giving me a chance to stretch a little and learn more about the technology that is on everyone’s lips this year (and probably the next several)

I’ll be honest, one of the things that made this easy is that I found a step by step guide to creating a Minecraft server on the Minecraft forums.  I’m including a copy of the guide in the extended post because I don’t want to take the chance of losing the information if something happens on the forums, an old habit of mine.  I’ll add a few of my own notes to it as well.  This was a huge help and probably cut my installation time by 3/4.

Signing up for all the Amazon Web Services was easy and only took about 30 minutes.  I needed to sign up for these in any case for another project, but that’s someone else’s tale to tell when he’s ready.  From that point on, the guide was spot on.  I don’t think it was more than 30 minutes later that I had the boys personal Minecraft server up and running.  As suggested, I chose a small, spot request instance of the default Linux installation, reserved an Elastic IP address, associated it and the server was up and running.  I performed a few additional steps, like installing Bukkit and half a dozen plugins that the boys requested.  Most of it was as easy as using wget to pull first bukkit and then the plugins and restarting server.  I did have one minor problem in that one of the plugins was being hosted on a server using HTTPS and I had to modify the wget parameters, but that’s relatively minor to overcome.

I’ve been running our Minecraft server on Amazon’s EC2 for about 24 hours now.  I made it clear to the boys that this server is only going to be up when evenings and weekends, which turns out to be a good thing.  It’s not a huge cost, but in the past day this installation of Minecraft has cost me approximately $1.50 to run at a fairly low load, which could quickly add up to $40-50 or more per month.  If there were more people using it, if their cousin actually had a full Minecraft account and could play with them, and if I didn’t already have a Minecraft server running on the home network, I might be willing to pay that, but for the most part they’re going to have to live with the server only being available when I say it is.  I’m not an authoritarian … wait, no scratch that.  When it comes to my kids, yes, I am the authorities and my wife lets me say so.

All in all, this was a worthwhile project; it gave me some experience with the Cloud and specifically AWS.  I walked the kids through some sections of the installation, which taught us all a few lessons.  They get a Minecraft server they can share with their cousin and friends, without my having to open my network or pay an arm and a leg.  But I am realizing that it’s important to watch your Cloud instances or you’re going to end up paying a lot more than you thought very quickly.

Amazon EC2 Server Setup Guide

Here you go:

• Lock picking (physical security being taught at HacKid)
• How to social engineer a password from someone
• Fix a printer (or at least replace the paper/cartridge and pull out jammed paper)
• Martial arts/Self-defense (also being taught at HacKid)
• Electronics/soldering/circuit boards (I’d have to learn more about this one myself)
• Amateur (Ham) radio
• Fast reading/Critical thinking (they’ve got the first handled, I can barely keep these kids in books)
• Conflict management
• How to build a tree fort
• How to build a home network
• How to build a computer
• How to change a tire (This one will wait until they’re a little older)
• How to repair a consumer device, how to fix a motor
• How to improvise to build what they need (aka Duct tape foo)
• Role playing games (so this one will do more harm than good, it’s still fun)
• Basic self-reliance (which our society seems to want to train out of us) [ireadit]
• Basic carpentry and plumbing skills [ireadit]
• Debate skills [Matt Summers]
• Rope skills: how to make, how to coil without kinks, how to tie knots [Chris J]
• Bike maintenance [Robin]
• Basic navigation, both with and without a compass (my kids have been orienteering since they were in diapers) [Robin]
• Juggling (fun, but essential?) [Robin]
• Coin/close up magic, handy for social engineering [Robin]
• How to swim [Norbert]
• Learn to play an instrument [Robb]
• How to play all major sports [Robb]
• Basic cooking skills [Peter]
• Basic first aid (Like ‘Call 911!’?) [Peter]
• Linux & Windows command-line fu, a programing language (Does Scratch count?) [Chris]
• And?

Leave comments and I’ll add to the list

My kids are little geeks, similar to many of your kids in all likelihood.  They wake up in the morning and hop online or start playing on the DSi, or just pick up a book and read.  Their favorite magazines are Make and Science Illustrated.  And some fool introduced them to Japanese (is there any other type?) anime a couple of years ago.  So a convention aimed at teaching them how the Internet works, how to stay safe online and building robots really appeals to them.  Add to it that the convention is happening at the Microsoft NERD center and MIT is just down the street and you’ve got something that budding geeks will find unresistable.

If you’re on the East Coast anywhere near Boston, have kids between the ages of 5 and 17, think about taking them to HacKid in October.  Do keep in mind that every young person must be accompanied by an old person (read: adult guardian), but that each of the classes will likely have almost as much to teach the adult as they do the kids.  Everything is being done on a volunteer basis and the event is organized as a non-profit, so the money is all going to a good cause.  But hurry if you’re going to sign up, the cost goes up from $50 each to $75 next week. 

I don’t like the idea of tracking of people, especially if they don’t know about it.  The potential for abuse far outweighs the benefits in most cases.  Whether it’s a spouse or parent abusing the tracking, someone abusing access to the vendor or law enforcement legally tracking someone, I get very nervous about what CAN happen.  So when I got the press release for Family Tracker and an offer for promotional codes, I decided it was time to bite the bullet that is my paranoia and see how a tracking program like this is used in real life. 

I travel.  A lot.  In the next few weeks I’ll be crossing the country several times and I’ll be gone from home more than I’ll be there.  I post my travel schedule on several calendars around my office, so which city I’m in is rarely a question and I use FourSquare enough that my location has never really been a mystery anyway.  But I’ve always been in control of both of these methods of tracking and giving my family a tool to tell where I am almost every moment of the day is new and interesting experience for me.  I suspect that my wife will look me up once or twice and then ignore the application 99% of the time.  But she has surprised me before.

I’ve set it up so I can track myself and my iPhone from my iPad, so even if my wife doesn’t want to track me, I can still find out more about what the program is capable off.  And unless I do something stupid that involves the police, I doubt anyone else will want to track me.  If anyone really wants to know my whereabouts, there’s more than enough information already on the Internet to find me if someone takes the time.  This will just make it a little easier.

So through the end of the month my little social experiment will be running. After that, we’ll see.  It may be that my wife likes being able to track me.  Or she may just say, “Meh.  If I want to know where you are, I’ll just call.”  I’m almost as interested in seeing how she uses Family Tracker as I am in seeing if she thinks being able to track me is worthwhile.  I honestly don’t know which way she’ll decide.

After the break is the information the folks at LogSat sent me when I expressed interest in their product, which covers several important questions about how Family Tracker works.

I hope this helps,

Roberto
Franceschetti
LogSat Software

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last week, you know about this case; quick recap is that a Vice Principal used a picture captured using LANRev on school provided laptops to accuse a student of taking drugs.  This prompted a class action suit and a potential criminal investigation into the district’s use of LANRev to illegally spy on students.  There’s a lot of damning evidence available on the Internet and it’s looking likely that a number of people will be facing criminal charges.  And it’s all because these people believed they were doing the right thing in tracking their laptops and their students without some form of oversight to tell them they were being complete and utter idiots.

Absolute Software, the makers of LANRev, understand that giving customers unrestricted access to spy using their computers is a major problem; they require that a police report be filed prior to the spying capabilities of their other, similar products such as LoJack are activated.  First of all, this creates the oversight advocates such as I crave.  Not too many people are going to report a laptop stolen so they can spy on their significant other.  Secondly it creates a paper trail that lays out when and why the spying capabilities were activated.  Even after these capabilities are up and running, it’s under the control of Absolute, not the end user.  In their own words this prevents “potential vigilantism” and other abuses of power. 

If what the families in the Lower Merion School District are claiming is true, and it appears more and more likely it is, then folks like the Vice Principal at Harrington High are definitely vigilantes, someone who illegally tries to mete out punishment to a criminal.  There’s a reason we have due process and the administrators of LMSD forgot all of them in their fervor to catch students doing things they shouldn’t at home.  They also forgot that the responsibility of schools and teachers is to teach, not law enforcement.  If they truly believed there was wrong doing going on, the police should have been called in and proper procedures should have been followed.  There’s still a good probability that using LANRev without a search warrant would have been considered an invasion of privacy, but if it was done with police involvement, there’s a lot lower chance they’d be in the hot water they’re in now.  And maybe someone with a little knowledge of the law would have said, “Hey, that’s one monumentally stupid idea you’ve got there.”