Dec
26
2011
Christmas is over! I hope yours was good, but I personally find the whole build up and let down stressful and I’m glad when it’s done with. Especially the part where my kids are home from school for a week and whine every time I tell them to get out of the house for a little while before I have to hurt them. Not that I’d actually hurt my kids, but it’s sometimes the only threat that will get them moving.
There have been some interesting stories leading up to Christmas and it’ll be interesting to see what’s been happening behind the scenes while the majority of us have been chomping on candy and ripping open our presents. I have nothing to support the theory yet, but I strongly suspect most of the bad guys left their tools running while they took some time off, so their might be reports of compromises in the not too distant future. After all, there were a couple of reports that came out before the weekend, perhaps hoping to get ignored and bypassed in Christmas craziness.
A quick thought on the boycott of GoDaddy over the SOPA legislation. GoDaddy is such a minor player in this realm and probably signed on to the legislation like a little brother following his older brother, Big Media; they wanted to sound and act cool in the eyes of everyone else without having the faintest idea that what they were doing had real world consequences. Boycotting GoDaddy is like bullying the little brother when what you really want to do is punch the elder brother in the eye! It’s ineffective, both in the long run and in the short term, to boycott GoDaddy when what we should really be doing is making the larger players behind SOPA aware this is an evil and unacceptable way to try to regulate the internet. A crowdsourced version of the list of supporters on the list is available as a Google doc. If you really want to do something important, boycott some of the big boys on the list and quit going to their movies and buying their products.
Open Tabs – 12/26/11
- Chinese computer hackers hit U.S. Chamber of Commerce – I wonder what our hackers are doing to the Chinese behind the scenes. Not the vocal ones on the con scene, the ones employed by the Three Letter Agencies. Never mind, we don’t do that, do we.
- LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) – DoS attacking tool – The tool is old news, but this is a pretty good writeup. If you want to know more though, one of my co-workers could tell you a few things more about how it works.
- The Thought Leader … One year later – Chris Eng’s further harpooning of the information security thought leaders. I know about half of the video applies to me at least as much as it does anyone else.
- How hackers gave Subway a $30 million lesson in point-of-sale security – There’s another meaning for POS, especially when you don’t bother changing default passwords and trust owners to follow procedures.
- The Dark side of B-Sides – I’m staying out of this fight, since I know all the players. But I know there’s a lot of truth to both sides of the stories, and the sooner this can be opened up and the aired out, the better for everyone involved.
- Hackers steal data on millions of Chinese net users – No need for nefarious government hackers when criminals will hack into Chinese sites because they data they hold might be worth something.
- Insurance against cyber attacks expected to boom – Let’s just insure our systems rather than taking the time to secure them! Because the insurance companies won’t place caveats on what’s ensured and what constitutes a breach of contract to include poor maintenance control, will they? “What do you mean our insurance doesn’t cover this?” is a phrase I expect to hear once cyber insurance (I shudder at the name) becomes common place.
- Congress calls on Twitter to block Taliban – Oh yeah, because it takes so much to set up another account and tell everyone to go there instead. And because censorship should always be one of the first tools used by a free, democratic system. These people spend too much time thinking in hyperbole and too little time thinking in reality.
Dec
18
2011
Long night last night. We went to something called a pirate gift party; sort of like a white elephant gift (cheap, person A can take a gift from the table or steal from person B) except most of the gifts were wrapped in tinfoil cleverly disguised to hide their true nature. Two minor variations from a normal white elephant gift is that there is no limit to the number of times gifts can be stolen per turn and no one gets to open the gifts until the last gift is chosen from the table. This led to an interesting ‘defense’ strategy; since there was a gift that was wrapped to look like Thor’s Hammer that my Spawn wanted, they worked together to make sure they kept it at all cost. Basically, when person A stole the hammer from whoever was holding it, that Spawn would steal his brother’s gift, and that Spawn would steal the hammer back. This was a pretty good strategy, until Spawn1 lost concentration at one point and went after a different shiny object. It all ended up good in the end, though another pair challenged the Spawn to a game of endurance to see who wanted the hammer the most. It ended up being a 15 minute round robin of gifts being stolen and restolen that left everyone laughing. Oh, and “Thor’s Hammer” ended up being a cleverly disguised box with chocolate and money in it, with a broom handle that was acting as the handle.
Oh, and very importantly, It’s that time of the year! Security Bloggers Meetup invites have gone out.
Open Tabs 12/18/11:
Nov
22
2011
I got home Sunday from 3 days in Las Vegas, two of which were spent at the first ever Minecon. For those of you who aren’t the parents of Minecraft addicts or addicts yourselves, it’s a game where you create a whole world then mine it for resources and build just about anything you can imagine. It’s multiplayer, sometimes massively so, and it’s very easy to set up your own server and be hosting it for the world in a matter of hours. Unluckily, it may be too easy; people who can barely figure out what their IP address is are setting up servers on their desktops then sharing their systems with friends via Hamachi or simply opening their home network to the world. It’s enough to give a security professional an aneurism! I wrote up my own experience in creating a cloud server for Minecraft in April, but that server never caught on with the kids. So now I’m trying a different solution, MineOS Crux, a custom build distribution of Ubuntu specifically created for people who want a secure, lightweight Minecraft installation. I’m running it as a VM on my Mac Mini server and exposing it to the world on a non-standard port, plus I locked down the distro a little more than the standard build. I’m still more than a little paranoid about it, so if the kids aren’t using it, it’ll go away.
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:
Nov
11
2011
Whether you call it Veteran’s Day, Pocky Day,Binary Day or something else, it’s Friday, I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to this weekend and spending some time with friends. Being a parent, I don’t get out for adult time as much as I once did, which makes the rare occassions all that much more special.
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:
Nov
08
2011
I had a great time at BSides DFW this weekend! Michelle Klinger, Joseph Sokoly and the whole crew of volunteers who made the event happen did such an awesome job of putting it together and the Microsoft tech center was the perfect place to have it. Not that Jayson Street didn’t make a few of the security guards nervous from time to time. And the rest of us nervous when he thought no one was watching where he was thinking of getting into. I gave the closing key note speech, which went well despite the fact I was as nervous as I think it’s possible for me to be. It’s worth giving the talk again some time, after I’ve tightened it up and loosened up a bit myself. Just remember to challenge all our current security wisdom.
Saturday was November 5th, Guy Faulkes day, and despite it being a high holiday for Anonymous, nothing much seems to have happened. They did pop Adidas last week, but that was supposedly a prequel to their main event this weekend. On a more positive note, Brad Smith is doing slightly better, though he is still comatose and has pnemonia. If you can, spare a few dollars to help Brad and his wife pay for medical bills; if you can’t, keep him in your prayers. Brad has helped a lot of people in the security community and it’s time to help him in return.
Open Tabs 11/08/11