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SSL certs – probably not worth the bits they’re printed on…
This failure of the trusted Certificate Authority (CA) “Comodo”: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/03/24/fraudulent-certificates-issued-by-comodo-is-it-time-to-rethink-who-we-trust/ highlights something that is becoming more apparent: SSL certificates probably aren’t worth the bits they’re printed on. Forgetting that there is a fairly regular stream of issues with the authorities, companies like GoDaddy issue certificates for all of $12 with nearly instantaneous issuance. That is,…
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Zone Firewall TCP reassembly size
If you get something like this in your Cisco’s IOS firewall log: Mar 12 15:05:33 192.168.1.1 3129: 003121: *Mar 12 15:03:03.195 EST: %FW-4-TCP_OoO_SEG: Dropping TCP Segment: seq:525214740 1415 bytes is out-of-order; expected seq:525170856. Reason: TCP reassembly queue overflow – session 192.168.1.5:53022 to 208.79.250.63:80 on zone-pair ccp-zp-in-out class ccp-protocol-http sometimes accompanied by hangs in downloads, then…
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Dear Vendors…
I have to say one of my pet peeves is when vendors, and a lot seem to do it today, send emails or leave voicemails acting like we’ve known each other (often sounding like years) when we in fact haven’t even exchanged greetings before. I don’t know if that works for others, but for me…
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Converting VMware virtual disk to “eagerzeroedthick”
Pretty simple from the console really: vmkfstools -d eagerzeroedthick -i <virtual-disk-source>.vmdk <virtual-disk-target>.vmdk Note that this will completely expand the size of the filesystem (ie: it will no longer be “thin”). I needed this not to convert a “thin” filesystem to “thick” filesystem, but a “thick” filesystem to a clusterable “thick” filesystem. The default of “zereodthick”…
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Larry Ellison on “Cloud Computing”
Via SwissInfo: “The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion,†Oracle founder Larry Ellison commented on cloud computing recently. “Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane.†I think there’s more to it than just…
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The kitchen sink of security tools…
This seems to be a useful location to find security tools: http://www.proactiverisk.com/links Everything including the kitchen sink!
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Apparently George Romero was right…
That a deadly virus would escape from the military possibly causing zombies: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/11/17/stuxnet.virus He was just wrong that humans would be the target.
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How to build a SLES minicd boot image…
Sometimes you’ll have a system that doesn’t have a DVD drive and/or it’s more convenient to use the network. Making a “minicd” to boot from network is fairly simple: Set up Apache and copy the DVD media to a subdirectory of “/srv/www/htdocs”. At least in my case I ended up with two directories: /srv/www/htdocs/SLES11SP1/SLES-11-SP1-DVD-x86_64.0432..001/ /srv/www/htdocs/SLES11SP1/SLES-11-SP1-DVD-x86_64.0432..002/…
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Another case of “With friends like these…”
Well, researchers have devised a way around most modern anti-virus software. Yet another example of, “With friends like these, who needs enemies.” Again, I know “security by obscurity” is false security, but it’s not like the bad guys need as much help as they’re getting!
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Beware of Outlook…
Just to save you the embarrassment I thought I would warn Thunderbird users about a little something I discovered today if you use HTML formatting with Thunderbird while interacting with users of Outlook 2007. Attached are two views of the same email created in Thunderbird and sent out. One view is from Thunderbird, the other…
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1 Reason Why Microsoft Bing Is Gaining on Google
eWeek has this “fluff” piece on why Microsoft Bing is “gaining” on Google: 10 Reasons Why Microsoft Bing Is Gaining on Google I don’t usually like to go this far, but frankly it’s pretty shameless pandering. Bing may or may not be a good search engine, personally the results it pulls just don’t cut it…
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How to kill a session on a Cisco PIX/FWSM
Completely different from Cisco IOS, so hard to remember: Log into the PIX/FWSM and go to “enable” mode. Do a “who”: fwsm# who 0: 192.168.100.80 2: 192.168.100.5 Choose the IP of the session you want to kill and grab the number. In this case I want to kill the “192.168.100.5” session, so I want “2”.…
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A good Blackberry security primer…
ComputerWorld has published a good Blackberry security primer here: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9165238/Five_tips_to_keep_your_Blackberry_safe I highly recommend all Blackberry owners read it.
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Why Internet Explorer rules…
This article about the growth of Chrome has a little gem in it that shows just how anti-competitive installing IE by default as the only browser on Windows is. It says: NetApplications reported, Microsoft’s [Internet Explorer’s] 61 percent is a record low for the company as its market share continues to decline. A key reason…
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Blackberry Profiles
I’ve recently received a Blackberry Curve 8330 from my workplace. Unfortunately the documentation seems a little thin on a number of aspects, one of which is “Profiles” which is what controls alerts and ring tones. Below is my attempt to document a few of the settings based on Google searches (this appears to apply to…
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Bash TCP programming hack!?
I had never heard of this until I ran into working on a recent project. In “bash” you can open sockets: exec file-descriptor<>/dev/tcp/IP-or-hostname-here/port so for example: exec 3<>/dev/tcp/192.168.1.100/23 would open port 23 (telnet) to IP “192.168.1.100” for read and write (the “<>”) on file descriptor “3” (remember descriptors 0, 1, and 2 are used by…
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Rubber Or Glue, It Still Sticks…
This brings up a sort of interesting if not chilling thought in the world of security, particularly for large organizations: Mozilla shuts online store after security breach The title of this entry, which I’ve included verbatim, is important. To me when I read it, I’m reading “Mozilla has a problem”, or “Mozilla isn’t secure”, or…
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Outlook email verbosity…
I write HTML in Thunderbird because I like some rich formatting (an area I am sad to admit Thunderbird is weak on). In particular I do a lot of indented stuff, which Thunderbird translates to simple “<blockquote>” tags. However, when I moved to Outlook 2007 (which I don’t use for mail, but was just checking)…
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Eating ourselves alive…
Here is yet another example of how the “good guys” are figuring out ways to subvert security to “help” us: http://www.h-online.com/security/Bootkit-bypasses-hard-disk-encryption–/news/113884 Basically Peter Kleissner, a young and clearly very smart university student, has figured out how to inject a bootkit in front of TrueCrypt (an excellent and free encryption product) to subvert its protections. While…
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Apple iPhone “Jailbreak” FUD
Apple may well have good and fair reasons to keep users from “jailbreaking” their iPhones, however the arguments as presented in the article are just FUD: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Midmarket/Apple-Claims-Jailbreaking-iPhones-Could-Crash-Cell-Towers-803734/?kc=EWKNLNAV07312009STR1 If AT&T’s cell network is this vulnerable, we have far greater worries than a little iPhone hacking. After all, Apple’s argument is essentially to keep jailbreaking out of…