Blog - Bloglines - Jaiku - Ports - Wiki


(J)ack (O)f (A)ll (T)rades
Mostly Security, Some
Blogging, Misc. Admin,
and Bits of My Life.









August 2007
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
     
 

Recent Comments

Wiki RSS

Blog Search

Categories

Archives

























Del.icio.us


Thu, 31 Mar 2005

Hash function attacks 31 Mar
Bruce Schneier points out a paper on finding MD5 collisions and starts a long conversation (in the comments).

joat: 13:00:00 31 Mar 2005


Wed, 30 Mar 2005

D'oh! 30 Mar
Here's a surprise... Those two at the RSA conference that had that "amateur" study that MS was more secure were actually funded by MS. They now claim innocence but the original story used sentences like "A Linux Latest News about Linux enthusiast at the RSA Conference in San Francisco has reluctantly concluded..." and "The pair said that they lacked the funding to test other operating systems..." which doesn't help their claim any. It all made the "test" sound like an honest (although amateur) contest.

How much funding do you need to buy/borrow/rent a PowerBook and watch it for 30 days? Hell, you could have built a Plan 9 box out of junk and watched it for 30 days (for free). Heck, QNX's trial period IS thirty days. How about FreeBSD? Or OpenBSD? Or Windows 3.1? Or FreeDOS? Or RxDOS? Or Beos? Does Sun still give away trial versions of Solaris?

How much money was the grant? If it was more than the $20 that one of the testers pocketed, I'd lean towards using the phrase "sock puppet".

And to avoid getting into that argument (and at the risk of irking both "churches"), either of those OSs can be a floating turd if it's not managed properly.

joat: 22:30:00 30 Mar 2005


Huh? 30 Mar
It's obvious but a lot of people experimenting with honeypots forget to do things like minimizing what can be abused.

joat: 13:00:00 30 Mar 2005


Tue, 29 Mar 2005

FTimes 29 Mar
FTimes is a forensics tool for working with alternate data streams (ADS). It's drawback is that it depends on the local OS. In other words, if the kernel is compromised, it may not see certain ADSs.

joat: 13:00:00 29 Mar 2005


Mon, 28 Mar 2005

More on Leo 28 Mar
I neglected to talk about how to listen to Leo on the radio. The flash applet from the radio station that's supposed to play the stream didn't work for me. Instead, I used Kaffeine to play it (I installed it from the Penguin Liberation Front's RPMs)(search Google for "easy urpmi"). At the command line, type "kaffeine http://ccdig.liquidviewer.com/kfi". It'll open the "mmsh" stream and will even display the Liquid Audio graphics.

joat: 13:30:00 28 Mar 2005


Unicode 28 Mar
The topic has some milage on it but there's some good discussion in the comments of Bruce Shneier's post on IDN attacks.

joat: 13:00:00 28 Mar 2005


802.11 Layer 2 Analysis 28 Mar
Here's Joshua Wright's GIAC GCIH paper which discusses Layer 2 analysis of the footprints left by wireless tools in the Stumbler family (those that actually communicate with a wireless LAN as it "detects" them).

joat: 13:00:00 28 Mar 2005


Sun, 27 Mar 2005

Asterisk 27 Mar
LAMP has a good two-part series on Asterisk (Part 1)(Part 2).

joat: 13:00:00 27 Mar 2005


Sat, 26 Mar 2005

ATA-186 + SIP 26 Mar
Here's a post about getting SIP wedged onto an ATA-186.

joat: 22:30:00 26 Mar 2005


Fri, 25 Mar 2005

Asterisk + ATA-186 25 Mar
Here's a guide for using a Cisco ATA-186 with Asterisk. (You'll need to turn word-wrap on in your browser if you have it. If not, view source.)

I'd seen some negative comments about using ATA-186's with Asterisk but thought that the document might be worthwhile regardless. Anyone care to comment on it?

joat: 13:00:00 25 Mar 2005


Returning 25 Mar
Are they still on the endangered list? It's nice to see them numerous enough that they consider nesting near where I grew up. From the local newspaper:


(Lynn Brennan) A bald eagle watches cars pass through the snow while resting on a tree limb at the Almond Dam Wednesday morning. There appears to be a nesting pair at the site, adding to others reported throughout the area, especially along the Canisteo River.

joat: 11:15:00 25 Mar 2005


Thu, 24 Mar 2005

NASA podcast 24 Mar
More in the podcast theme: would you believe NASA has a podcast feed?

joat: 22:30:00 24 Mar 2005


Wed, 23 Mar 2005

Where's Leo? 23 Mar
I liked the ScreenSavers prior to G4 and can't stand it now. Ever wonder what happened to Leo? He's here doing a weekend talk show about the same ol', same ol'. You can either listen to the stream on the weekend or download it as a podcast. A cool twist is that the show notes are on a wiki (you can edit/add to the show notes!).

joat: 22:30:00 23 Mar 2005


Tue, 22 Mar 2005

Smarter worms 22 Mar
A little while ago, the wormblog pointed out this interesting paper.

joat: 13:00:00 22 Mar 2005


Mon, 21 Mar 2005

No op 21 Mar
My apologies. Postings will be a bit thin this week as I've spent most of the weekend at the hospital. I normally write most of the posts for the week on the previous weekend. This weekend, I was offline, mostly.

When my son has a cold at this time of year it can combine with the weather and his asthma. The result is he ends up on oxygen and steroids. Nothing to worry about though unless, of course, you have something to do with supporting my grocery bill while he's on steroids or if you're one of his nurses (he's 20 but acts like a bored 2-year old when he doesn't feel well).

joat: 15:00:00 21 Mar 2005


DNS Stuff 21 Mar
Here's another good online tool.

joat: 13:00:00 21 Mar 2005


Sun, 20 Mar 2005

Dynamic IPv6 DNS 20 Mar
For those of you that want an IPv6 version of dyndns.org, try DNS6.org.

joat: 13:00:00 20 Mar 2005


Sat, 19 Mar 2005

Botnets 19 Mar
Here's an interesting paper from the Honeynet Project entitled "Know Your Enemy: Tracking Botnets". The subtitle reads "Using honeynets to learn more about Bots".

joat: 13:00:00 19 Mar 2005


Fri, 18 Mar 2005

Make Mag. 18 Mar
Hey telmnstr! The magazine is on the streets! Here's a review of it.

joat: 21:30:00 18 Mar 2005


Blacklight 18 Mar
FYI: F-Secure's Blacklight Beta still has about 6 weeks to it. Blacklight is a "running rootkit" detector. (See the site for a better explanation.)

joat: 21:00:00 18 Mar 2005


Thu, 17 Mar 2005

So now they're called "business models"? 17 Mar
I've disagreed with CircleID authors before. You can chalk this one up as yet another disagreement.

I'm not sure if James Seng was being sarcastic or not (I'm quite dense when exposed to subtleties) but just about everything that he describes as a "business model" in this article, I find offensive and wrong as the underlying methods employed are usually illegal, unethical, or just plain offensive.

What methods are these? Let's see...

  • blog comments spamming
  • wiki spamming
  • domain hijacking
  • domain squatting
  • dishonest or unethical registrars

Have I missed anything?

joat: 13:00:00 17 Mar 2005


Wed, 16 Mar 2005

Earthquakes 16 Mar
I was surprised when I stumbled across this (via its RSS feed actually). The U.S. Geological Service maintains a page of latest quakes and even provides the data in an RSS feed.

joat: 13:30:00 16 Mar 2005


TEMPEST 16 Mar

joat: 13:00:00 16 Mar 2005


Tue, 15 Mar 2005

Class action suit 15 Mar
If you've ever bought something from CompUSA, you might be eligible for rebates that you never received.

joat: 13:00:00 15 Mar 2005


Mon, 14 Mar 2005

Google/Yahoo VoIP 14 Mar
In leiu of this article, it may be a good idea to brush up on your VoIP. (heh) Okay, I'll drop it. For now.

joat: 13:00:00 14 Mar 2005


Sun, 13 Mar 2005

OpenSSH 13 Mar
OpenSSH v4.0 is out. Although I'm a bit wary of new versions, it might be worth a try. Here's a list of feature changes.

joat: 13:00:00 13 Mar 2005


Illustrated Guide to Hashes 13 Mar
Here's Steve Friedl's An Illustrated Guide to Cryptographic Hashes. He states that he wrote the article because of the recent discovered weaknesses and to explain to the general public what hashes are and what they're used for. Sort of a "the sky is not falling, only a piece of it" article?

joat: 13:00:00 13 Mar 2005


Sat, 12 Mar 2005

He's baack! 12 Mar
My comment spammer is back. I was getting worried. Maybe he'd slipped in the shower and hit his head. Maybe tripped and fell off the curb and fell in front of a bus. Or was struck by lightning. Hey, I was really worried.

Once again, he can be traced back through Gandi. What a wonderful service.

joat: 21:00:00 12 Mar 2005


Huh? 12 Mar
This has got to be THE most stupid thing I've ever heard. So MS is going to offer patches to the gov't one month prior to anyone else? I have a few questions:
  • Do they become classified information for that period of time?
  • If so, do they think the practice will last any longer than the first due-dilligence lawsuit?
  • Is this an early shot at April 1st?

joat: 21:00:00 12 Mar 2005


Asterisk again 12 Mar
Being a n00b does have it's perks, at least when dealing with Asterisk: everything is new! I finally had time to play with it again, got Kphone to connect to the server and caused the server to connect to the Digium site. (Documented here)

Next up, I have to figure out how to get inbound calls across the NAT box (if anyone wants to send pointers, keep in mind that it's OpenWRT and not a standard firmware load). Maybe loading Asterisk on it and just having it forward all calls to the internal box?

I'm driving my wife absolutely nuts playing with this thing!

joat: 14:00:00 12 Mar 2005


Spam art 12 Mar
higB talks about a new twist to spam: the addition of ASCII art as yet another mututation to try to slip past scanners. I find it interesting as I was first exposed ASCII art in college.

Actually, it was ASCII porn and it was before personal computers had graphics displays (yeah, I'm old enough to have learned assembly on a cutting-edge 8080A). The running joke was that if you left your terminal open, someone would cause a set of jobs dump to the line printer and get charged to your account. Needless to say, the computing center went through a minor fortune in tractor paper.

joat: 13:30:00 12 Mar 2005


LambdaMOO? 12 Mar
LambdaMOO is still around? (I left just after the virtual rape article.) Actually, it isn't the original PARC LambdaMOO. The source code and a chunk of the original database was made available to anyone who wanted it and I think that this is one of those instances. It's one of the virtual reality success stories, text-based or whatever.

joat: 13:00:00 12 Mar 2005


Fri, 11 Mar 2005

Podcasting 11 Mar
/usr/bin/geek has a post describing the basics of podcasting (for the listener). He's had to explain it repeatedly so he's entitled it "The Dummies* Guide To Podcasting".

joat: 13:30:00 11 Mar 2005


Home Automation 11 Mar
Here's N. Cherry's home automation links page. It's huge! I'll be digging through this one for weeks.

joat: 13:00:00 11 Mar 2005


Thu, 10 Mar 2005

Brazilian Honeypots Alliance 10 Mar
Some of us/you find the Brazilian Honeypots Alliance Daily Statistics page interesting.

joat: 13:30:00 10 Mar 2005


No spam? 10 Mar
Odd. There's no spam in the comment queue this morning. Did the spammer(s) forget to reset/reload a script last night? (heh)

joat: 13:00:00 10 Mar 2005


Wed, 09 Mar 2005

Getting Started With Asterisk 09 Mar
Yet another howto for Asterisk: Getting Started With Asterisk.

joat: 13:00:00 9 Mar 2005


Tue, 08 Mar 2005

Loss of anonymity? 08 Mar
In response to this, I'll add:
  1. YOU GAIN the a better chance at tracking down spammers and domain thieves
  2. YOU GAIN a better ability to contact owners of misbehaving network systems
  3. YOU GAIN a little peace of mind by forcing domain owners to cut back on their own abuse.

Personally, I don't like how it was done but I do like the fact that "something is being done". The current situation which allows certain spammer-oriented Registrars to operate makes running even a simple blog like this (on someone else's site) a constant battle with jerks and assholes trying to earn off of your volunteered work.

The author of that article needs to take a few civics lessons too. There is no right to operate a website anonymously. Anonymity is something you might gain by making traceback difficult but it is not a Constitutional right.

Neither does the First Amendment guarantee the right to speak anonymously. The First Amendment prevents the government from censuring your speech. It does not prevent the government from holding you responsible for what you say, nor does provide any guarantee of anonymity that would allow you to avoid that responsibility.

In all 9 of the authors examples, he claims that anonymity is lost. What actually occurred was a return to responsibility. The anonymity that "you" are losing was a temporary side effect of the relaxing rules. For those of us that used Registrars that kept to the rules, our info was posted and is readily available. Spam and malicious code has reached record levels and unless we (as a society) start tightening the rules, the problems are only going to get worse. We're about to move to a different network protocol (IPv6). How about we leave some of the problems behind?

Apologies for the rant. I'm tired of tracing crap back through Gandi and similar.

joat: 13:30:00 8 Mar 2005


HITB Vids 08 Mar
HERT has a post which indicates that the HITB '04 videos are available via BitTorrent.

joat: 13:00:00 8 Mar 2005


Mon, 07 Mar 2005

Asterisk 07 Mar
I've added an Asterisk page to the wiki to keep notes on my experiments with the PBX software and to (hopefully) help anyone else experimenting with it.

joat: 13:00:00 7 Mar 2005


Sun, 06 Mar 2005

WHOIS 06 Mar
For basic theory, here is a 15- Minute Series tutorial on WHOIS.

joat: 13:00:00 6 Mar 2005


Sat, 05 Mar 2005

SixXS 05 Mar
I don't know how valuable this is but SixXS does a little bit more than provide IPv4-to-IPv6 tunnels. If you just want to visit a website on the "other side" (without setting a tunnel up) just add ".ipv6.sixxs.org" to the hostname.

From IPv4

   http://www.ipv6.phreak.org.ipv4.sixxs.org

will take you to the IPv6 site for the Digital Information Society. It also works in the other direction. If all you have is IPv6 connectivity

    http://www.google.com.ipv6.sixxs.org

will take you to Google.

joat: 13:30:00 5 Mar 2005


Traceback 05 Mar
Here's a paper from @Stake which discusses two theoretical approaches to traceback.

joat: 13:30:00 5 Mar 2005


Malware trail 05 Mar
I've been remiss in not pointing out that "Follow the Bouncing Malware" actually had four installments.

joat: 13:00:00 5 Mar 2005


Fri, 04 Mar 2005

Reverse Engineering Malware 04 Mar
Here's Lenny Zeltser's paper on reverse engineering malware, parts of which he used for his GCIH cert requirements.

joat: 13:00:00 4 Mar 2005


Thu, 03 Mar 2005

Forensics 03 Mar

joat: 13:30:00 3 Mar 2005


ReadPST 03 Mar
For anyone that needs to read Outlook PST's in a *nix environment, I recommend readpst (part of the libpst tarball). I wasn't able to pull/push files directly into my IMAPS server but I was able to generate a local MBOX file, mount that, and then push the messages onto the IMAPS server via a local mail client.

joat: 13:00:00 3 Mar 2005


Wed, 02 Mar 2005

Have I been hacked? 02 Mar
Here's BleepingComputer's quick tutorial for Windows entitled "Have I Been Hacked?". It's gives a quick what- to-check for the suddenly paranoid.

joat: 13:30:00 2 Mar 2005


DNS Attacks 02 Mar
Linux Exposed has a quick article on "DNS Common Abuses".

joat: 13:00:00 2 Mar 2005


Tue, 01 Mar 2005

Wormblog 01 Mar
Here's a blog devoted to issues related to combating worms.

joat: 13:30:00 1 Mar 2005


Say it again 01 Mar
(heh) Here's the algorithm related to this:


if($self eq "MS purist") {
	$a=1;
	until ($a<0) {
		say "We will bury you!";
		pound_shoe_on_podium();
		stand_in_front_of_flag();
		say "It's Un-American!";
		say "It's an Axis of Evil!";
		launch_3rd_party_FUD_campaing();
		$a--;
		if($a <1) {
			$a=3;
		}
	}
	if(all_else_fails()==1) {
		click_heels_three_times();
		chant_repeatedly("There's no place like home");
	}
}

The unending barrage of FUD (from both sides) gets a bit tiring. There are specific strengths and weaknesses in all operating systems which brings about the situation "the best tool for a specific task". Well-run hybrid networks are more secure than well-run monolithic networks (Before you want to restart that argument: a single vulnerability won't damage the entire infrastructure.)

For now the argument has dropped back into the "The End is Nigh" entertainment category but I do wish that the left and the right would get over it so the rest of us can get on with our lives.

joat: 13:00:00 1 Mar 2005


robtex