Come and Take It » admin

Schneier’s Five Questions

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:30:20 +0000

I just read Bruce Schneier’s Beyond Fear. It was classic Schneier and by classic Schneier I mean very good and thought provoking. He sets forth a methology to analyze and evaluate security systems, technologies and practices. Below are the five questions that he set forth in the book which are the bassis for this methology. I find this books and his writing in general to be the best at helping to develop a security mindset.

Step1: What assets are you trying to protect?

Step2: What are the risks to the assets?

Step3: How well does the security solution mitigate those risks?

Step4: What other risks does the security solution cause?

Step5: What costs and trade-offs does the security solution impose?

Book Review: Kingpin, How one Hacker took over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground

admin — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 01:29:11 +0000

I enjoyed Kingpin. It gives real insight to credit card fraud and government “cyber” investigations. This case (the conviction of Max Vision) really symbolizes the movement of hacking prosecutions into a new realm. This new realm is really just plain old crime by other means.

Zero Day: A Novel

admin — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 17:19:20 +0000

Mark Russinovich is a windows Ninja and he has been for a long time. He is bona fide. This does not mean that he is necessarily able to write a good novel, develop characters, or articulate convincing scenarios about cyber-terrorism. Fortunately, he is able to do all three. Zero Day was fun to read, intense thriller. The technical side of the plot was great. No surprise here, but the larger plot was believable and more than a little scary. This was a good read for both quiet technical and not so technical readers.

The Cuckoo’s Egg

admin — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 04:37:25 +0000

When I saw that The Cuckoo’s Egg was on Richard Bejtich’s top ten Infosec books for 2010, I decided to give it a re-read. I had fond memories of the book and I was not disappointed. There are still some good security lessons to be learned from the book. It is a well presented story and a fun read.

http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2010/12/best-book-bejtlich-read-in-2010.html

Information Leakage on Used Network Devices

admin — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 02:05:59 +0000

All devices need to be sanitized of information before disposed of. I recently acquired a 2950 switch for small project off of ebay.. As expected, the configs were still intact with a treasure trove of information. Yes a treasure trove. The switch was previously at a major corporation, there were two snmp RW strings and the enable password which was cracked in less than 30 seconds.

WinMD5Sum

admin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 02:46:40 +0000

The latest entry to the Software Vault is a nice little windows program to compute and compare MD5 hashes. I have found myself in the past not checking the md5 hash on a file when I was on a windows box and I would have checked the hash if I was on a Linux box. This is just a nice little program to have.

http://www.nullriver.com/products/winmd5sum

Enabling IPv6 on Windows XP and IPv6 Default Installs

admin — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:12:27 +0000

IPv6 is not enabled by default in Windows XP. To enable see below. no reboot required.

From the command prompt:

ipv6 install

netsh int ipv6 uninstall

IPv6 is installed by default on most new operating systems. See Below. This creates a significant security issue which I will post about at a later date.

Vista, Windows 7, Server 2008, MAC OS SUN, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5

Cisco IOS Default Interface

admin — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:09:39 +0000

The default interface command erases all commands on the particular interface places the interface in a default state which includes no shutting the interface. Below is the configuration of an interface before and after running the default interface command.

Sales2#show run interface fastEthernet 1/0
Building configuration…

Current configuration : 128 bytes
!
interface FastEthernet1/0
description Dev Lab
ip address 192.168.3.34 255.255.255.0
shutdown
duplex auto
speed auto
end

Sales2(config)#default interface fastEthernet 1/0
Building configuration…

Interface FastEthernet1/0 set to default configuration

Sales2(config)#do show run interface f 1/0
Building configuration…

Current configuration : 83 bytes
!
interface FastEthernet1/0
no ip address
shutdown
duplex auto
speed auto
end

Google Docs Now allows any file type to be uploaded

admin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:41:12 +0000

Google has been rolling out this feature over the past few weeks and i got it a couple of days ago. This is another prime example of Google’s low key approach to enhancing their free or low cost cloud based services. I can now do all the things that I was doing with Dropbox in Google Docs. I uploaded a zip file, a picture in jpg format and a windows executable. All uploaded correctly.

Into the Cloud with Drop Box, Toodledo and Google Aps

admin — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:53:37 +0000

I have been exploring different methods of storing non work related docs, files and information in the cloud for easy access. I want to access from multiple locations and from a variety of devices. The best solution so far is google aps, toodledo and drop box. The new iphone app for Drop Box is great. For task management, I am trying Toodledo which is not fully baked but has a very usable iphone app. I have been more successful with it than google tasks or Outlook tasks.