It’s really good to see one chalked up against a botnet operator. Friday, a former botnet operator was sentenced to 37 months in prison for breaking into 100’s of thousands of computers. There NEED to be more stories like this. Unfortunately though, with a possible benefit of making $6,000-10,000 per month being a botnet herder…. and only 2 high profile arrests and convictions, I don’t know if this will discourage ENOUGH people from this kind of activity.
Category: Computers
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Sendmail DoS vulnerability
I’ve got to admit, I hadn’t caught the notice of this until it was at incidents.org. I don’t currently administer sendmail on any machines, but…. Sendmail released version 8.13.8 on August 9th to address several issues (including a DoS vulnerability). It was possible for a specially crafted email to trigger the problem.
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Virtual Machine of a real hard drive
This incidents.org article the other day caught my eye. It talked of a utility calledliveview that could take a hard drive (or image of a drive) and make it into a virtual machine for use in vmware (saving all changes to a temporary file so the original structure of the disk/drive image is not touched.) It looks like you need to have Windows as your base platform, but it looks as though it would be a useful tool. Windows Incident Response possibly saw the same note on Incidents.org.
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Free (and legal) music downloads coming by Christmas 2006 and DRM
I’ve seen several news reports picking up this story from yesterday. SpiralFrog will provide an advertising supported, free music download service and is expected to launch in time for Christmas 2006. There is an agreement with the Universal Music Group and SpiralFrog and the concept is that users must agree to watch advertising before downloading the free music. Testing will begin in the US and Canada before the end of the year. It sounds as though they will use DRM from Microsoft on the free downloads…
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DEP incompatibilities HP Deskjet 5550 printing blank pages
I had a frustrating morning last week. I had setup a new pc, transferred data and gotten everything in fairly nice shape. I had got the old printer attached and setup (HP Deskjet 5550). In fact I had done a test page through the printers software at the end of the install process (Some sort of deskjet toolbox software, not Windows test page pattern.) Then we were making sure everything worked and they went to print out a UPS label from Worldship. The printer had come unplugged in the last rearrange, so I plugged power back in and the printer loaded a page, ran the head back and forth twice and spit out a blank page. Oh, we were using a parallel cable – I’ve seen some parallel cable based printers get “flustered” when power is lost and back on (especially if it was in the midst of a job when the power was pulled) – so reboot…
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Converting pdf to tif (tiff) images
One of the things I was looking into this morning was the possiblity of converting a pdf into a tiff image. Many character recognition programs (and some music recognition software) uses tiff as one of the formats that it can recognize from. I have a number of things in PDF format that I wanted to test out by converting to tif. There MUST be a way….. yes there is (several I suppose).. In linux though the answer is ghostscript.
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Flashplayer 9 on linux
Macromedia Flash player 9 running on linux? Impossible? No… many things that seem impossible, well… aren’t This morning there’s a good writeup at how-to-forge about installing flash player 9 on linux. It involves wine and the how-to is specific to Ubuntu. However, the first two steps (sudo apt-get install wine and sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts) are the only ones that are ubuntu specific. For your given distribution, install according to your distro (urpmi/etc.)
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Recovering lost files
There’s an article at linux.com that gives a good overview of using testdisk and PhotoRec. Testdisk should be able to recover at the partition level and PhotoRec should be able to just pull the files out of a damaged partition. Truth is Hard drives fail in a number of different ways and some of those can give the same error messages. Not too long ago my brother had a laptop hard drive failure, it gave a “no partition found” kind of error message. We talked about a utility such as ghost4linux (g4l) which includes dd_rescue which does a remarkable job with failing disks.
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Intel Proset Wireless update
A couple weeks back, there was a pretty important security update for the Intel Proset Wireless driver. The big problem is that the update was a memory hog and caused porblems. Sans has info on the update to the update, also George Ou is encouraging everyone to make sure they’ve got things updated. It’s possible to JUST download and install the driver without getting the full proset management software. So…. CENTRINO users – this means you… update your wireless driver.
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Using screen to connect multiple users to a shell session
I NEVER knew you could use screen for this…. Let multiple users connect to the same Console (command shell/bash shell) session simultaneously. I’ve looked at screen before. It’s a great *nix utility that’s available for most linux distributions. The primary use I’ve seen for it is to be able to have a shell open, and use screen to be able to disconnect and reconnect to a session. Let’s say you have software compiling, you can use screen to get it started from one location and then re-connect to your screen session from another machine. Think…. VNC for the command line. Well, much like VNC it’s possible for multiple users to view and use the session.