Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category


Federal requirement to disclose database security breaches?

Thursday, May 11th, 2006

Fines and prison time are among the penalties envisioned under a proposed house bill. The requirement would be that businesses with database holding information on more than 10,000 people (or federal employees) would have to inform either the Secret Service or the FBI of a data security breach. (The maximum sentence would be [...]

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How to escape from the deluge of credit card offers…..

Friday, April 7th, 2006

This isn’t necessarily tech related, but modern life related I guess. I can’t count how many credit card offers we receive in the mail each month. I have visions of a few acres of forest land somewhere being tagged with our name and the subtitle… “credit card offers”. I’ve never followed up [...]

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Apache2 not starting because of ssl_scache file

Saturday, January 21st, 2006

I mentioned this a while back, but I didn’t go into much detail on a long term solution. Let me re-set the situation. Linux server running apache2. It’s Mandrake (now Mandriva) (an older version.) When the system has suffered abrupt outage (power loss). Everything starts up normally with the exception [...]

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Oracle updates

Wednesday, January 18th, 2006

I normally don’t follow updates for Oracle, as I don’t have an installation running Oracle to support. Right now, I’m quite glad of that… The Security Fix is talking about the 82 patches they released Tuesday in their quarterly patch release. The fact that they released 82 patches is not what’s disturbing though. [...]

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Disable or turn off hotkeys under Windows XP

Thursday, January 5th, 2006

Since this is a simple tip I’m including it in the basics category. I ran across a pc with a Dell Multimedia Keyboard and they wanted to disable the hotkeys (sound mixer was always popping up because the key was in the way.) Anyway, on older systems, there would be a standalone program [...]

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Cleaning up after WMF exploit third party boot disc

Thursday, December 29th, 2005

At this point, I needed to rename or delete some files that windows would not let me touch. I had this winlogon.exe running from a suspect directory c:\windows\inet20001 and windows wouldn’t let me kill it, or remove it’s start entry in the registry. So, I booted my image from a dsl linux cd [...]

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Removing items from MSCONFIG after WMF exploit

Thursday, December 29th, 2005

OK, so, I’m busy killing off running processes and fire up MSConfig to try to keep them from coming back on the next boot. To launch msconfig go to start, run… type in msconfig and click ok. The startup tab is where we’re looking for programs running at startup (makes sense…) This [...]

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Task manager has been disabled by your administrator

Thursday, December 29th, 2005

The first problem I ran into in cleaning up after my infested Windows XP image was this error message. One of the first things I do in cleaning an infested system is try to kill off running process that look suspect (or at least identify them.) On using ctrl-alt-delete I got the message [...]

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Workaround for zeroday WMF exploit

Wednesday, December 28th, 2005

It’s worth repeating a few things here. There is a nasty exploit in the way that WMF images are parsed in Windows. This means that WITHOUT user intervention a system can be remotely exploited and through that exploit various software (spyware, viruses, other malware) can be installed. There is no patch at [...]

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Takedown phishing sites

Friday, December 16th, 2005

Sunbeltblog has a good post on a group that helps “take bad guys out”. The Internet Crime Provention and Control Institute (Link expired). Basically, they will take submissions of complaints and assist in getting sites taken down. A good example would be phishing sites, maybe servers hosting illegal content, stolen information, etc. [...]

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