There’s a good article at Michael Sutton’s Blog which points out something that really makes sense and I think many people are aware of, but with all the buzz that a new previously undisclosed vulnerability has, we forget. The point is this, there are plenty of machines online vulnerable to ancient flaws that have been known (in some cases for years.) In his article, he does a search for one specific vulnerability and finds targets. Some of the comments speculate that some may be honeypots, but I would doubt that a high percentage are and suspect that most are the real deal.
Tag: EVERYTHING
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Audio on Linux weekend…
For most people here in the US, this last weekend was known as Labor Day weekend, for me though… it was more like Audio on Linux weekend. I’ve mentioned before that I use my computer for most EVERYTHING and that’s not far off…. I have watched movies on the PC, I’ve recorded multitrack audio, captured tv shows to disc, and of course, work…. database server, digitial photos/editing, test web sites, word documents, test various hardware, etc. etc. test software, etc…. vmware…. oh the list could keep going and going and going…. Well, sometimes it seems that optimizing the machine for one thing comes at the expense of another. Since I had to swap out the system board on the main machine (massively failing probably due to overheating…. multiple pci slots had failed, etc….) I hadn’t had a chance to see why some things didn’t work the way I used to….
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New Data Leaks section
I’ve added yet another category for “data leaks”. This is where I’ll put news along the lines of X company leaked data on yyyyy customers. It’s unfortunate that this is something that likely happens daily. There is no way that I can keep up with EVERYTHING, but I’ll try to post the bigger events in this category. I have many customers that say they’re concerned about people getting their credit card or bank numbers and for that reason they don’t do ANY transactions online or have any of that data on their computers. Well, I hate to break it to you, but the genie is already out of the bottle, because the companies that we do business with (ON OR OFFLINE) have all your data on computers and prohibiting yourself from online transactions is NO guarantee that you won’t have your data stolen or be a victim of Identity theft.
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Is the firmware current?
The other day I was struggling with something that should have worked “out of the box”. It was a little wireless bridge (Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge). The idea was to just connect it to the pc and it would just work. Well…. in a word NO. It “sort of worked”, the problem is the pc didn’t receive the dhcp address, so I had to manually set it. I didn’t know the correct gateway information (should it be the bridged device ip or the REAL gateway.) At one point I got dns lookups working, but routing to the internet was not working, then the access point got pulled off a shelf and EVERYTHING stopped working. Checking in on the bridge would show it was just cycling through the WPA handshake process over and over and over.
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NTFS cloning
Sometimes drives just go bad. Surprise. One recent fresh install of Windows XP had started having real stability problems. On running a chkdsk and looking at the event viewer, it was fairly clear that 16KB of bad sectors and the disk problems had likely been the problem (lots of disk and atapi errors in the system log. Mostly disk error during paging operation (swap filing)) So…. I looked at cloning the drive using dd_rescue. All went well and the new system booted up on the new identically sized drive. In fact EVERYTHING was fine except chkdsk still reported 16KB of bat sectors….
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Ubuntu-server 6.06 LTS plus vmware server and other vmware server notes
What follows are some notes taken on vmware server. Most are related to an install on ubuntu-server (NO GUI INSTALLED)…. the main point of this is to have the host system take as FEW resources away from the guests as possible.
This requires a few x libraries – but not full blown X gui.
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Sky falls – bugs exist in the Linux kernel….
There have been several articles in the last few days breathlessly heralding the news The linux kernel is too buggy… Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer has said in the last week that the 2.6 kernel has gotten a bit out of hand with too many new features and too few fixed bugs. Of course, he’s probably right…. Linux founder Linus Torvalds agrees that a “bugfix only” cycle of kernel development would be a good idea.
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Top 10 things to do when throwing out a computer
This is going to sound familiar to those that have been here before, but I’ve just had a once over of a batch of machines that are going to get thrown away tomorrow and felt compelled to make a list of the top ten things to do before you throw away, give away, pitch or otherwise dispose of your computer…..
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WMF vulnerability not an accident? Was it an intentional backdoor?
I’m not quite sure if I’m willing to attribute to design, what I could attribute to a mistake… but, slashdot has pointed out that Steve Gibson in his latest Security Now! podcast (link is to transcript), is suggesting that it appears as though the WMF vulnerability of recent weeks appears (to him) to have been INTENTIONALLY included as a means of a remote backdoor.
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C:\windows\system32\kernels64.exe not found
On the next boot I was greeted with the above message C:\windows\system32\kernels64.exe not found please make sure the path……correct…. blah blah blah. Back to msconfig. Everything there now looks clean. I check the running processes, again everything there looks clean I don’t see anything that I’ve been fighting. So, I start the registry editor (start, run and type regedit) and once that’s open a start a search for kernels64.exe