We hear so much about the mishandlings of security and anti-terrorism policies in the US. There’s a new anti-TSA bashing article published almost daily. “We’re spending too much money and resources on security theater and not enough on intelligence”
However, all is not lost! I came across an excellent article on the Guardian’s website. It’s about ‘Inside the world of Obama’s secret-service bodyguards‘ but it documents several foiled voilent plots thanks to good old fashioned intelligence.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about Apple, the new iPad, and Jobs’ denouncement of Flash. Supposedly Steve Jobs thinks Adobe has gotten lazy and he believes them to be evil similar to Google. What does Jobs think he’s doing when designing hardware with proprietary connectors, closed hardware etc?
YouTube has a beta site with HTML5 + h264 (Firefox won’t work yet). An interesting comparison is to view a video with Flash and then view the same video in theirHTML5 beta site. Open your task manager and watch your processor usage — notice a different?
Feb 12
Mudge (from L0pht) has just been hired as a program manager by DARPA. (I didn’t even know DARPA still existed). Do you remember when L0pht testified before congress that they could bring down the internet in 10 minutes?
If you’re like most people then you have a separate partition where you store your data (mp3s, torrents, software, movies etc). Most people set these partitions up with the default settings (NTFS, 4kb cluster size). However, in most cases the 4kb cluster size is horribly inefficient for the purpose of these data partitions. Chances are most of the files on this data partition will be at least 1mb. The smaller cluster size causes your drive to perform extra seeks to read and write the data. With the sudden rise of the new GUID Partition Table (GPT) and drives beginning to ship with a larger default sector size than 512bytes you should get ahead of the curve.
First, you need to determine what the optimal cluster(block) size is for your data. The best way to figure this out is taking the median file size of the partition. Once you know the best cluster size then you will need to copy the data to another partition or drive. Finally, you can repartition with the new cluster size and then copy your data back.
Here are the steps:
On the way to work this morning I was listening to the Silver Bullet podcast interviewing Dr. Lorrie Cranor (Comp Sci professor at Carnegie Melon). I recommend listening to this episode if you’re at all interested in privacy in the digital age and how it has been evolving. Actually, how is society reacting or non-reacting to privacy in a new medium. There are some interesting studies about how well people can decipher privacy policies and how most companies keep their policies convoluted. An interesting mention is the idea of having privacy policies follow a “nutritional label” format which would be great for the layman like myself to read 
Cranor helped create the P3P Standard: http://www.w3.org/P3P/ It’s been approved by the W3C and has even been supported in IE6-8. Sadly, I don’t think many webmasters are aware of it.
Dr. Cranor also mentions how Google is making an attempt to clarify their privacy policy as folks start to wonder if Google can reach the point of too much information (Enemy of the State and Minority Report). Long story short, Google is creating video’s with real people explaining the privacy policies of their different applications. Kudos to Google on this: http://www.youtube.com/user/googleprivacy
Have you just injected a running process’ memory? In most cases, unless your an adept author and have written a root-kit you want your malware to remain persistent via auto-run, registry, start-up etc. Where do you store your persistent launcher? A clever idea would be to determine what AV the victim is running — if any Once you determine which AV is running you should check whether or not any files or directories are excluded from scanning. If so you’ve just found the perfect location for your loader.
Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
AVG – Configuration files in binary format; No registry entries
Microsoft Security Essentials: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Antimalware\Exclusions\Paths
Trend: Check out these registry locations:
**Here’s a Microsoft KB article about their recommended locations for exclusion: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822158
From their homepage: PhpSecInfo provides an equivalent to the phpinfo() function that reports security information about the PHP environment, and offers suggestions for improvement. It is not a replacement for secure development techniques, and does not do any kind of code or app auditing, but can be a useful tool in a multilayered security approach.
Combine this tool with my ‘Assault on PHP Applications’ blog entry and this recent ‘Web Security‘ article and you’ll be a fairly competent web pen-tester.
I’ve been reading Stephen Levy’s Crypto which gives a nice history of public cryptography (vs. private crypto which has been around much longer) and follows Whit Diffie at least in the chapters I’ve read so far. I will post a full review once I finish the book. In the meantime, Levy mentions the NSA’s involvement with creation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and pressuring IBM to reduce the key size to 56bits.
The book really has me wondering where and how the NSA is recruiting such top talent (mathematics, scientists, engineers). I’ve been scouring the web and haven’t been able to find much information. I find it hard to believe that the NSA sits back and waits for top talent to approach it. I’m thinking of the usual nerd stereotype: aspergers and introverted. I just can’t imagine these folks dying to work for the government in a stuffy cubicle from 08:00-17:00.
I came across one well documented account of someone’s experience with the actual NSA interview process: http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/nsa-interview.pdf Unfortunately, he was not accepted.
I know nowadays the NSA appears at college career fairs and can even be found on facebook. However, what was the process 50 years ago during the height of the cold war?
Is the NSA secretly recruiting? Monitoring doctoral dissertations and white papers and then approaching the authors? I’ve heard from folks that the three letter agencies have plants on college campuses watching for potential rising stars.
The private sector may be winning over candidates because of the salary gap. However, the NSA still has the allure of the best technology, biggest budget, and access to the most information (beat that Google!).
I found a comprehensive list of Security news[letters], feeds, and alerts here: http://www.gideonrasmussen.com/news-alerts.html It’s definitely worth checking out as I found a few lists that I wasn’t aware of.
FYI – Here’s my personal list of favorites (in no particular order):
I just found this article about a new service run by Marlin Moxiespike (from sslsniff fame). He has created WPA Cracker which uses the cloud (his 100 cpu quad processor cluster) to crack WPA and WPA2 (PSK only) handshake captures. So for $17 and the handshake capture you should have your password with 20 minutes.
Related: Using airodump-ng to capture the authentication handshake.