Don Parker

Boy oh boy, Christmas has come early! The scum of the Internet has finally come up against US law enforcement and lost. I remember hearing about CastleCops coming under DDoS attack. DDoS attacks are nothing new to the forums part of this website. Several times we have come under attack by such losers who have nothing better to do. The bizarre part are these fsck_wits think they are elite or talented in some way. Where the heck is the talent in exploiting vulnerable computers? Any monkey with a keyboard can do it. It takes far more to actually learn something vice using someone else’s exploit code, or better yet, actually have some ethics. I have spent years developing my skills and not once have ever thought about exploiting a vulnerable computer, of which there are tons. Technorati Tags: DDoS, DOS, CastleCops

For those of you in IT, be it security or sys admin, you are likely beginning to realize the importance of having soft skills, or people skills as it were. This is no longer the 1980’s with the mystique that computers once had with only a very small minority in the know. We are now faced with an ever increasing crop of talented IT talent. Just how do you distinguish yourself from the masses? Well that is where the all important soft skills come in.
Use the following example as a premise. You are the sys admin/IT security person in a corporate network. You find that one of your users is surfing porn at work. What do you do? Do you follow possible existing guidelines ie: report them immediately, with them possibly being fired, or do you give them a friendly visit first? That is but one small example. My point is, you must exercise judgement first. It is not always about following guidelines or best practices. There is a human facet to computers. One would be wise to pay attention to it.
Technorati Tags: Sys admin, Corporate network, Soft skills

We have all read and heard tons of information about computer security. What about physical security though and how it impacts your IT assets? After all there is little point having the best of breed for your network if you are going to leave the door to your cabling closet wide open. While this is a rather obvious example of access control in the overall physical security strategy there is a whole lot more that you can do. Have any of you ever actually worked on physical security strategies for your company? I have done so in the past and found it to be an often neglected portion of a company’s overall security posture.
Technorati Tags: Physical security, Network security, Computer security

It would seem that some employers just don’t know when not to hire someone. Hiring a convicted computer hacker is not the way to go, though it would seem some companies would rather buck conventional logic. As has been shown in some cases, the supposedly reformed hacker is anything but. The present landscape of network security has changed drastically from what it was twenty years ago. You no longer have to hire a thief to catch a thief, as it were. There are many talented professionals out there, and quite a few who are looking for work. On that note, why the heck would you hire a criminal?
Technorati Tags: Hacker, Network security

We all have different training needs for we all occupy different jobs. That said, who are your preferred training vendors. What are your various training requirements? Problem is though, once you begin to advance there are less and less vendors available to you. What if you wish to develop your diasassembly skills? Who do you go see? How about this, let’s collaborate, please feel free to list who your preferred trainers are. Moreover, what areas are you trying to develop.
Technorati Tags: Training, Programming, Computer security

A good many of us who work in the computer security industry have heard of Dave Aitel. He is the CTO of Immunitysec and has also generously donated his time and skills to develop and release, for free, programs such as SPIKE proxy, Immunitydbg to name but a few. This brings me to the latest commercial product offering from Immunitysec, SILICA. SILICA is a pen-testing tool for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which leverages the Immunitysec flagship product CANVAS. SILICA comes in the nice form factor of a PDA. This is one of the features which makes SILICA rather attractive, its very small size. Instead of sitting in the hallway of a high rise office building with your laptop probing a clients Wi-Fi network, you can instead sit there with a small PDA looking rather innocuous. Anyhow, seeing is believing, so let’s take a look at some screen grabs.
First up we see below the SILICA start menu, which is pretty easy to figure out.

Next up is the list of preferences seen below which is fairly intuitive and does not really need explaining. Though if you need some feel free to drop me a line.

We see below what SILICA looks like while scanning.

Noted below is a list of AP’s that SILICA can associate to and then proceed to scan if so desired.

Lastly, we see what a SILICA report looks like

Anyhow, I don’t want to do "death by screenshot". My point is that SILICA can replace some other very expensive s/w programs which scan for AP’s and nothing more. SILICA will do that and also allow you to leverage CANVAS for a pen-test of them. I have several s/w programs

Do any of you perform wireless audits, or pen-tests of them, as part of your work? Reason I ask is that I have done them in the past whilst using some high-end aka expensive Win32 tools. I am just in the middle of looking at another tool that is not Win32 based that I will blog about shortly. It seems quite nice, and takes the guesswork out of WiFi for those pen-testers/auditors who are not up to snuff on the technology,Technorati Tags: WiFi, Wifi, Pen-test, Audit and some of its weaknesses. Anyhow, I would be most interested to hear of any experiences some of you may have had.

I remember the first time I read that Max Butler was busted for hacking. It struck me as incredibly stupid that someone who actually had spent time trying to get a reputation as a good hacker would get busted for illegal hacking. Well it would seem Max just hasn’t learned his lesson. He was busted yet again! This time however he is looking at spending a good chunk of his young life in prison. It really is a shame that he had to continue his petty larceny ways. Heck, even spammers make more money then Max did with his lame credit card site. Crime just doesn’t pay, and in this case, that is a fact.
Technorati Tags: Max Ray Butler, Credit card fraud, Hacking, Prison

Well as we all know most every network is built and based around some version of Microsoft Windows. Securing these networks is the usual assortment of firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), content checkers and so on. What though in your opinion is the most underrated element of security in a Windows network? For my two cents worth I would say the judicious use of group policy objects(GPO). Much like using egress filtering on routers the use of GPO’s can be most beneficial. Much like egress filtering though GPO’s are often misunderstood or poorly applied. Your thoughts on this?
Technorati Tags: Group policy, Egress filtering, IDS, IPS