July 26, 2005

Interesting Story about DDoS attacks

How a Bookmaker and a Whiz Kid Took On an Extortionist and Won - CSO Magazine - May 2005


The story recounts the efforts of one company to resist an extortion attempt based on DDoS of the targets website. This seems to be an increasing trend at the moment, and is additional evidence that the worm and virus writers we'll be seeing in the future won't be kids looking for kudos on IRC, but professionals who view compromised systems as a resource to be used, in this case, for criminal ends.

Posted by rorym at 9:08 PM | TrackBack

July 24, 2005

Thought provoking post on terrorism and statistics

The Musings of Harry: Let's not loose our heads


This is a very interesting post. "Harry" has done some work looking at the number of deaths from terrorism as opposed to other causes, in the UK and asks some questions about the level of emphasis and spending on those topics.

It's pretty obvious that a lot of this is based on the shock effect and media coverage. If you take heart disease as an example.. what sort of coverage do the 110,000 people who died in the UK of preventable heart disease, get... compared with the coverage of the London bombings...

Also if you think about it, if the governments goal was preventing the deaths of UK citizens, would they not be better legislating to ban (not just get rid of direct advertising for) unhealthy foods and cigarettes, instead of passing legislation which has a dubious effect, at best, on terrorism....

Posted by rorym at 9:09 PM | TrackBack

ToR

Nitesh Dhanjani

Post about using ToR to launch attacks (or in this case vulnerability scanners). Using this it appears that you can be more or less anonymous on the Internet, at a network level anyway. Only the entry point to the ToR network will know the origin of your traffic. Of course if you get to the site and put in identifiable information about yourself, that would somewhat defeat the purpose ;op

Of course it would be probably be possible to reconstruct traffic if you could grab the whole ToR network... but unless you're wanted by governmental agencies.. that shouldn't be a problem!

One thing though. I wonder whether we'll see cases of uninformed courts trying to press charges against the exit points of networks like ToR as they will be what turns up in the logs of destination web servers....

Posted by rorym at 7:27 PM | TrackBack

July 12, 2005

Some tips on secure wireless networks

Building Secure Wireless Networks @ LinuxWorld

Good articles from the guys who wrote Wi-Foo on some tools to help build secure wireless networks.

Posted by rorym at 7:18 PM | TrackBack