Well a combination of holidays/moving server and some problems with my new host (hopefully all sorted now!) have left me not blogging for a while now, but should be back to normal, erratic, service!
Recently in Misc. Category
Well I'm back from (sometimes) sunny shetland. Thanks to some rain and a laptop I'd taken I got some work done on a tool I've started developing for my SANS GSOC gold paper.
RoraScanner is a Oracle 10G security scanner written in ruby. I'm enjoying writing it at the moment as it's let me develop my ruby skills and my oracle skills at the same time.
Hopefully it'll also become a reasonably useful security scanner!
well like some others in the security blogosphere I'm off on my holidays for the next couple of weeks to lovely shetland. Nice place, but not renowned for the density of it's Wi-Fi hotspots so I'll probably be offline for a bit...
I've had the blog running in a virtual machine for a while since the power supply on my server blew, but that's it back onto dedicated hardware now..
In fact it's a nice little debian server using a Buffalo Linkstation Pro reflashed with FreeLink.
Pretty good deal as you get a perfectly good linux server based on a 130 pound piece of hardware. I've got two of them running now, one as a web server and one as a file/print server. There a lot smaller an quieter than running full-tower cases in the office!
IT Security, the view from here: A kick in the teeth
Well looks like I annoyed Rob Newby, with some comments on the challenges I think that Data-Centric security will have. To be honest I'm a little disappointed in the tone he chose to take in his post and that he didn't trackback which would've allowed me a chance to respond, as it was I only found his post 'cause Hoff chased down the non trackbackers... anyway here's my response which I've commented on his blog as well...
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Hi Rob,
Thanks for replying (although I almost missed your comment no trackback!). I must say I'm a bit dissapointed, in that I thought I raised some valid points in a reasonably constructive way, but you seem to have annoyed you a bit.
Allow me to respond to your points
1. How do you mean I don't have to manage it? My role is at a corporate and one of the challenges I see in corporates implementing this kind of security is that with not standards it'll be impossible for it to work
2. You've not really passed on anything new to this. Again in many companies I've worked with the idea of getting users to understand and manage security rights has caused a load of problems and I think that anything else which adds to that burden is probably a non-starter.
3. Didn't think I said it too hard. Wouldn't you agree that the only DRM usage (music files) that has had widespread take-up has been, in my opinion, a disaster. Now I'm not familiar with EMC etcs DRM products and how they solve these problems, perhaps you could tell me more about that.
4. Sorry I've NEVER seen those models of security used outside the military and the police. Modern corporates in my experience all use DAC style because there are no products which are considered manageable which implement those pieces.
Yes I have studied security for many years thanks. Just because I don't think that one direction that people are going in for security is the best doesn't mean I'm anti-security. What I've found however is that companies are focused on having information available to make business decisions and any security measure that makes that difficult/impossible is not one which will see wide adoption.
Well that's the blog back online after more than a week, just before I was off to the OWASP Conference (Of which more later), the power supply in my server blew! after some frustration with moving disks and volume groups in Linux I decided to wait until I got back and re-build on a Virtual machine...
I've been having some fun sorting out some cool new tech. for my house. I've been looking for something to replace the large tower box I've got running my file/print & website for a while. Mainly so I can separate them and not be hosting any extneral services on the same machine as I'm hosting internal services.
So I've been looking for small, quiet, cheap Linux boxes to use for a webserver and I came across the Buffalo Linkstation Pro. It only costs 99 pounds in the UK and is designed as a NAS device, however in common with most of these kinds of devices, it's really a small ARM-based computer running Linux. So following a quick trip to the excellent Linkstation wiki some downloading and following of instructions to re-flash the device, I've now got a debian Linux server with 128MB RAM and a 250GB hard drive all for under a hundred quid!!
The other thing I set-up for the first time the other night was tor, mainly to see how easy or difficult it would be. the answer is (on Fedora Core 6 at least) pretty easy, two package installs and a couple of edits to config files and I'm surfing anonymously. It's a bit slow but apart from that seems to do what it says on the tin. Very handy to test source IP address restrictions if you're using them.
