Cyber Security Awareness Month

The Internet Storm Center is offering daily tips on cyber-security, and specifically on incident handling, for the month of October.  Check out the link to catch up on the daily tips or submit your own.

Apple OS X Root Privilege Vulnerability

If you are a Mac user, and haven’t seen the latest security vulnerability for OS X yet, Macshadows has an excellent writeup, with a temporary solution.  Essentially, you need to open a terminal window and paste the following command:

sudo chmod u-s /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent

After you press return, you will be prompted for your password.  This command changes the executable permissions.  It will also revert back to the vulnerable permissions if you repair disk permissions.  Apple’s latest security patch did NOT correct this issue.

Portable and Cross-platform Personal Password Manager

Having to change between two different platforms (Windows and OS X), I wanted a functional password manager that was both portable and cross-platform.  KeePass fits this requirement, and even has a Linux port and several other versions, as well.  KeePass is open source and free.  Download the portable apps version of KeePass here, and the OS X version, KeePassX, here.  I installed the portable apps version to my thumbdrive, then downloaded the OS X version and just copied the .app file to the same directory. Make sure you keep the password database in the same directory.

Revision3 Denial of Service Attack

Revision3 spent the Memorial Day weekend fighting off a denial of service attack.  Their blog post summarizes the shocking and angering results.  Check it out.

I Will Derive …

One of the funniest videos I have seen in a while (at least from my totally nerd viewpoint):

MacBook Pro Hard Drive Replacement

I upgraded the hard drive in my MacBook Pro today. It went pretty well, but is not really for the easily technological-intimidated! I followed (for the most part) the guide at ifixit. I ran into a few things that their guide didn’t include, so I thought I would add my experience here. First, as you remove the screws, make a list of the location of the screws, and how many you removed. Be sure that you place each set in their own location. The guide doesn’t state that there are different lengths of screws.

MacBook and MacBook Pro USB Ports

This week on MacBreak Weekly ( Episode 88 ) one of the hosts was having sound problems with a USB headset. They discussed the problem and one of the other hosts suggested changing the port the headset is on. A short discussion followed and here are the results. The MacBook has two USB ports on the left. The port that is closest to the screen sits on an internal USB hub with the other devices on the system (i.e. the camera). The other port is on its own. For the MacBook Pro, there are two plugs: one each on the left and the right. The port on the left is on its own. The port on the right is on a hub with the other USB devices on the laptop. You will get better sound and probably better performance out of other devices by plugging the devices into the single port.

VMWare Fusion 2 Beta and Backtrack Wireless

If you are trying to use VMWare Fusion 2.0 Beta and anything wireless in Backtrack, you might want to wait until the next release. I had all different kinds of trouble getting wireless USB dongles working with the setup. First Kismet would quit because of a TCP error. Then I had several kernel panics. Going back to the current stable release fixed the issues.

What’s on my USB key?

I’ve gathered many programs for my USB memory stick so I thought I would list them here. Actually, when you get down to it, I have a couple of memory sticks I keep with me most of the time. The first one is an older stick and is only 256 mb. However, it has a switch that you can flip to make it read-only. I use this stick to run the Windows utilities from Helix. The read-only switch comes in handy because some antivirus programs identify a few of the Helix tools as malware.

Ubuntu 8.04, VMWare Server, Wine and Warcraft, DVD Playback

I installed the latest Ubuntu (8.04) last weekend and have been playing around with it a bit this week. Wow, is it nice! It is noticeably quicker than my 7.10 install. Of course, I did a complete wipe and reinstall, so that probably has something to do with the speed.

I installed VMWare Server as soon as the operating system was up and running. Of course, you will need to do a few minor housekeeping items before it will work. Here is the link to a process that was successful for me.

Next up was to get Wine installed so that I could feed my World of Warcraft addiction. However, I am on a three week withdrawal right now. Wish me luck… If only there was a patch for this addiction. Follow the instructions above to install Wine. You’ll get the most recent version instead of what is in the repositories. After that was installed, I just copied over my WoW directory and changed a couple of settings, and it was up and running.

Adding DVD playback, courtesy of Lifehacker, is as easy as two command lines:

sudo apt-get install totem-xine libxine1-ffmpeg libdvdread3

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh