securitySumo

Cyber Security Awareness Month

Sumo — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:00:16 +0000

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.

Posted in Internet Security

Apple OS X Root Privilege Vulnerability

Sumo — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 03:16:09 +0000

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

Sumo — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:15:31 +0000

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

Sumo — Fri, 30 May 2008 01:58:20 +0000

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 …

Sumo — Sat, 24 May 2008 19:05:58 +0000

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

MacBook Pro Hard Drive Replacement

Sumo — Sat, 24 May 2008 18:49:29 +0000

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.

Second, after you have all the screws removed, it will help to use your head: literally! When you lift the top panel (with the keyboard and trackpad) the cable isn’t long enough to let you stand the panel up by itself. I just stuck my head in and let it rest on it while I unplugged the cable (you have to remove a short piece of tape first).

Third, when it comes time to remove the hard drive cable, you will have to pry it off a couple of locations where they tacked it with some glue. I used a business card to slide under the cable to loosen the glue. Don’t use anything metal and don’t bend the cable. It is very fragile and could break a connection very easily.

Last, I didn’t reinstall the top panel screws at all before checking to make sure the hard drive was working. I just snapped the panel back in place and booted of my Leopard dvd-rom. You will have to use Disk Utility once you have booted to format the drive. After the format, you are ready to proceed with the install.

For my data, I already had a Western Digital 250gb Passport drive, so I backed up most everything there, just to be safe. I stopped by the local computer shop and picked up a 2.5 inch SATA to USB hard drive enclosure and just transferred my old laptop drive to there. After OS X was installed, I just plugged this in and copied everything I needed over. Now I have a clean install, and all my data was backed up in two locations!

Side note: After the OS X install, I noticed the laptop really heating up, which worried me. Once the system was installed, I ran Software Update and installed all the latest patches. Now, the heat is back to normal.

MacBook and MacBook Pro USB Ports

Sumo — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:56:12 +0000

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

Sumo — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:53:09 +0000

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?

Sumo — Sun, 04 May 2008 03:19:19 +0000

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.

My second, and primary, memory stick is a SanDisk 8gb U3 Cruzer. The first thing I did was to remove the U3 partition with the included software. I then had to use my Mac to recreate the primary partition because, for some reason, when I tried to make the USB stick bootable, it would hang when grub was loading. Once I recreated the partition, grub worked fine. So, onto the list:

My first, and favorite install is the USB bootable version of Backtrack3 beta. Here are the instructions on how to do this.

PCRepairSystem – this folder takes just over 26 mb of space, contains around 37 useful tools and was built to fit on a 32 mb drive.

Helix Tools – To get the tools from the Helix distribution, I mounted the Helix iso and copied the Autoplay, IR, and Language folders, and helix.exe, helix.ico, indext.html, and autorun.inf into a folder.

PortableApps – Portable Apps lets you pick and choose various applications that have been specially crafted to run solely from a portable USB drive. Here is my list of installed apps: 7zip, ClamWin, CommandPrompt, Eraser, Firefox, Gaim, Keepass, Notepad++, OpenOffice, Backup, Putty, Sumatra, Sunbird, Thunderbird, VLC, and WinMD5Sum.

PortableServers – This is a very impressive service. When you visit the link, you can choose various self-contained web applications (ie. Apache, php, etc.) and then select applications to run on a portable web server. For example, on the server side, I am running Apache2, MySQL5, and PHP5. The applications I have installed are: Drupal, Joomla, Knowledgeroot, Mediawiki, OpenDB, WordPress, and xoops. A very nice way to help you customize some of these programs without having to setup a complete web server.

Various Tools Folder – My own collection of various tools I have picked up over the years. I have the complete collection of Sysinternals tools, the Firecat listing (a listing of Firefox security extensions), the ISC Alert applet, NetStumbler, and TrueCrypt5.

I realize that there are some duplicates in this listing, but I have plenty of space left on the drive (over 4 gigs even with a couple of iso image files I am temporarily carrying). It nice to have a good toolbox when a family member or friend asks you to fix their computer. The biggest problem with this many tools is remembering which tools you have and what they do!

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

Sumo — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:40:15 +0000

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