Suggested Blog Reading – Friday May 4th, 2007

ReadWell Friday is finally here and man am I tired. It’s been a hectic week at work and I’m looking forward to some relaxation time.

Here’s the list for today:

Scapy – Interactive Network Packet Manipulation – Another tool to add to your IDS testing kit.

Scapy is a powerful interactive packet manipulation program. It is able to forge or decode packets of a wide number of protocols, send them on the wire, capture them, match requests and replies, and much more. It can easily handle most classical tasks like scanning, tracerouting, probing, unit tests, attacks or network discovery (it can replace hping, 85% of nmap, arpspoof, arp-sk, arping, tcpdump, tethereal, p0f, etc.). It also performs very well at a lot of other specific tasks that most other tools can’t handle, like sending invalid frames, injecting your own 802.11 frames, combining technics (VLAN hopping+ARP cache poisoning, VOIP decoding on WEP encrypted channel, …), etc.

How to check if your WebMail account has been hacked – I love the idea of trying to trick hackers with crafted spam messages…that’s classic!

WebMail accounts are a popular target for malicious hackers, law enforcement conducting investigations, and rouge insiders. WebMail security is very important, perhaps even more so than your online bank account. If your WebMail is hacked, every web-account associated to that address (using send-an-email-forgot-password-system) could be compromised, including your bank. Phishing scams, password brute-force attacks, cross-site scripting exploits, and insufficient authorization vulnerabilities are all commonplace. And for the most part these attempts are impossible for normal users to detect or do anything about. The problem is that unless your password changed without our knowledge, how can you tell if your account has been compromised? Fortunately there is a fairly simple way.

Ineffective User Awareness Training Revisited – Amrit gets his legs under him for the 2nd round…..ready…fight!

A recent post on the ineffectiveness of user awareness training (here) has sparked some lively discussion, some agree and others not so much. Interestingly enough those that disagree with my position seem to feel that it implies that one can make a similar argument about technology, a completely absurd leap. Anyway I was not trying to weigh user-awareness training against technology alone.

It Was All Him, That Bad Boy 10.11.2.3 – The main problem with “Identity Management” is that you need to have logs from all devices in the infrastructure in order to properly track down the “Bad Boy” and a good way to correlate it.

As security people we are used to answering questions such as “Who attacked that system?” with a curt “Oh, it was 10.13.13.13.” But is the IP address really a who? No, really, is it? I seriously doubt that an auditor, a judge or a lawyer will agree that “an IP address is a who.”

Where am I going with this? I think the time when we start making broader use of identity traceback to link the faceless, inhuman 🙂 IP addresses to a nice (or nasty, as the case may be :-)) warm-blooded humans, who actually press the buttons and write programs.

RSA public keys are not private (implementation) – It’s too early for math! 🙂

Previously, I described a proposed system that will both sign and encrypt code updates using an RSA private key. The goal is to derive the corresponding public key even though it is kept securely within the device.

Steganography for the Mac! – I’ll have to give it a shot.

This might be old news, but I hadn’t seen it until recently. There’s a steganography application for the mac! It’s called Pict Encrypt and it’s a free download. The downside is that it only saves files in MacPICT format. Anyhow, here’s a little something for all you Mac users out there that want to play with it.

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