F.R.I.D.A.Yay!!!!!

Here’s the list for today:

Do we need 100Gbps IPS? – I don’t see why we wouldn’t but it sounds like Alan’s main problem is the profitability of the company, not the product itself.

To me this is just a classic case of my marbles are bigger than your marbles. This boys and their toys mentality may be great for NASCAR racing, but this kind of folly will I think continue to drag down the bottom line over at 3Com. Who are they going to sell a 100Gbps IPS to and how many can they buy. I disagree with Masri that 100Gbps is at the core of enterprise networks. I can understand being out in front of a market, but when you haven’t been profitable for 6 years and as the article points out because of the financial structure involved in the H3C partnership buyout, allocations of expenses make it harder to show profitability, can you afford to chase white elephants.

PPT Metadata – Sounds like a good script. I haven’t quite made it to chapter 5 yet 🙂

I received an email recently asking if I had any tools to extract metadata from PowerPoint presentations. Chapter 5 of my book includes the oledmp.pl Perl script, which grabs OLE information from Office files; this includes Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. I’ve run some tests using this script, and pulled out things like revision number, created and last saved dates, author name, etc.

Why Security Pros Use Macs – Interesting points. I purchased my MacBook so that I could have the power of Unix with the usability of Windows (without the frequent crashing).

Laptops are tools. You use them to provide a service to a vast array of clients. What tool is going to enable you to multi-task the best, save you time, and serve the broadest possible customer base?

Snort 3.0 licensing – Marty chimes in on the recent Snort 3.0 licensing.

If you want to know what Snort 3.0’s licensing language is going to be, try reading it. It’s available in the first Snort 3.0 pre-alpha release I did last month and we’re using the GPL. Apparently it was hard to locate because it was in a file called COPYING instead of one called LICENSE. The origin of naming the license file COPYING comes from the FSF as I recall and is typical of most GPL projects. Anyway, to avoid further confusion (and so I can tell people to look at my blog if it comes up!) I’ll post the preamble that we added to the COPYING file before the GPL license language in Snort 3.0 right here

Blogging on corporate laptops is risky business – …..as I blog this from my work laptop during my lunch break 🙂

When employees fire up their company-issued mobile devices at home or at the airport, they often use the technology for both business and personal pursuits like blogging. According to one industry expert, it’s a very dangerous trend.

Hardware Security Modules: part I – the basics – The quality of articles from these guys never cease to amaze me.

HSMs and PKI are pretty big subjects, and putting every piece of information about them into a blog post would make it fairly unreadable. What follows is therefore a basic primer of information you will need to understand before I go any further with the meat of the issue, which I hope will be expanded on arising from any questions that people may have. If you know this already, great stuff, we’ll pick up on the actual HSMs tomorrow.

Removal Instructions for Trojan.Kardphisher – Tuck this one away in case you get infected.

In the blog entry MS Needs Your Credit Card Details?, we detailed the behavior of the Kardphisher Trojan, which “attempts to steal credit card numbers by tricking the user into entering their credit card details to activate Windows.” This entry explains how to remove the Trojan.