With recent news that there is issue with SSL certs. The real issue is no SSL, the encryption being used or other technologies. The issue is the involment of people in the whole process.
Generally the weakest part of security of an organization is people and this is also the case with SSL. It is the case that these hacks are achieved by gaining access to a system that provideds human interaction to grant certs. This is the flaw in the system.
If you have a safe and you give random govenments the master key to this safe, also have a non skilled way of making a key should you get access to that workshop then you are placing your trust in people and not the strength of the encryption as the weakest link is the strength of the system.
I know of cases at a major computer supplier that where credit card details are wrote on a piece of paper and then the details are later entered into the order system. These details can be kept in a desk drawer.
The ironic thing is that self signed certs throw an exception that they can no be trusted but in the current climate they may be more trustworthy as you know who that third party may be.
It is not possbile to have a secure system but have backdoors. This is the flaw of SSL.
As noted in other news media if one of the big two cert was compromised would it mean that they would be just revoked. I don’t think so as they are too big to fail. It is all built on a house of cards and is only a matter of time before it all falls down.
Windows has been plagued by rougue AV for some time now. Now on Mac a user can also suffer such faith.
The victim is tricked into thinking that their is a virus of some kind on their system and they must install something. This software (Rougue Anti Virus) then spits out a list of valid files saying that they are infected and prompts the user that they must upgrade if they want to fix the issue.
As in windows you can’t do anything because the virii they reported are stopping you doing anything like browse the web, run anti-virus (the one you have) etc but it is the rougue AV that is stoping this.
So you upgrade and pay $80 but also provide the rougue AV with your credit card details.
Currently you must enter your admin password for the malware to take control of your system but it is only a matter of time where an exploit is used to get around this limitation/hurdle for the malware writers.
It target if you have “open safe files” box checked which used to be default in Safari but not any longer.
As always you should always be aware of what your installing and that the source can be trusted.
Peter Kruse reports that a DIY crimeware kit that is akin to Zeus and Spyeye on Windows is now available to attackers to yield similar results on OS X. Weyland-Yutani BOT supports web injects and form grabbing in Firefox; however both Chrome and Safari will soon follow. The webinjects templates are identical to the ones used in Zeus and Spyeye.
Currently there is only support for Firefox but other browsers to follow including iOS and Linux release.
Looks like the merger of Zeus and Spyeye is producing fruit.
I was very interested in the area of Cyberbullying and how it impacts on society. In Ireland there is a lack of legislation in respect to this problem. I wrote a paper on these issues on “Legal and Ethical issues to cyberbullying in Ireland and beyond“. Feel free to give a it a read.
Google provides an easy to manage SSO service for education. Costs can be reduced as all you have to do is sync the education instution active directory server with google using Google Apps Directory Sync. Then you can provide all your students with SSO email etc that will be hosted by google and the same credentails can be used for physical login to your IT system. Sounds great on paper. Will it is, you reduce cost, need of hosting of emails, backups etc while providing an excellent uptime and interface for services such as email, calanders, google docs that you could never develop in-house.
Is there a catch. Will when something seems too good to be true it generally is. SSO is great if implemented correctly but what if a 3rd part site would like to use your login’s also. Well you have little control and what if they implement it in the worst possible way, well your dammed here also.
Currently a 3rd party site can implement a signon session using your accounts (which were synced to google) over http with plain text.
You may think this is far fetched but I have seen it with my own two eyes. I have seen a 3rd level education instutution doing just that. All their internal sites use https and are secure but a 3rd party site didn’t bother and sends a username and password in plaintext, not even hashed. I could then take this information and login to their IT system physically and access all the student services.
Where does the responsibility lie ??
So how its done is that the education instutuion uses Active Directory and syncs this with google and then people use this authentication DB as they will. The control is lost in the sync with google.
I love Backtrack but sometime I wish that those tools were on my mac also which is my primary OS. Mac Ports is the answer.
Visit and install (You need Dev tools installed)
http://www.macports.org
Then Just run a command like
sudo port install metasploit3
tools available of which I use :
aircrack-ng
ettercap-ng
hping3
hydra
john
p0f
xprobe2
nmap
snort
German white-hat hacker Thomas Roth claims he can crack WPA-PSK-protected networks in six minutes using Amazon EC2 compute power — an attack that would cost him $1.68. The key? Amazon’s new cluster GPU instances. ‘GPUs are (depending on the algorithm and the implementation) some hundred times faster compared to standard quad-core CPUs when it comes to brute forcing SHA-1 and MD,’ Roth explained. GPU-assisted servers were previously available only in supercomputers and not to the public at large, according to Roth; that’s changed with EC2. Among the questions Roth’s research raises is, what role should Amazon and other public-cloud service providers play in preventing customers from using their services to commit crimes?
While doing a CCNA years ago I loved the ease of being able to use the simulator to get my work done, similarly I loved using GNS/Dynamips later.
I wanted the same with VMware.
I like to run vmware fusion on my macbook but its too slow and the fans start spinning up etc. I would also like a lab that I could work on remotely so I started to use vmware’s vnc server option.So now I run the vm’s on my iMac.
To setup you enable it while the vm is off in advanced options for each vm and then ensure that you don’t use port 5900 as the mac is using that for ard/vnc.
The gotcha is that you have to connect to the mac’s ip and the port that you have configured to connect to the vnc server and not the ip address of the vm.
I tried out a few vnc clients and found Jollyfastvnc to be the best for this. Now I can setup a complete lab with remote access for all my VM’s
Pitty there is no web management tool to start/stop the vm’s etc on mac.