Jan 29, 2013
Alissa Torres is a certified SANS Instructor and Incident Handler at Mandiant, finding evil on a daily basis. Alissa began her career in information security as a Communications Officer in the United States Marine Corps and is a graduate of University of Virginia and University of Maryland. She's on tonight to talk to us about Bulk Extractor.
Cisco responds to the WRT54GL Linksys router hack. They're working on a fix for people being able to remotely get a root shell, but their recommendation in the meantime? Only let friends use your router. Oh yeah, with friends like these...
Have you signed up for the SANS webinar titled "Uninstall Java? Realistic Recommendation? No. Insanity? Yes!" with John Strand, Paul Asadoorian and Eric Conrad? It's coming up, this Tuesday at 2 pm EST.
Do you have all the HTTP response codes memorized? Someone is proposing a new range of 700-level codes Some that might be helpful: HTTP 725: It Works On My Machine. And I fear how often the Security Weekly web server will return an HTTP 767. It simply reads "Drunk".
Former Dawson College graduate student, Ahmed Al-Khabaz, who was expelled for allegedly hacking the university's infrastructure, has received multiple job offers. The guys talks about the situation with a little more detail than is often reported. He found a vulnerability and reported it. So far, so good. But then a little while later, he pointed a scanner at the vulnerability that he found, presumably setting off alarms. Even worse, the noise from the scanner pointed back to him. Once he reported the vulnerability, what's he doing going back to it, and as "evil" Jack mentions, why didn't Al-Khabaz cover his tracks better when he switched his hat color? Nonetheless, lots of weirdness abounds in this story. The university overreacted (what?!? a university overreacted? never!) instead of using this as a learning opportunity. Plus, the student may have made some mistakes along the way, yet he comes out better for it. So is the lesson here to hack your way to a job? Is that what the universities are for? Umm, no. Never go after something that you don't have explicit, written permission to hack. Plus there's Paul's suggestion of punishment here, the student should have been required to work the help desk for three months. That's enough to teach anyone a good lesson.