deutschlandfunk

old time radio
At the end of last year a friend gave my contact information to a radio producer with an interesting project. She wanted to learn as much she could as you can from a person through different means:

  • Getting his writing analyzed
  • Getting his voice analyzed
  • Using a private detective to follow him for a couple of days
  • And of course the digital perspective (which is where I tried to pitch in)

Basically we had a target (which gave us written permission to hack him and his systems) and the idea was to go, collect all the information we could from his online presence, hack any of his accounts and / or his personal computer. One of the things we had in mind, was since “the Target” was one of the producers, is that we didn’t want to kill any of his devices.

Keep Reading →

sysunconfig

I just released a set of scripts that come in handing when creating clean images for virtual environment, heck you can even use it for cloud images.

What they do is:

  • clear all the logs
  • clean up the networking scripts, because the normally get references to the mac address in CentOS
  • clean up the repository files
  • in some cases create a root user

There are scripts for: CentOS 6, Debian and OpenSuse.

They can be be found in the tools section or in github.

Workshops in Cologne

I’m going to be giving to workshops in Cologne in July, with what I think are really fun topics: WordPress Security and Hands-on security for beginners.

So embrace this opportunity to learn some hacking or security for a one time only startup friendly price

Keep Reading →

Horizon and cookies

I’ve been working with the Havanna release of OpenStack the last couple of days and ran across a default setting that should be avoided in any deployment: using cookies as the session backend.

The source of the problems has been known at least since October 2013  in Django and other frameworks: clear-text client-side session management.
There is even OSVDB entry and Threatpost covered it in an article.

Keep Reading →

Launch of Practical security

This is a topic that I have been thinking about for a long time and finally started creating some content for it. The idea is to create a series of posts, workshops and presentations that will help create security awareness at many levels. The topics will go across the board but I will be starting with those I think will have a greater impact in reducing the amount of low-hanging fruit out there.

Keep Reading →

Social over-sharing

Image from www.avgjoeguide.com

In some parts of the world over-sharing or just sharing information about you, your life-style and family can be really dangerous. There are many types of information one can over-share on the Internet, typically on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Foursquare :

  • Personal information, for example: name, maiden name, birthday, schools we attended, who are our friends and family, pictures.
  • Geo-location or location information: this information tells people where you are and where to find you. Keep Reading →

Measuring community activity in Cloud Computing projects

I normally try to stick to posting original content on my site, but I ran across this post today while doing some research for the Hacker High School project.

It presents a really well structured analysis of the communities that support and give life to the main Cloud Computing projects: OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus and OpenNebula. All the information was extracted from public forums and code management systems.

You can find the post here: http://t.co/qmwUUcsiHu

Executive summary

  Keep Reading →

Smart phone / mobile phone tracking and privacy

The first hand-held mobile phone was demonstrated by Motorola in 1973 and since 90s, mobile phones have become one of the technologies that have the biggest impact on the way we live. Cell phones or mobile phones have reached an impressive 96.2% of the world population and have penetrations rates of over 100% in developed nations. This information technology has spread faster that any other, including TV, Radio and the Internet. Can you remember how we lived before cellphones?

Keep Reading →

vpnc and Fritz!box

Fritz!Box is a series of home routers from AVM, which can do a lot. Among the features is  VPN support: site-to-site and client-to-site (road warrior).

I wanted to play with the road warrior setup, because it is always practical to have a way back into a network: for privacy if on a hot spot or just to be able to access hosts on it.

Fritzbox deliverers it own Windows / Mac VPN client (FRITZ!Box VPN Connection) which works pretty good, but as a Linux user I would really enjoy native support (so I don’t have to get access through a VM, which works pretty well by the way).

After multiple failing tests and toggling all possible vpnc configuration options, which aren’t that many by the way, it was time to play: find the differences!

Keep Reading →

Do Reverse Proxies provide real security?

OSSTMM

Have you ever questioned the security best practices?

In the process of building / designing the infrastructure for a new project the following question was asked: “shouldn’t we use a reverse proxy to secure or protect the web servers?” Of course the first question I asked myself is “do reverse proxies provide real security?” or is this a best / common practice that has been adopted without foundation? Keep Reading →

Prev12346Next