OK, somebody out there has a use for something as twisted as this.

http://www.anthea2.freeuk.com/carminaburana/

• An Informal Study on the Literacy Level of Security Blogs–We All Get Pwned by Amrit
• FISMA Grades Using DHS Coding System
• Create Your Own Apple Rumors
• Life Behind “The Great Big NAT in the Sky”
• A Day in the Life of the Feedmaster

Robert Scoble has an interesting interview with founder and demo of Plazes.

It’s such a strange concept to me because I have spent most of my adult life making sure that people either didn’t track $us or to allow $us to track other people and what they are doing.  I just don’t buy off on the fact that people would volunteer their geolocation and current activity–I’m too much inclined to answer “Nun yo” if you ask where I’m at than I am to tell you the truth.

At this point about all I can do is shrug and say “Wow, the Web 2.0 kids are weird.” =)

Now all we need is for Al Qaeda to register and we’ll be golden.  “I’m sitting at a teastand in Quetta, here is my GPS grid and I’ll be here for a couple of hours.”

• Simple Thoughts on Simple Rocks
• Communicating the Value of Security Seminar Preview
• DC Demo Camp
• Idaho and Technology
• Making Press Releases

Very interesting article on keyloggers and the AV companies.

I’m sitting here trying to think about the problem, the scenario goes something like this:

• I’m the police/$favorite_member_of_NIC and need to keylog somebody
• I need to get the keylogger to the target and their computer
• I need the anti-malware detector on the target computer to not find my product so I can both get a foothold and continue to collect evidence.

So putting on my thinking cap, this is a fairly complicated attack. Yes, malware vendors do it all the time, but they aren’t selective usually in what their target is–they’re throwing what they have at a bajillion targets and taking what sticks.

In order to do this attack right, I would need to know which type of AV/endpoint security the target uses or I need a technique that none of the vendors know about or how to detect. In order to find out the AV that the target uses, I can either break in, hire a snitch, or use a wiretap to wait for the software to phone home for a signature update.  Once I know what exactly the target uses for protection, I can plan the attack.

Of course, this assumes that AV is 100% effective, which we all know isn’t true. =)

• Sir Bruce Mentions FDCC, World Goes Nuts
• Digital Forensics: Who should make the keys?
• DDoS Vocabulary and Mathematics
• My Lunchtime Hobby: Collecting Badges
• Keeping Up With the DDoS Kids

Seth Godin has a phenomenal blog post about the honor system and how it affects the secret squirrels and the chicken littles of the security world.  I knew there was a reason we liked Seth.

• Alternative Uses for System Security Plans
• My System Environment
• It’s All About Common Controls!
• Cult Crossovers Into Information Security
• Noisy People

Becoming slightly annoyed with the problems getting feeds from yahoo pipes, I set up a simple cron job to snarf the rss off the yahoo servers every 5 minutes using wget.  Then I changed the hrefs to point at my own server.

While testing wget, I found out why the pipes were bombing out:  The pipes server doesn’t issue a response until it has computed the feed, then it sends it all at once.  This might be up to 10 seconds before the RSS reader gets any kind of a response back, which puts it into timeout territory some of the time.  Trusty ol’ wget worked every time, though–I swear it’s one of most reliable programs I’ve ever used at feeding it glop and getting back pure water.

So here you go.  If you were having problems with getting blank feeds, it should be happy now.  These are off the chateaublogsville server.

• Eiswein
• Chardonnay
• 2-Buck Chuck

• A Day in the Life of the Feedmaster
• The Rise of the Slow Denial of Service
• Tie Down the Livestock, Twister’s a Comin’!
• It’s a Series of Pipes
• And Now for Something Completely Different…

My customers, they come to me looking for nourishment, a late-night snack, or maybe some light reading. They want to be fed and they want it now, and I wake from my slumber to give it to them. They walk away satisfied.

My name is Mike. I am a feedmaster. This is my story.

Late last night I took Chateau Blogsville live and I’ve been adding to the filters throughout today in order to tune the output. Suspiciously, this is what life is like for the analysts working in our SOC. =)

Lessons from tuning feeds periodically during the day:

• I have a sizeable set of explicit blocks for quite a few terms coming from the search feeds. Even though I could build the search feeds with “NOT” values, I still had a bunch of trash that was more effectively deleted by a global junk screen.
• I developed an “allow” filter based on keywords in the content. This is what I call the “relevancy filter”. In Chardonnay, it’s used for the dirty gray and gray feeds. In Eiswein, it’s used for everything.
• I’ve done more blacklisting for the search feeds (dirty gray feed) on urls than I have on keywords for the time being, making broad slashes through aol.com and myspace.com. Time will tell if this will be a fool’s game, since the spam blogs can come on pretty strong, and the only way to be sure is to nuke them from orbit.
• I think I’ve pushed pipes beyond what it can do. About every third time, I get a null results set (ie, it times out). If you’re using a smart feedreader (I just make the feed a live bookmark in firefox), it just keeps the last version and you don’t really know or care that your feed is outdated, as long as it catches up sometime.
• “Privacy” is the hardest thing to explicitly allow thanks to real estate, vacations, and dating. “Risk Management” comes in a strong second, thanks to banks, loans, and project management. Surprisingly, nobody but security people talk about BS7799.
• I’ve roped in some really, really surprising content through the blog searches on technorati and google. What this means is that I’ll find sites like The Technology Liberation Front which I’m now a fan of. With as much of a hassle the search feeds are to filter out the junk, I think they definitely add something that a closed or by-invitation-only blog feed is missing. I’ll most likely add more feeds like this as I think them up.
• Some of you will notice that at no point have I blacklisted the C-word (c*mpliance) but notice how it chokes itself to death nicely when you deny all but allow “risk management” and “penetration testing”?
• There are a couple of terms that I deliberately did not add to the relevancy filter. Dollar for the person who names one, and the C-word doesn’t count.

Chateau Blogsville is now officially open. I will replace the RSS icons with something better once my graphic designer gets them done.

• Is Myspace Satan?
• And Now for Something Completely Different…
• Bacn–It’s Cooked Spam
• It’s a Series of Pipes
• Blog Statistics and Search Strings