Go figure

We bumped into this piece right after lunch. Figure out what's wrong with it!!!...



bart would say...aye carambe!

Download MP3s via Google Search

I start with a disclaimer: I do not advocate piracy nor support it. Whatever you learn from this and how you apply it to your benefit/misfit is completely beyond the purpose of this article. Be responsible for your actions or inactions :P

OK. Sigh of relief. Now lets start.

A day ago, a friend (see Frank's Blog) sent an email about how one can get files directly using google's advance search techniques. This applies to movies, documents or virtually any file that google may have inside it's crawled database. How this search works. Lets see the contexts or slap this line inside google's search tab:

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "ziggy marley"

The exact same line above will return sites that have MP3 extensions that contain the words "ziggy" & "marley". The "-inurl:htm and -inurl:html" tells google to look for the extensions within HTML documents only (you could also add -inurl:asp or -inurl:aspx). These are pages that google crawls which can also include text or PDFs or whatever that's text or alike.

Now, the intitle: switch searches documents that match the HTML tag TITLE. In the above example, "index of" is a typical directory browsing format which in normal cases are file repositories using HTTP. If you for instance, upload a bunch of files inside a website and do not specify a "start page" or restrict browsing access to that directory, your webserver will automatically or dynamically return a html or htm document listing all files in that directory in unix style.

So, to translate the above query into english would be something like this. Hey google, search for mp3s containing words ziggy and marley within html or htm documents which have a title of "index of" or a directory browsing format.

Now, use only your imagination to figure out what more you can do with this.

For guided google's advance searching, go to www.google.com/advance_search or for help on switches using standard searches go to http://www.google.com/help/operators.html

Happy fishing.

Firewall Considerations

A MERDEKA SHOUT OUT TO ALL MALAYSIAN! LONG LIVE MALAYSIA

When purchasing a firewall long time ago, there weren't many things to consider as it was really the lame ole' packet and stateful filtering the few vendors boast about. Fine, that was then but these days, things seem more complex than just to say "i want that one" (ala Little Britain). Organizations need to ensure that the first unit of defense, normally the firewall, be equipped with enough firepower to thwart intelligent attacks and "noises" that come from the internet, particularly.

So, here, i try to discuss the basis of enquiry when purchasing firewalls by breaking down the methods into the soft and hard factors. Soft factors are quite tricky sometimes as its mostly subjective or open to further discussion. So, here's some of the things you should run in your heads when considering a firewall solution;

The soft(er) factors

1. Management - Consider solutions that you are familiar with. There's no patch for human error. Nonetheless, this shouldn't be the reason for a compromise in quality.
   
2. Scalability - Will the solution be able to cater for your business needs in say, 5 years?
3. Support - Firewalls will have holes, these holes must be patch. Is there a guarantee from the manufacturer of full support for up to n-number of years that you wish to keep the unit. How about SLA from these providers? Any formal training/certification provided?
   
4. Policy - Does the firewall govern and works with your current IT policy and/or a corporate policy? Will it eventually help to achieve governance and compliance?
5. The $$$ factor - There's firewalls that cost virtually nothing to those which will have your arm and leg. I personally don't believe anything is free. In IT, free comes with a non obvious price tag on it. In reality, this particular factor determines play the ultimatum decision for the rest of the factors.
   
6. Company direction - What is the type of vendor you are buying from, their proposal (and product) and business direction
   

Now, we talk about the more obvious choices, reasons and features that you will need to consider when purchasing a firewall

1. Type - Hardware or Software. I don't wish to discuss which is "better". Have your own opinion, justify it and live with it
2. Speed - Throughput vs network speeds. No. of concurrent connections/users/devices
   
3. High availability, cluster, cold standby - Do you guarantee SLA for users? If so, how..
4. Built-in AntiDOS/IDS/IPS/Antivirus/Content Filtering (e.g. web filtering, antispam, antimalware) - Should the firewall include this? Take overheads into consideration when turning on such features
5. VPN (and sslvpn) - Do you need this? If so, again, consider performance factors
6. Forward/Reverse proxy - Should the firewall provide application layer filtering including reverse publishing of web servers or forward proxy functions?
7. Logging/Reporting/Accounting - Do you need extensive reporting/accounting? Do you wish to correlate with an existing tool?
8. Protocol support - Do you need any specialized routing protocols such as BGP/OSPF/VLAN other protocols such as Authentication protocols (multi factor authentication), content vectoring/rendering
9. Integration with existing firewalls/systems - Is there a supported configuration when using this particular firewall? Is such even needed?
10. Others - E.g. requirements for policy governance e.g cipher strength, supported internet standards etc

There...now go get urself a firewall :)

Sanjay

PDF and ECard Spam

Hi there, bet most of you are wondering why's your mom (who's perhaps computer illiterate btw) sends an e-greeting for an occasion that has nothing to do with you (e.g. Indonesia's national day, today!). Well, the answer is simple, they're just SCAMS!.

Recently, i've received and done some research on two types of spam that walked right pass my antispam goofy gateway protection and my local email client antispam protection. One comes as an e-greeting with an IP address with a link claiming origin of credible sources such as bluemountain.com. There's also PDF documents that comes sailing smoothly through my (now what i believe to be a seriously goofy gateway product) antispam solution.

One quick way is to see the sender. If it's unknown, don't bother opening. If the links are dotted notations (IP addresses) don't open. They are phishing scams!. As for the PDF, feel free to read em' if you've got ridiculous time (like i have now writing this) but don't click anything within these PDFs.

Be safe .

Happy weekend

Top 5 reasons why you shouldn't connect to an open wireless (WiFi specifically) connection

When you connect to, umph, say, Starbucks's wireless networks and similar, you connect without even providing a username or password (some of these applies to web based authentication) think about these;

1. 1. It's open, therefore there's NO encryption, everyone (can) see your traffic
2. 2. Others can impersonate you! and do stuff you wouldn't (or would, but not in public, haha)
3. 3. Anyone could easily impersonate the access point and become the gateway. Which mean, everything passes through his/her computer before reaching another destination
4. 4. Your own computer can be easily exposed to unauthorized access (or attempts) since almost ANYONE can connect, which mean, the good and bad guys!
5. 5. And finally, It's designed to be insecure! or the implementors have no clue what so ever. So, don't even expect any security on it.

Stay secure, opt for secure APs (at a minimum), if you do not have a choice, they ensure that you access only SSL, TLS or VPN type of accesses to ensure you create an encrypted tunnel between you and the destination. Wikipedia TLS or SSL for more information.

Stay secure

Accessing paid tech knowledgebase (for free!!!)

Its really frustrating sometimes that these communities like expert-exchange, event-id charge for a community response. I think it should be free! Anyway, i found a nasty way to access some of these information for free.

How to?
Firstly, you would probably do a search engine for a said problem, then, most likely these "paid" websites would pop up in your searches, great, but when you access, they ask to sign up and sign up requires $$$. Well, try this now, GOOGLE'S CACHED pages. Do the same search based on the keywords on that particular website/page then most likely that actual page may appear in google. Now, instead of clicking what you would normally click in google, click the CACHED link below. And viola! the page is free for you to read.



Note that the cache may be outdated tho...so, this is for cheapskates like me but if you like their service, subscribe lah...

Only your imagination is limited to whatmore you can do with it... :)

Cheers!

Running checklists

I am a big fan of checklists, besides "reminding" us of steps to do or take, it creates a kind of standardization for work being done.

Pilots use checklists even they have thousands of flying hours and are highly experienced. Why? We are only human, we can make mistakes.

Therefore brings me to introduce a cool link that provides security checklists from Wireless to Windows. Download them and run them against your implementation.

Checkout http://iase.disa.mil/stigs/checklist/index.html

Happy securing.

How to enable the 75 gigabyte limit on Exchange 2003

So you've implemented Exchange 2003 and installed it with service pack 2. Your database grows up to 20 GB from all that migration suddenly the Information Store stops with an error. Well, don't panic.

In Microsoft Exchange 5.5 until 2003 standard editions , the database logical store cannot reach more than 16GB otherwise the information store will stop gracefully. There's an allowance given by Microsoft to increase this limit 1GB more until you've cleaned up the database size and make it smaller than 16 GB. Now with SP2 on Exchange 2003, the limit is increased by default to 18GB. But they said SP2 can grow up to 75GB..?

Yes, this is possible but you need to set it through a registry key and specify the size of your database.

Here's how and where ...http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912375/en-us

Happy bloating your mailboxes!

Safari for Windows Beta 3 - Vulnerabilities found in found in mere minutes

Apple corporation released Safari 3.0 beta 3 and works on Windows as well. I downloaded and tested B3 after Frank sent an email of this release. Just cruising the web i found already 10s of vulnerabilities in this browser by far. This was further confirmed by an email i received just hours after downloading Safari 3.0 Public Beta. One researcher apparently could perform a BO using a standard fuzzer in mere minutes from Apple's release!

Hmm, this makes we wonder if these products from not-so-adopted platforms and companies are put to the masses (making it available on Window for example) get to taste reality and i question the fundementals of vulnerabilities disclosure numbers.

So the question is: Is having lesser vulnerability disclosures eludes us to believe it is more secure or it is not exposed enough to know for sure?

Explanation: Just say with a Mac, there's only 10 people using it out of 1000 and 990 are using Windows. It can be safely assumed that a majoriy vulnerabilities may be exposed on Windows as opposed to a Mac. Now take a Mac application that runs on Windows, now the exposure number is no longer 10, but 1000 (10 + 990)...

CNET: http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?t=38867270-0037d8f61322461ed8fe864e314af4fe-bf&s=5&fs=0

Safari for Windows: http://www.apple.com/safari/

Wonder when Google's gonna' punch something out...?

Stirling- The fore front to Microsoft FOREFRONT

Its about time someone envisions something like this. Imagine, a centralized desktops and servers management platform, with anti-malware, email message protection, workstation access validation, centralized log correlation, personal firewall and what have you. It all spells ONE CONSOLE, ONE INTERFACE which equates SIMPLICITY. The key to any success, in my belief, at least.

Stirling
Microsoft released a press statement of it's upcoming security powerhouse, codename Stirling. In a Microsoft camp(people who use a lot of MS technologies) this would be a dream product to integrate almost all the security a company would need (including firewalls) under on hood. It would be easy for CIO and whomever to produce a single piece of report snap-shotting your company's state of security and threat.

I am hoping to get involved in the TAP and work with Microsoft Malaysia on this. Till i get more information and product demos, stay tuned. This piece of product could potentially turn heads :)..kinky...

FAQs-http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/prodinfo/roadmap/faq.mspx