October 31, 2013

Cryptolocker - Seriously Problematic Ransomware

There’s a new piece of ransomware in the wild, called Cryptolocker. It’s a nasty piece of software that uses public/private keypairs to background encrypt all your documents and files, and then helpfully let you know it has done it. Then - you will be asked to pay $300/€300 to unlock your files. If you don’t, you will lose the key to decrypt them, and then lose all your files. Not only that - it also encrypts shared drives, such as on your business network.

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October 28, 2013

Simple Steps to Use Yum Rollback on Centos / RHEL 5

Simple Steps to Use Yum Rollback on Centos / RHEL 5 Some nice instructions on a simple backup/rollback technique for packages on Centos / RHEL 5. This can be accomplished even more easily in newer versions of yum, such as on Centos / RHEL 6, which the ‘yum history’ command. There’s a nice undo feature there now, that makes it trivial to revert a change, if you have problems with a package update for any reason.

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October 22, 2013

Interesting Talk on DevOps

This is an excellent (albeit long) talk on DevOps, and where it came from. Some of the systems theory stuff in here, which is rarely covered by computing enthusiasts is illuminating and extremely helpful. If you’ve wondered why agile doesn’t work in operations, or why there’s such a counter-productive feedback loop between developing a deploying your software, this is really worth a watch. It’s aimed at sysadmins, but I think developers would get a lot from it too.

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October 13, 2013

Watch "Getting Started with Puppet - PuppetConf 2013" on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdAmAj3eaFI&feature=youtube_gdata_player

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October 8, 2013

SQRL (Squirrel) Authentication - Bye bye usernames and passwords?

Distruptive technologies ocassionally come along which can make a big difference in computing. Something in the early days which I heard about last week was the SQRL authentication proposal by Steve Gibson. This proposal aims to address the extremely big problem of user and password authentication across the internet. This is a huge and annoying problem for all internet users - you must try to come up with secure passwords, whilst giving passwords to many different parties, some of who you can trust, and some of whom you can’t.

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October 5, 2013

Examining the Glastonbury Ticket Sales Website

Note: Also see my updated 2016 post about this topic. Tomorrow is that time of year again, when hundreds of thousands of people spend hours pressing their F5 key, in an often futile attempt to try to book Glastonbury Festival tickets. Although I have been successful the last couple of years anyway, this year I had the opportunity to do a bit of investigation beforehand, as they had a smaller ticket sale on Thursday evening.

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October 5, 2013

Examining the Glastonbury Ticket Sales Website - Comments

Old Article Comments I exported these from my old wordpress blog, so they are a bit out of date, but I thought I’d keep them around for posterity. Lewis Cook - Sep 1, 2015 Great blog post. . Any chance of an updated blog post for Sunday’s ticket showdown? chrisgilbert42 - Oct 0, 2016 Hi Lewis, hope you managed to get tickets last year/this year. I’ve noticed a few things that have changed this year, I’ll see if I can come up with an updated post soon.

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September 19, 2013

Google's Password Storage Database

Do you have an Android phone? Some interesting news I read this week was that an innocuous (on by default) setting on Android phones can save your Wifi passwords on Google’s servers. It also backs up all your app settings, bookmarks and so on. This isn’t that worrying - it could be considered a useful feature. However, the worrying thing is that these plain-text passwords aren’t encrypted using your account details - they are available in unencrypted form to Google employees.

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September 18, 2013

Increasing VMWare Disk Sizes in Linux Without Rebooting

You can increase disk sizes in vmware guests whilst they are running. This is supported, but Linux will not see the new size of the disk until it reboots. There is a way around this (assuming here we are using LVM disks): 1. Increase the disk size in the vmware settings. 2. Logon as root onto the Linux guest system. 3. Do: echo "1" > /sys/class/scsi\_device/<device>/device/rescan ..where is the SCSI bus you wish to rescan.

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September 9, 2013

Security Breaches From The Sands of Time

I found some interesting old news, back from 1999 that someone posted a link to in the SecurityNow newsgroups. I’ve recently started listening to this podcast - it’s a brilliant way to keep up with computer security news, and I feel a lot more informed having started to listen. http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/5/5263/1.html http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/2/2898/1.html The articles were to do with NSA back doors in several pieces of software, Microsoft Windows and Lotus Notes. Both of these were verified back in 2009 by security researchers by reverse engineering software.

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