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Cool epoch counter
As probably many of you geeks already know, today the epoch counter (AKA unix timestamp) will reach the value 1234567890, which is cool I guess because it is in the order the keys are on your keyboard. You can find a countdown here. You can use the following perl snippet to find out when the…
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Don’t overthink software security
While reading the trapkit blog, my attention was drawn to the following post: Commercial usage of ScoopyNG. ScoopyNG, in case you didn’t know about it before, is a proof of concept tool to detect VMWare. In the post the author of ScoopyNG details how the makers of a commercial product (Atempo Time Navigator) use the…
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And you thought the JRE was big
I was updating a VM with WinXP today and it downloaded the “Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.5 Family Update (KB951847)”, which weight in at a whopping 238MB! An update! WTF? As a comparison: the Java 6 JRE is around 15MB.
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A portable AntiVirus collection
Over at the GSD blog I found a nice collection of descriptions on how to create portable anti-viruses. VIPRE would fit nicely in the collection, however I wanted to do a quick description on how to do this with BitDefender (I’m doing this from memory, so some details might be wrong!): Get the free edition…
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New Ethical Hacker Challenge
Brady Bunch Boondoggle – at the first read I confused it with the Dukes of Hazard, but I’ve since seen the err of my ways 🙂
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Mixed links
Conficker is using a few tricks to make reversing harder Metasploit (and other security sites) are being hit by DDoS. Some interesting thoughts: Use DNS to mitigate the attack (if the bots follow DNS, you can simply point them to 127.0.0.1, if not, you simply move servers to an other IP range and point DNS…
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PHPBB hack
I saw the news on the Kaspersky blog: phpbb.com was hacked. Fortunately (?) the hack wasn’t done trough PHPBB, rather trough a vulnerable installation of PHPList. BTW, the Kaspersky blog gets it wrong: the hack wasn’t because register_globals was enable, but rather because PHPList contained code to emulate the functionality of register_globals. More info: The…
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Time travel – by Yahoo!
Today I was greeted by the following error message on Yahoo mail:
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Security charlatans
Why do people go to charlatans? Because they make them feel good about themselves Because they will make a big effort to speak in a language which the customer understands and can relate to (even if the things said are not-that-true) Because sometimes they (the charlatans) get to a level where they themselves believe that…
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Browser Password Manager test
This is rather old, but still good (originally found it via the Pat’s Daily Grind blog): a security company did some tests with the password manager included in different browsers. And of course they slapped not one but two sensationalistic titles on it (“Google Chrome Receives Lowest Password Security Score” and “Safari Ties for Last…