Unfortunately, I’m not shocked by this. But I’m still mad has hell about it!
NSA Snooped on All U.S. Communications
January 22nd, 2009 | by matt | in the news, politics, security
Jan
22
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Spam Drop!
November 22nd, 2008 | by matt | in the news, security, spam
Nov
22
Normally when I see articles such as this where spam volumes have dropped between 40-75%, my BS meter starts to peg on high. But more articles are coming out stating that 500,000 bots have been bagged.
Surprisingly, we have seen the drop here at the office. We have a store and forward service and we have various statistical tools to serve us a graph of the volume. Check this out!
I didn’t think it would be a big drop, but one of the other admins pointed that out and we have seen it across all of our store and forward and relay servers. Attempts by bots and various other servers to try and send mail through our systems have drastically dropped.
What are you seeing?
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‘Huge’ exploit threatens most Internet data
August 28th, 2008 | by matt | in the news, security
Aug
28
A new security hole in the Internet Protocol is potentially the most severe ever discovered, according to a presentation by security experts Anton Kapela and Alex Pilosov. The two have revealed that the inherent nature of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is essential for optimizing and routing traffic on the Internet, allows a hacker to redirect traffic to his own servers and forward it along without interrupting connections or otherwise immediately exposing the attack. The method would allow a malicious user to either spy on unprotected traffic or alternately ‘poison’ the data with altered code before it reaches its destination.
The method can’t easily be fought since the BGP protocol itself requires an explicit level of trust to work as written, the experts say. The currently proposed solution would rely on BBN Technologies chief security scientist Stephen Kent’s recently developed Secure BGP standard, which would force each router online to sign its routing map data and let network providers determine whether or not they will accept changes made by that router. A provider could establish blacklists that cut off unknown or actively hostile routers.
This one was reported at the latest DefCon. well, more accurately reported after DefCon when they revealed what they had been doing. The network at DefCon is filled with a bunch of nasty things floating around and definitely not for the faint of heart. At the same time, there is also a group of admins that are constantly tending to the network to make sure this sort of goofiness is squashed. The fact that this went unnoticed is pretty amazing…and scary!
Would your corporate network realize such an attack was taking place?
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Air Marshals
March 28th, 2008 | by matt | security
Mar
28
Recently CNN ran an article called Air marshals missing from almost all flights.
In it they have stated that:
Of the 28,000 commercial airline flights that take to the skies on an average day in the United States, fewer than 1 percent are protected by on-board, armed federal air marshals, a nationwide CNN investigation has found.
SO WHAT?!?
Honestly, do we really think that our airport security has gotten that much better after 9/11. Its all show. It really is. They may catch some of the goofy stuff, but I’m willing to bet that if you wanted to you could get a weapon of some sort on board and attempt to take a plane.
Notice I said attempt.
We’re living in a day and age where we know what can happen when a plane is hijacked. Its not good. And no one, at least in the USA, will go out that way again.
At least, not without a fight.
And that’s exactly what will happen the next time someone tries to take a plane. Its going to be a street fight at 35,000 feet. Men, women, kids, grandparents, I don’t care who you are, you’re going to stand and fight. I’ve thought about it and I’m sure you have to. I know that if something goes down on my flight, I’m 6’1, 195 pounds of bad intentions coming after you down the aisle.
So does it really matter if we have any air marshals on the flights?
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