The odds of a coin coming down heads or tails are not 50/50: they’re actually 51/49!
A great precis of an article explaining why, and how to leverage it.
The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition? – Coding the Wheel.
If you get breathalised, make sure the cop isn’t covering the exit port for the air when you blow, or the purported alcohol consumption will go up!
Even though they keep supporting Internet Explorer 6, they’re not going to support XP?
Microsoft had stated the reason for continuing support for IE6 was that it came with Windows XP and so they had to keep supporting it. Now it turns out that they’re not supporting XP either. Not exactly their road map, but oh well.
XP is thus fully broken, with a security hole in the TCP/IP implementation.
You’re doing well, MS – it took you long enough to fix the hole for Vista et al as well!
Microsoft: No TCP/IP patches for you, XP.
Using SQL injection and the recent IIS faults, a grey hat hacker called Unu from Romania has hacked 4 large banks and a UK government website. He’s on a roll, and MS has no fix for their IIS holes…
Hacker ‘Unu’ valt Europese banken aan | Webwereld.
She left it in her handbag on the bus.
Now the article doesn’t mention if the data was encrypted, but considering that absolutely nothing in the UK Government is (because they quite surprisingly can’t do what millions of other people can – for free), it’s safe bets that it wasn’t.
Of course, Jacqui Smith still thinks centralised databases are the dogs bollocks. Trust the government with your private data – what could go wrong?!
Now, let’s make a database with all the children in the UK in it! And a centralised ID scheme with all your biometric data in it! I’m sure whoever the government gives that to will love it.
Not only does the UK seem to have an uncanny way of losing their huge centralised databases unencrypted, they also have a hand in losing the physical cards the data is supposed to go on. Which means that it won’t be a problem to fake ID’s in the UK, no matter what biometrics and clever IT jiggery they put on them: not only do you have access to the original database data, you also have no need to forge anything as you have the physical backup as well!
Daily Express | UK News :: ID card staff lose security passes
Table 1. Some Security-Enhancing Packages in Debian 3.1
Package Name Description aide, fam, tripwire, osiris File/system integrity checkers. bastille Excellent, comprehensive and interactive (yet scriptable) hardening utility. bochs Bochs virtual x86 PC. bozohttpd, dhttpd, thttpd Minimally featured, secure Web server daemons. chrootuid, jailer, jailtool, makejail Utilities for using and creating chroot jails. clamav General-purpose virus scanner. cracklib2, cracklib-runtime Library and utilities to prevent users from choosing easily guessed passwords. filtergen, fireflier, firestarter, ferm, fwbuilder, guarddog, mason, shorewall Tools for generating and managing local firewall policies. flawfinder, pscan, rats Scripts that parse source code for security vulnerabilities. freeradius, freeradius-ldap, etc. Free radius server, useful for WLANs running WPA. frox, ftp-proxy FTP proxies. gnupg, gnupg2, gpa, gnupg-agent GNU Privacy Guard (gpg), a versatile and ubiquitous e-mail- and file-encryption utility. harden, harden-clients, harden-servers, etc. Actually an empty package containing only scripts that install and un-install other packages so as to improve system security. ipsec-tools, pipsecd, openswan, openswan-modules-source Tools for building IPSec-based virtual private networks. libapache-mod-chroot, libapache2-mod-chroot Apache module to run httpd chrooted without requiring a populated chroot jail. libapache-mod-security, libapache2-mod-security Proxies user input and server output for Apache. oftpd, twoftpd, vsftpd Minimally featured, secure FTP server daemons. privoxy Privacy-enhancing Web proxy. psad Port-scan attack detector. pyca, tinyca Certificate authority managers. selinux-utils, libselinux1 Utilities and shared libraries for SELinux. slat Analyzes information flow in SELinux policies. slapd OpenLDAP server daemon. squidguard Adds access controls and other security functions to the popular Squid Web proxy. squidview, srg Log analyzers for Squid. syslog-ng Next-generation syslog daemon with many more features than standard syslogd. trustees Extends file/directory permissions to allow different permissions for different (multiple) groups on asingle object. uml-utilities User-mode Linux virtual machine engine for Linux guests. In addition to the local security-enhancing packages in Table 1, Debian includes many tools for analyzingthe security of other systems and networks. Table 2 lists some notable ones.
Table 2. Security Audit Tools in Debian 3.1
Package Name Description dsniff, ettercap Packet sniffers for switched environments. ethereal, tcpdump Excellent packet sniffers. fping Flood ping (multiple-target ping). idswakeup Attack simulator for testing intrusion detection systems (IDSes). john John the Ripper, a password-cracking tool (legitimately used for identifying weak passwords). kismet Wireless LAN sniffer that supports many wireless cards. nessus, nessusd, nessus-plugins Nessus general-purpose security scanner. nmap Undisputed king of port scanners. snort Outstanding packet sniffer, packet logger and intrusion detection system.
Vista is upsetting everyone, with rumours that you can’t turn off the starting sound or have access to the kernel etc. but now it’s getting quite serious.
First, Patchguard has been compormised by Authentium prompting a backlash from Redmond stating that companies have no business even trying to compromise the kernel protection because it makes things unsafe for the Vista customer. Like private individuals aren’t going to try? And succeed?
Now the new EULA has become a draconian affair, royally screwing the customer – 2 of the 6 versions are not allowed to be installed on a virtualised environment and the Ultimate version is not allowed to play DRM protected content on a virtualised environment. Besides that you will only be allowed to install Vista on 2 PCs (ie transfer it to one new PC) and after that you can throw the licence key to Vista away and buy another one.
There’s a page dedicated to hijacking your mobile phone via Bluetooth. Appropriately enough, it’s called BluejackQ.
Linkie:
http://www.bluejackq.com/index.shtml
LAND attack:
Sending TCP packet with SYN flag set, source and destination IP address and source and destination port as of destination machine, results in 15-30 seconds DoS condition.
Which is funny. The last time the LAND attack was seen was about 8 years ago. It’s a trivial remote DoS and you’d think that even basic QA would check for something like this.
Securityfocus has the Bugtraq posting:
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/392354/2005-03-02/2005-03-08/0
No patch out yet, joy!
http://msgs.securepoint.com/cgi-bin/get/bugtraq0503/73.html
