Jun 242016
 

I hate when an application gets updated and then you have to remember how to make settings work that already worked previously.  So I am making this post as a reminder since it seems to not be a lot of info about it online.  If you don’t want to send things you delete to trash, which then requires you to go empty trash for it to really be deleted ….. then add a “Delete Permanently” to your right-click menu items.

Pretty simple to do …. just follow these steps:

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Feb 172016
 

This is a silly script but you would be surprised how many times a day I have to do this and no matter how many times I type the command, I always get it wrong (or more than likely I forget to escape something).  Its also interesting to note that the scripts I find silly are usually the ones that are the most popular on this site….so here it is.

Basically, if you copy and paste this script into a file and run it, it will give you the exact date and time in the sed command to run to search all lines in a log file from the previous hour to now and save it to another file.

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Mar 162015
 
Screenshot of psecio-parse scan

I used rips for many years to help with auditing source code.  Lets face it, anytime you can automate a mundane task such as source code auditing, you free up time for other things to be done…..plus if you have ever stared at source code for 14+ hours straight reading line by line by line ….. you know how well automation helps save your vision.

Anyways, today I found a new project at github and wanted to document how I set it up.  One thing to keep in mind is that this is a relatively new project, and with any new project of this size and scope … we can generally expect a few things …. lots of development changes and false positives.  Even with this being known, I still love the direction the project is already moving … so lets begin.

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Dec 122013
 

I have been using this script for a long time (maybe 13 years) with only very slight changes.  It was probably one of the first cool ideas I had for a way to track laptops issued to employees that might possibly be stolen.  Granted, today, we use full disk encryption and other cool things that almost makes this script obsolete….but in the event something does get stolen, we can always track it.

The script only requires a crontab entry and a way to send mail (I use ssmtp btw).

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Dec 042013
 

This is somewhat related to updating amazon group resource ip’s for dynamic ip addresses except it is a different concept.  How many times have you been on the road and needed to access your home computer?  Granted, there are many third party services that allow you to do that, like dynamic dns but that is behind my control.  I wanted something I could control.  Since I use linode, they have an api and a way to script ip updates.  So thats what we will do here.

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Dec 042013
 

I often review various vulnerability scanners.  When I review them, I look at several different things:

  • were they able to find a vulnerability I previously missed?
  • are they accurate in their findings?
  • how quickly do they complete an audit compared to “insert some other vulnerability scanner here”?
  • sometimes I will also grab the tcpdumps of the audits for even further analysis
  • how accessible and easy are they to use by “skiddies”?
  • based on the tcpdumps + noise generated on the server logs, are the audit signatures of wapiti easy to detect?

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Nov 212013
 

I work from home a lot.  My ISP used to never change IP addresses dynamically the first 3 years or so I was with them.  Now they change it often (more than once a week).  This creates a slower response time when I am at home, get a page, go to log in via ssh, and find out my ip has changed since we restrict our AWS environment via group policies.  The times I have needed to do this are relatively few, but still its a problem if there is an emergency.  Leave it to me to come up with a simple solution….

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Nov 182013
 

Openx has been a pain in my ass for some time now (5 years).  Even if you have the latest most up to date software release, you will still get append and prepend infections.  I’m not sure if it comes from client browsers when they log in or some other reason.  What I can assure you is that the file system in which openx resides is as secure as it can be while leaving openx functional (all files are owned by a different user than the web server process and are only readable by the web server.  All directories, except two, are also owned by a different process than the web server and are read only….while two have to be writable by the web server process.  The lamp stack is also up to date.).  Anyways, even with these restrictions, clean code, clean db, limited plugins, and even checked the meta data of all image files for backdoors (I first learned about this technique in approx 2010 but here is an article from 2011 detailing this – PHP Code into JPEG Metadata: From hide to unhide ) we still get an occasional append/prepend infection.

How to stop it?  This is pretty easy, I simply wrote a script that checks for append/prepend problems, logs if clean, logs and alerts if infected, and also disinfects.  This only works, if the append and prepend is NOT being used in your ads.

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