Computer Tips -Tech Info

So, let’s say we want to have an open wireless access point for some reason. (Maybe offering it to guests if you’re a business?) There are certainly a lot of BAD ways to give open wireless access. As we’ve seen in this series so far, it could be quite easy to hijack all connections in […]

So, if you haven’t already had enough cause to tighten your wireless security…. we’ve been talking about arp poisoning (spoofing) and the basic conclusion is that IF an attacking machine is on the same subnet as your machine (same IP address range), they can “own” all traffic from you machine to the gateway. It doesn’t […]

So, we’ve spent a couple articles talking about arp spoofing. It sounds really bad, it’s a frighteningly easy way to do a “mitm” or man in the middle attack and anyone using arp spoofing could capture ALL network traffic including passwords. There’s got to be an easy fix right? Um…. well. This is not something […]

When a machine has been arp spoofed, ALL network traffic from it is likely passing through a “hostile” machine. So, NO, https and ssh traffic is not immune, it is travelling through a hostile machine. However, it should be encrypted. There are a few exceptions though. SSH version 1 is a broken encryption scheme and […]

So…. what is arp spoofing (poisoning)…. and what are it’s implications? ARP spoofing involves tricking a machine into thinking that you’re machine is, yet another. Let’s put this in IP address terms. Let’s say that 192.168.0.1 is the default gatway on the network and 192.168.0.150 is our target. We are given another network address – […]

So, for those that have a little bit of knowledge about network hardware, you’ve probably heard this. “You can’t sniff switched networks”…. wrong…. let’s see what this is about. Older networking hardware was dominated by what’s called a hub. This was basically a “dumb” device that when it received data, it would retransmit the data […]

A while back I did a network security series and one of the points that I mentioned was that it’s important to know what is normal for your network. In other words, what machines are NORMALLY connected, what services are normally running, etc. Well, I’m about to start a serious look at something that makes […]

There have been a couple stories out of the “Blackhat federal” conference in the last couple days. Brian Krebs at the Security Fix gives a good overview. One of the more troubling notes is the possibility of creating a rootkit that can hide itself in a systems BIOS. Security Focus has some detail on this […]

Lot’s of news following up on the Nyxem worm in the last few days. It’s currently going under a number of names, the Kama Sutra Worm, Blackworm are some of the more common names. Sans has a page for information on the worm here. Microsoft has detailed manual removal instructions. The counter that logs the […]

First I should raise an alarm of warning on this one, this virus is supposed to overwrite all accessible document files (network shares too) on the 3rd of the month, so February 3rd we may be seeing some problems. Don’t wait until then to make sure you have current antivirus definitions. The Nyxem virus though […]