Last week I got a notice of this warning…. it seems that scammers are sending out emails claiming to be from the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.) and the email claims that the government will no longer insure your bank deposits unless you validate certain information…
In the last week there was a well documented writeup of a cross site scripting vulnerability which had allowed a phisher to pose as a paypal login with THE LEGIT PAYPAL SSL CERTIFICATE…. Brian Krebs at the Security Fix has some details on some of the new and interesting ways phishers are trying to exploit to seperate us from our personal information.
Sometimes drives just go bad. Surprise. One recent fresh install of Windows XP had started having real stability problems. On running a chkdsk and looking at the event viewer, it was fairly clear that 16KB of bad sectors and the disk problems had likely been the problem (lots of disk and atapi errors in the system log. Mostly disk error during paging operation (swap filing)) So…. I looked at cloning the drive using dd_rescue. All went well and the new system booted up on the new identically sized drive. In fact EVERYTHING was fine except chkdsk still reported 16KB of bat sectors….
OK – there have been a number of Excel problems floating around in the last week – week and a half. Securiteam blog has a FAQ on the Excel 0-day vulnerabilities with Excel and Excel Viewer Incidents.org kindly gives us a scoresheet documenting the three different vulnerabilities that have been recently exploited. I have not thoroughly read details, but suspect that avoiding opening unexpected xls attachments would likely be a GOOD preventative measure. If you take the attitude… “oh junk mail…. ooo attachment – wonder whats in there – let’s see…” then you’re likely already stuck by a few viruses.
Of course, I’ve spent some time with posts on VMware player (free download to “play” existing vmware images). And more recently on the VMware server which is also a free download but can create images as well. If you’re not in a position to try the VMWare server, you might be interested in this website which walks you through to create the vmx file that defines a virtual machine environment for vmware products. Of course, it doesn’t create the actual disk images for you, but you can use free tools like those supplied with qemu to do that.
Last week our Church held annual Vacation Bible School and I am just now catching up on some of the items I’ve been intending to post over that period, so…. today will likely be a fairly active posting day as I clear out some of these tabs I’ve opened over the last week. In many cases – I’m doing roundups – like the Google stories all in one article. Between the VBS and related preparations/trips to pick up last minute supplies, and the one or two issues that came up needing my firsthand presence…. there was simply no time for posting (unless I wanted to do away with those wasted “sleep” hours.)
As I’ve mentioned I’ve got an ubuntu based test system. Most of my linux experience has been from a red-hat derivitive-based background and for that, at the command line, you have chkconfig which is a good tool for checking the configuration of services to run at startup. It is a red-hat derivitive thing… However, I found this forum post where someone contributed a “chkconfig” script that does the same thing. I tried it and it’s somewhat slow compared to it’s red-hat derivitive counterpart, but…. it does the job.
There are a few Google related stories of the last few days to catch up. 1)55 Ways to have fun with Google is an e-book available for purchase on Amazon or Lulu.com, but it’s also avaiable as a free pdf download. (And it’s licensed so you can mix it up/etc…) It’s certainly not as deep as a Google Hacks overview would be, but covers some of the Google games out there and a few other interesting bits as well. It might be a good gift for those just getting their feet wet in Google searching…. 2) There are a couple stories about just how many IPv6 addresses that Google controls these days. From George Ou’s article ” (79 billion billion billion addresses)”…. They’ve been sold that many, really for the main purpose of being an ISP of some sort (maybe selling businesses IPv6 connectivity?)
Sometime last week, the news story of a French competitor to Google Maps called Geoportail.fr caught my attention and I took a look at the page. It caught my eye because the initial article boasted 20 inch resolution in some areas (???) But, as of today, all I’ve been able to get is an error message along the lines that there is too much traffic and that I should try again later. It’s in French – it’s been a while…. anyway, I’m not the only one that’s noticed – The Register has noted the painful launch as well. Really, it should be interesting when it’s up.
What follows are some notes taken on vmware server. Most are related to an install on ubuntu-server (NO GUI INSTALLED)…. the main point of this is to have the host system take as FEW resources away from the guests as possible.
This requires a few x libraries – but not full blown X gui.
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