June 20th, 2009
In September 2008 a 14 year old boy had been robbed in a street in the Dutch city of Groningen.
After he pressed charges, the police could not find the two responsible for the robbery.Until a few months ago, when the boy found himself and his robbers on google streetview.
He then notified the police who after identification arrested the two.
Personally, I am not a proponent of Google streetview because of the privacy issues but in this case it was good to have them at the right place at the right time.
Posted in General, Uncategorized | No Comments »
June 17th, 2009
Opera just released their new “Unite” browser, which is according to them revolutionary. It is not only able to browse the Internet ( as a browser is supposed to do ) but it can also serve files and web pages and stream music to others, and it lets users leave post-its on a virtual fridge. According to their website, the latter function is “open to all” which basically means everyone can leave these messages…
Let’s see how long it takes before spammers are leaving you spam post-its on your fridge…
Tags: linkedin
Posted in General, Security | No Comments »
June 16th, 2009
Some interesting developments on Twitter. Due to the disorder caused by the recent Iranian elections someone has decided to widen the scope of the disorder to the internet. He has asked people on twitter to help him DDoS Iranian government websites. As he stated in his Tweet, he ( and probably some others) successfully took down one website already.
But other Tweets show people don’t want this to happen. Because Iran’s Internet infrastructure is not as state-of-the-art like most western countries it could be possible the internet of Iran saturates and they have no internet at all!
It’s kind of disturbing to see how easy it is to get people motivated on twitter, for the cause of good or the bad.
Tags: linkedin
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
June 8th, 2009
Today a friend asked me to look at something strange he found in his logs.
To better understand the situation, I’ll describe his network setup:
He runs a linux server with postfix, spamassassin and clamav antivirus which removes all spam and virusses received from the internet. All legitimate e-mail is then routed to his exchange server. E-mail that is sent by users on his network is relayed back to the linux server and then sent to the destination.
Last week he was checking his mail logs on his linux machine and he noticed his box was receiving e-mail from strange e-mail addresses. He figured: Well, no surprise there: Probably spam messages. Until he looked at the ip address from which it originated: It was the ip address of his own exchange server. First thing he did was doing a full virusscan of his exchange server. Nothing. He tried some spyware scanners, but again: Nothing. So he called me.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: linkedin
Posted in E-Mail, Linux, Security, Windows | No Comments »
June 4th, 2009
Yesterday I was goofing around with kismet, a wireless network sniffer, and found sixteen acccesspoints within my range. I wondered which had bad encryption, so I sorted them on WEP key encryption. It turned out two where un-encrypted and eight where encrypted with WEP! I still do not get it. Why is WEP still being used by so many people? I can relate to the fact that people don’t encrypt at all: Some manufacturers just enable wireless out of the box and people just connect the device and notice it’s working. So they will not bother configuring the device if it is already working. But the ones with WEP had to have configured their device, so why not configure it to WPA?
Or perhaps I should reconsider my question? Why do manufactures not pro-actively promote the use of WPA in the web-gui for non-experienced users? The WPA2 standard has been optional in devices since 2004, and required since 2006. And WPA ( non -2 ) has been out for even longer. So why not enable WPA by default, or atleast point out WPA is more secure?
Any insights?
Tags: linkedin
Posted in Wireless | No Comments »