Simon Sez

Forgive me, Father, it's been....wow -- almost a year since my last blog.

Busy times. Fun, but busy.

A few tips from the field: application firewalls are not all they're cracked up to be. They'll block the automated (read: dumb) attacks, but they really don't do much against a trained attacker. I've just taken over a corporate network via a SQL Injection vulnerability. All done through an ISS firewall (also applied the same attack to a Barracuda firewall). ...

The Storm worm continues to fascinate me....

It began as a worm which brought compromised computers into a botnet....one which quickly became the largest in the history of the Internet. There is one person/organization at the helm of the greatest computing power on the planet right now. And he's not one of the good guys.

The Storm botnet currently has orders of magnitude more power than the most powerful super-computers on the planet.

And it's evolving. ...

Convicted hacker (black hat) Moore gave a decent interview with InformationWeek today: http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=202101781

Nothing terribly exciting in what he did, really....just scanned networks for routers (and software-based routers) that had been configured with the default passwords left in place. Default password lists are quite easy to come by....a few of them:

http://www.cirt.net/cgi-bin/passwd.pl
http://www.phenoelit-us.org/dpl/dpl.html ...

The storm worm continues to grow and evolve. Now using Tor to spread (and sending out 'helpful' spam messages enticing people to download a Trojaned copy of Tor).

Tor is a great thing....just make sure you get the actual/clean version of it.

Details here.

First and foremost, look on the left of the screen.

• Go to my blog
• Post to my blog
• View RSS feed
• Mark this blog read
• Blog control panel

All interesting and notable features. In particular, spend some time on the last item. Go through the blog control panel. There's a number of features for you to configure to your heart's content (categories, title/description for your blog, rights, access control, etc.)

Most of it should be pretty self-explanatory, but if you need help, ...