Tech/Horsepower

My buddy Jon Canady reviews the Kinesis Freestyle on his blog. Saw him bang out this thing yesterday, looks intimidating in a code-slinging sit back and make applications sort of way. You know, like Old Rasputin Imperial Stout is to drinking beer when all other keyboards are Bud Light. It’s all about raw coding power.

Personally I think it’s perfectly paired with the flogiston a’la The Lawnmower Man.

Previously posted and imported from elsewhere (Day 2 and 4 by Jon)

Today brought us the real meat of the week, conference day one. This is my first industry engagement and I found it quite easy to get registered, figure out where things are happening and understand the lay of the land. Quite a bit happening all at once; three different presentation tracks, a bustling vendor area, many coffee-and-tea stops (which I used frequently!), people moving all around, and just a lot of good energy around the building. To keep this on the lighter side, I’ll bullet out what presentations I chose with a quick comment.

• DHS Software Assurance Initiatives: A thorough discussion on integrating security into the SDLC with government best practices. Keyed me into a lot of materials I’d like to read!
• HTTP Bot Research: This was a great talk on botnets, past present and future by shadowserver. A lot of time was spent on the Georgia conflict and looking at the first botnet attack from the U.S. and the second from Russia. I really enjoyed it!
• Get Rich or Die Trying – Making Money on The Web, The Black Hat Way: This was my (and Jon’s) favorite talk. It was a veiled comic presentation that hammers home business logic flaws.
• Using Layer 8 and OWASP to Secure Web Applications: Two of the City of New York’s security guys lead this presentation on how they’ve developed their software development policies and practices.
• Industry Outlook Panel: Several big names in corporate security discussed their thoughts on a variety of topics. I really wish it was a double session, 50 minutes wasn’t nearly enough time.
• OWASP Testing Guide – Offensive Assessing Financial Applications: This was presented by a jet-lagged no-BS Brit who laid out some good testing primer.

*cough* we skipped the next hour and half (nothing we really wanted to hear) to run back to the hotel and grab some great Thai food in the East Village.

• OWASP Live CD: This turned out to be a lot less on the live CD and a lot more about a beta email phishing project loaded into a VM image. It scared the devil out of me, very powerful software. Apparently scared a few other folks too as it may not ever get released because it works so well.

Finished the night up with the (ISC)2 cocktail hour (free booze!) and they announced a new certification, the CSSLP. Then we took a walk to Times Square again which is infinitely cooler at night (duh).

Back in and getting rested for tomorrow. Can’t believe it’s nearly Thursday already!

Goodnight from Grand (street)!

Previously posted and imported from elsewhere

Friend and codemonkey Jon and I had a great day at OWASP AppSec. For a couple of NYC newbs, we’re getting around really well! Starting at 7:30a, we hopped on the subway for the trip to the Park Central Hotel. OWASP is taking very good care of its attendees and we got in and settled easily.

The management training was very informative and challenged how I think about security. Coming from a small SaaS firm, I was in the minority as the training was geared heavily to large organizations. This was excellent because I learned from hardened policies established by industry leading companies. I took a lot away from the group discussions because many large firms had representatives, but I also felt I was able to provide some insightful “grassroots” knowledge and approaches that working with a small organization affords. The training also provided a nice primer on attack styles, best practices to secure them, statistics on vulnerability and business effects, and how to “sell” security. Looking very forward to putting together lessons I learned to enhance how we approach current and future security opportunities.

Jon seems to really dig his defensive coding training, we’ve been chatting and trading ideas back and forth all night. It will be interesting to see what the second day of his course brings.

Personally, we’ve been having a great time experiencing NYC in our off-time. Had lunch at the Carnegie Deli then took a stroll to Times Square. Got our real NYC pizza fix at Arturo’s for dinner tonight, then strolled around for a couple hours just seeing what there is to see. NYC easily makes you feel very, very small!

Cheers from Chinatown

Previously posted and imported from elsewhere

Barak Obama has motivated real change in the entire world today, four months before the general election! Vista and Server 2008 users were greeted by KB955020. To be fair, “Friendster” is included as well, along with a couple words auf Deutsch, but Obama did get his own Office 2003 hotfix last year.

Previously posted and imported from elsewhere (special note: I’m now a FireFox guy)

I’m not even a FireFox guy…

Previously posted and imported from elsewhere

I was on vacation last week on the fine island of Puerto Rico. My fiancée’s good friend was married on Friday, so we spent the week in the territory and had a great time. We chose Delta, an airline which I mostly despise (but not totally despise, like American Airlines, but that could be another story). Delta was the cheapest airline available, we purchased our tickets just as they were emerging from bankruptcy but were also being threatened with a hostile takeover. A fantastic time to buy airline tickets, for sure.

The flights to the island were relatively uneventful, the typical pain-in-the-ass which is relegated only to air travel and a root canal with Orin Scrivello, DDS. The picture worth a thousand words (if it wasn’t terrorism) took place on the flights back from San Juan. At the check-in portion of airport terminals, it seems that many airlines (especially Delta) have replaced most or all real people with these ridiculously monotonous and extremely unfriendly “kiosks”. Enter part of your name on the touch-screen or slide in a credit card (no thanks, Delta, I’ll enter my name) and you get to check yourself right in. To make it worse (if forgetting that most people despise computers isn’t the worst) they usually have one or two obviously overworked and underpaid employees manning all twelve kiosks. These poor people are charged with not only having to hold the hand of most travelers through the process of check-in on these kiosks, and in most cases just doing it for them, they also have to check-and-tag each checked bag from every passenger at every kiosk. Nice.

So I was standing there, marveling at what an efficient process it would be if people liked to use computers and the employees were robots, wondering exactly how much money Delta saves by investing in these kiosks and canning real people. Just as I was deciding that Delta surely couldn’t be making money on a flawed system of very expensive but impersonal computers and overworked, understaffed employees pissing off all of their customers, I noticed something at the corner of my eye. Kiosk #1, all the way the beginning of the row, looked funny. Its screen was black. I glanced at my fiancée and pointed to the kiosk so she would know where I was going, strolled up, and a horrifying site beheld. It was a Windows 98 black screen of death! The screen with something to the tune of ‘Windows 98 cannot start because the following file is missing or corrupt: “c:\windows\system32”’ – it’s been so long since I’ve seen one that I can’t even recall the exact words. I was taken aback. The system in charge of running the airline’s check-in is based on WINDOWS? Not just Windows, but a vastly outdated, terribly insecure, networking-inefficient FAT-based version of Windows?!

Yikes. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be really, really afraid. So I chose to laugh, which attracted the attention of the manager-looking Delta employee who was giving me a very unnerving look. Just as it dawned on me to grab the camera so I could take a picture, he gave the nearby TSA “agent” a look of “come over here and get this guy to stop laughing at my broken kiosk”. We were ready to head to security, so I decided not to push the issue. Jail in San Juan for taking pictures of the airport was not something I was to tempt. The flight to Orlando to connect to Columbus wouldn’t have been bad if it wasn’t for the air conditioner leaking buckets of water all over the front of the cabin. The steward closest, in first class, was too busy taking drink orders to notice the three gallons of water pouring onto the floor. So I walked up, gently tapped him on the shoulder and said “excuse me, the plane is leaking” and pointed to the pond in the middle of the floor. He looked at the pond, then up at me and said “Oh, so it is!” and stood there looking very nervous. My goodness. The next 30 minutes was filled with hilarity as three janitors hooted and hollered around the leaking air conditioner, mopping up the water only to be mocked by another gallon of water pouring out, and attempting to “wipe” the water away from the ceiling panel from which it was dripping as if wiping it with a handful of paper towels would somehow stop the deluge. It really was hilarious.

But back to the story. We eventually landed in Orlando and are walking to our next gate for the flight home. We stop by one of the big monitors for arrivals and departures so we can find our gate, and what do I see in the lower-right corner? The Windows XP “desktop cleanup wizard” popup bubble, reminding every passenger that Delta has not run the wizard in over 30 days, and it might be a good idea to clean up the desktop icons. Again, as innocent as it is, I didn’t feel like being hassled about taking pictures inside the airport, so I passed on this hilarious picture opportunity as well. So it seems most of Delta’s computer infrastructure is Windows based. Hey, at least this one is XP.

Having something critical to say of Windows is probably coming as a shock to my friends; they know I’ve never shared their same spooks about Microsoft. There is great deal of value in their products when properly chosen, implemented, and understood. However in this case I’m pretty frightened that a major airline would trust so many systems (and who knows how many mission-critical systems) to something as, in the very least, fickle as Windows. A nicely chosen Linux distro seems to be a much more favorable alternative for reasons I shouldn’t even have to list. Google ‘Linux versus Windows security’ to start. The first topic that comes up today is from a favorite news source, The Register, I recommend taking a look.

So, in this case, two pictures would certainly be worth a couple-thousand words, but not at the risk of being branded a terrorist. Instead I deliver 1,033 (according to Microsoft Word).