Posts by vulture65537

Forgotten motherboard driver turns out to be perfect for slipping Windows ransomware past antivirus checks

Re: Driver Signing

What about refusing to downgrade to a lower version (after the new version has been in use for a day)?

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

Re: HOWTO Move Your Server

At Uni I was reading a book which covered three-phase power (it turns out to be important for X-ray machines) and found in the book a warning that if the fuse blows you must not replace it with a nail.

Long ago somewhere in this galaxy there may have been someone who tinkered with the inside of a PC so much he got to leaving the screws undone and the case open a few centimetres. Then there was contact from a near neighbour (who had not seen indoors at this place) complaining "You're running a PC with the case off which interferes with TV signal and is illegal". The case went back on and there was no more complaint.

Wake me up before you go Go: Devs say they'll learn Google-backed lang next. Plus: Perl pays best, Java still in demand

Re: If you want to do Low-Latency properly ...

No - you walk one string and compare to the other buffer that might not contain a string at all (and if it does may not indicate the buffer size).

School's out as ransomware attack downs IT systems at Scotland's Dundee and Angus College

"because nobody knows anything"

This graduate from 13 miles south suspects that's the usual condition.

Anatomy of OpenBSD's OpenSMTPD hijack hole: How a malicious sender address can lead to remote pwnage

Re: With great power...

You mean it's time someone invented smrsh - the sendmail restricted shell?

https://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/linux_system_administration/securing_and_optimizing_linux/chap22sec182.html

Re: How?

too right, and common knowledge since at least 1994

http://sunmanagers.mrbill.net/1994/0509.html

Go on, eat your fibre, new build contractors. It's free! OpenReach lowers limit for free FTTP connections

Higher upload speeds would help a lot with backups to cloud.

Wave goodbye: DigitalOcean decimates workforce as co-founder reveals lack of profitability, leadership turmoil

Re: Impressed with the service but........

I used to report port scans and intrusion attempts ... even cataloged the preferred contact method (email/web form * groups/single items) for a bunch of ISPs and automated the reports (with a rate limit).

The most annoying was my own ISP since they couldn't reliably read logs (bsd pf logs in tcpdump format) and often contacted me claiming I was the source of the scans I'd complained about.

A Notepad nightmare leaves sysadmin with something totally unprintable

Re: Support ticket

I had a luser claim that my s/w changed his Solaris hostname to "-a". Puzzled by this since I'd been running it on Solaris for a long time and knew it never changed the hostname, I invited him to look in root's shell history for "hostname -a" where perhaps "uname -a" was intended.

I never heard back.

Brit banking sector hasn't gone a single day of 2020 without something breaking

If El Reg wants to reproduce user content on topical issues isn't it possible to pick items with better adherence to the 3rd commandment?

The time PC Tools spared an aerospace techie the blushes

Re: The scariest word in IT....

I (and Kevin) had to deal with a situation in the early 1990s where the culprit (Carl) had been the last person to leave on Friday (and by the time we arrived on Monday was abroad on leave). He'd left some sort of unfinished reformat and reinstall job without so much as a note about how far he'd got and what was left to do.

During his holiday someone phoned for him and when I said he was away they asked "Oh! How do you manage without him?".

Re: Try 'rm -rf some_directory /*'

I might have done something similarly dumb by starting a directory name #with-a-hash-making-a-comment .

Also GNU rm interprets -r -f etc if it sees them later in the argument list which might be unexpected.

Five years in the clink for super-crook who scammed Google, Facebook out of $120m with fake tech invoices

Re: Good accounting

> phony invoices that each of the tech giants thought were for real purchases

Years ago I worked at a place that tried to pay invoices whether they were due or not. The drone I spoke to on one of these occasions was panicking that "they might sue us" while I was telling him the cancellation I had in the correspondence file would keep us safe if they did.

Remember the Dutch kid who stuck his finger in a dam to save the village? Here's the IT equivalent

Re: Once upon a time in Brighton...

I found a situation where a password could not be changed; even by root using 'passwd -r files luser'.

The line in /etc/passwd was there but the passwd program was not reading it. Enter truss .. /bin/passwd was quitting before reading the whole file which meant a problem in the file. pwck pointed out wrong number of fields.

And somebody's edit had left a blank line mid-file resulting in later lines not being used.

Managing the Linux kernel at AWS: 'A large team of security experts' dealing with fallout from Spectre, Meltdown flaws

Re: Translation:

No harm in a few more instance types and let the customer choose?

Re: "We take our customer's privacy seriously..."

> Dedicated servers if you are handing PII, including financial transactions.

Then there are your passwords, SSH keys, ASLR variables, CSRF variables etc so even if you have no PII you might want to step up the caution.

Gravitons, Neoverse... you'd be forgiven for thinking AWS's second-gen 64-core Arm server processor was a sci-fi

Re: All Amazon CPU include a integrated microphone as standard

always

https://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/papers/acoustic-20131218.pdf

In Rust We Trust: Stob gets behind the latest language craze

Re: Do...While

do { ... } while(0) was a tool taught me* in the 1990s for use in C macros.

When you have your code:

if (x) frobulate;

you don't need {} after the if even when frobulate is #define'd as multiple statements of something.

* by the pdksh maintainer Michael R?? er, web search suggests Rendell

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That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

Yes they were.

> warning for anyone ever tempted to insert witty error messages into their code

sudo has an option for "insults" (strange sayings emitted when you enter a wrong password). I maintained sudo for a while in a company which meant download/compile/package when there was a new version. There were a few people so alarmed by the "insults" that they made helpdesk calls to people who didn't know what they were and didn't know how to find out about them. In later releases I made sure the insults were turned off.

examples here: https://grayson.sh/blogs/viewing-and-creating-custom-insults-for-sudo

Before you high-five yourselves for setting up that bug bounty, you've got the staff in place to actually deal with security, right?

Re: Job Postings

> Hiring an infosec person, chucking them in a corner and paying them well will never be a waste of money.

That's exactly a waste of money as you missed out the part where you should take their advice.

UK tech freelancer numbers down for first time in 5 years since IR35 tax reforms hit public sector

> contracts finishing by 28th February 2020

Did they not notice the leap year?

No one would be so scummy as to scam a charity, right? UK orgs find out the hard way

Re: Charities are a fraud

Years ago there was a debate in the newspaper about pay in public v private sectors. Someone defended his public sector pay because of the amount of money he managed (i.e. spent). Another writer said spending money is easy and the hard work in the private sector is earning the profit.

Tearoff of Nottingham: University to lose chunk of IT dept to outsourcing

Re: And this means

> keep the expensive part of the IT organisation

Did Amdahl also make a law of finance ?

'Technical error' threatens Vodafone customers with four-figure roaming fees

Re: "Customers will not be charged"

Vodaphone -> Vodafone

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

He's been learning from Richard Attenborough. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049637/

Former BAE Systems contractor charged with 'damaging disclosure' of UK defence secrets

Re: A common misconeption

I blame the Potato farm.

Father of Unix Ken Thompson checkmated: Old eight-char password is finally cracked

Re: DES

https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/december-2003-volume-28-number-6/end-crypt-passwords-please

December 2003 article on the limitations of old DES crypt()

Re: penetration testing --really?

"early Solaris" meaning as far as part of the Solaris 9 series - really quite recent

Watch out! Andromeda, the giant spiral galaxy colliding with our own Milky Way, has devoured several galaxies before

Re: Let me get this straight ....

> universe is expanding

That applies on large scales. Bringing nearby things together is not prevented (so it's not an excuse why your golf club misses the ball).

Are you who you say you are, sir? You are? That's all fine then

Re: Santander

I had Powergen phone me to say I needed to change my password which included the term "cheating bastards" because of the way they'd used higher estimated bills than actual meter readings.

Fed up with Facebook data slurping? Firefox has a cunning plan

Re: How is it any better than running NoScript

> introducing lumps of code from sources over which its developers have no control

https://www.troyhunt.com/locking-down-your-website-scripts-with-csp-hashes-nonces-and-report-uri/

Divert the power to the shields. 'I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!'

Have you written your cloudy serverless proposal?

I just love your accent – please, have a new password

https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-27

Despite billions in spending, your 'military grade' network will still be leaking data

Re: With All Due Respect to Larry Wall

Your experience is not complete until your boss personally tells you that an unpatched bug does not even exist . This is a bug that you discovered and reported to the vendor 9 years earlier and (after testing the patch) sent a description to a security mailing list that's archived on the web.

You're all set for your long summer vacation. Suddenly a text arrives. It's the CEO. 'Data strategy by Friday plz'

Re: A new idea?

Dear Boss, Refer to quote from Dorothy Parker.

We checked and yup, it's no longer 2001. And yet you can pwn a Windows box via Notepad.exe

Re: Privelage escalation

privilege

Industry reps told the UK taxman everything wrong with extending IR35. What happened next will astound you

Re: Perhaps you should advise your children

You do not tell them what to play. They do not tell you what to do with the money.

YouTube mystery ban on hacking videos has content creators puzzled

Re: Strange

out of copyright by now

Cop a load of this: 1TB of police body camera videos found lounging around public databases

I wonder if there is any footage included showing someone entering passwords .

This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come early July

Re: Par for the course

> SHMBO

Relative of SWMBO?

Freaking out about fiendish IoT exploits? Maybe disable telnet, FTP and change that default password first?

Re: But surely

Assuming you mean read-only anonymous FTP for distributing stuff there's not a lot wrong with it.

But it does have a disadvantage relative to HTTP. The data connection is prone to receiving connections from unexpected participants sneaking in before the intended connection.

Oblivious 'influencers' work on 3.6-roentgen tans in Chernobyl after realising TV show based on real nuclear TITSUP

Re: On the bright side

as seen in new towns and places where building nuclear plant was considered but not done

When it comes to DNS over HTTPS, it's privacy in excess, frets UK child exploitation watchdog

Re: Does this change anything?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting

disabled in April 2018 by big players

March 2020: When you lucky, lucky Brits will have a legal right to a minimum of... 10Mbps

Re: Bribery at work

If you're not thinking it happened again 3 months later .. think a bit harder.

Re: Bribery at work

At my recent problem (using Zen and BT) Openreach took two visits to my home to check the line. The first visit was only a phone line check (no serious fault found so charged £85) and the 2nd visit by their broadband guy found and fixed the fault. That's all after I've done a range of indoor tests including buying a new router.

Church roofs? Nyet, say Russian scrap thieves, we're taking this bridge

> swipe the remaining 23m-long, 56-tonne metal structure of the central span

It's like the man said: "Sixty feet of bridge I can get almost anywhere."

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065938/quotes/qt0474851

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

Re: Nice story

> I'm also happy I'm not the only one who once had a totally pointless day in his career

I was approached by a manager about Friday lunchtime saying he urgently needed some work done for a customer meeting on Tuesday. His own team were on holiday and he did not know when they were due back. So I did 9 hours (IIRC) overtime on Saturday.

Monday comes round and his team are back in the office and say they've already done everything for the meeting.