LoveMyTool - Building an Open Community for Network Management and Monitoring

Using Passive and Active Approaches to Manage the Heartbleed Issue (by Darragh Delaney)

 Using passive and active approaches to manage the Heartbleed issue/tragedy!

Have you changed your passwords?

We are now into week two/three of the Heartbleed issue and while many high profile sites were patched initially, a lot of servers still remain vulnerable. Some people have adopted a head in the sand type approach and that they think that only high profile servers will be targeted. My own research shows that SSL servers on networks of all sizes are being targeted. 

If you have not done so already you need to get an inventory of systems together so that you know what to monitor and patch. This is easier said than done. Many devices which have a web based management console will be running OpenSSL. Windows server running 3^rd party applications may also be vulnerable as these applications may use OpenSSL for web services.

The Man'ority Show - Law Enforcement

The Strange History of Port 0 (by Jim MacLeod)

The Strange History of Port 0

While reading the latest report from Arbor Network on DDoS activity across the Internet in Q2 2013, a particular phrase jumped out at me:

“ TCP fragmentation attacks (port 0) are up from about 10% last year to nearly 25% this year. ”

There are three reasons I don’t understand that statement. First, TCP is a streaming protocol, not a datagram protocol, so there’s no concept of “fragmentation” within TCP. Second, googling “TCP fragmentation” results in an IDS evasion technique using overlapping SEQ numbers in retransmissions to replace the contents of the receive buffer on the recipient, but not the IDS (see here for an awesome example including Wireshark screenshots), but that has nothing to do with port 0. Third, and the one I will explore here, port 0 isn’t defined as a valid port.

Know thy enemy!

Despite the fact that port 0 isn’t a valid port for traffic, network management tools will regularly report that you’ve got traffic headed there.  However, that’s not what the packets contain. 

Never Give Up While Freedom Is On The Line (by Casey Mullis)

I recently had the pleasure of assisting another Investigator from Carroll County with forensics on one of the new Macbook Pro 13 inch with a 128 GB SSD. The first thing you notice is there is no CD/DVD drive. There is also no Firewire port only a thunderbolt port and USB 3.0.

So now what? I first tried booting with Blackbag's  MacQuasition but it would not boot. I called Blackbag tech support and found out that the version I had did not support the new model of Macbook that we were working on. The hard drive in the Macbook was a SSD nonstandard drive. See image(s) below.

 

So what do you do? Do you give up on getting the forensic image of the hard drive or do you push forward and keep digging to find a solution?

Security Threats Continued: Why They Are Targeting Your Business? (by Jim MacLeod)

Over the last few posts, I’ve dissected the major security threats that are happening on your network today. The first piece dissected the “Who,” mainly how do you classify these perpetrators based on a set characteristics that they share. The next post took a look at the “How” hackers enter your network and what you can do to help safeguard it. For the final piece of this series we will look at the “Why.”

Where is your Attack Level?

While there are lots of sociological theories and studies on why people vandalize and steal, this post will focus the “Why” on the current most common motives that drive hackers to penetrate your network.

1. 1.    “Lulz”
2. 2.    Profit
3. 3.    Ideology