ch-athens - security

Παγκόσμια μέρα εναντίων της λογοκρισίας στο διαδίκτυο

betabug — 2010-03-12T14:49:58Z

Σήμερα από τους Reporters Sans Frontières έχουμε την " Παγκόσμια μέρα εναντίων της λογοκρισίας στο διαδίκτυο " (δική μου μετάφραση). Το διαδίκτυο μας δίνει - μεταξύ άλλων - την δυνατότητα να εκφράζουμε γεγονότα και γνώμες με πιο ανοικτό και ελεύθερο ...

Faking it on somone's tumblr blog

betabug — 2010-03-01T14:24:00Z

tumblr_ is a blogging service that is well known for its ease of use: Basically you can send in posts to your personal (and secret) tumblr mail address and they will appear on your blog. Cool. My COREblog has a similar "moblog" feature, but I have to give some special formatted information to make the post work - and to make it authenticate, I have to include a password (which is sent in cleartext, no real security there). This morning with my friend saad_ we wondered about the security of tumblr's offering: Given that someone got hold of your posting address, how good are they at weeding out faked posts?

Google Mailservers used for Dictionary Attack

betabug — 2008-04-06T10:03:05Z

The last few days I noticed a nice, big dictionary attack targeting my lowly mail server. It's not been the first time and I'm not the only target of this, looks like Tor has seen it too. What is interesting about the attack is that it's abusing a lo...

Smoke Detector in Place

betabug — 2007-10-27T21:23:53Z

Maybe someone might remember the story Tired and Buying a Smoke Detector in which I was woken up by neighbors who noticed smoke coming out of our apartment. I resolved to buying a smoke detector. Some days ago I finally (!) put it up. Promptly I was ...

Tired and Buying a Smoke Detector

betabug — 2007-09-24T15:27:38Z

This morning at about 6:20 someone rang the bell on our apartment door. Repeatedly. I turned around in sweet slumber and cursed the lusers. They kept on and started knocking too. I got up and had a look, thinking about if it was safe to open in the middle of the night (not knowing the time yet). Moving over to the hallway I noticed what was wrong, as I looked over to the kitchen: Smoke was coming out under the kitchen door...

Is there anyone who cares about the SSH worm?

betabug — 2007-07-15T22:17:33Z

Please excuse the rant... everybody talks about Windoze malware, but is there anybody who is at all interested about the tons of Unix boxes who carry the SSH worm around? (Everybody knows which one I'm talking about, the one that closes every couple ...

Your Papers!

betabug — 2007-06-18T16:38:08Z

On my Sunday evening walk along the coast between Falliron and Kalamaki I came across a surreal scene. It was evening, the sun was just setting behind Pireus in a burst of orange and pink light. The promenade was full of families with little children taking a walk, and people who had spent the day swimming and sunbathing at the beach and who were now heading home. I passed by a couple of men from (judging by what I could grasp from their talk) Romania, who had been at the beach. They were walking towards the Kalamaki tram station. Suddenly there popped up a policeman in the middle of the flow of people...

Θέλουμε Pirate Good Privacy;

betabug — 2007-05-06T18:43:52Z

Εκεί που γράφει ο adamo για το λάθος (για να το πούμε διπλωματικά) να κατεβάσεις "άγνωστης προέλευσης binary crack από το Internet" ενώ προσπαθείς να τρέχεις ένα ασφαλείς σύστημα, μου έρχεται ένα mail από κάποιον που ήτανε στο σεμινάριο PGP μου. Ο άνθρωπος δεν βρήκε το κατάλληλο PGP πρόγραμμα για το PC του (το σεμινάριο αναφερότανε πρώτα απ' όλα στα Macintosh). Και τι έκανε;

Speaking of "Underground"...

betabug — 2007-04-26T09:31:36Z

While I was doing some logspotting yesterday I discovered a couple of accesses that came from some hosts that looked like a lot of open proxies or a botnet or something. Someone was likely abusing them for scraping mail addresses off web sites. One of them rang a "Bell": I had seen the name "NorTel" in the book "Underground" (see this post). Even thouth the IP didn't have a reverse DNS entry, the "whois" showed it belonging to "Bell-Northern Research" aka "Nortel Networks". In the book the "hacker" kids find a way into one of Nortel's telephone exchanges and later into their company network. So maybe one of the researchers set up a test server and forgot to lock it down? ...and now some "hackers" got into it?...

Underground

betabug — 2007-04-17T20:51:05Z

A few days back I had discovered over at adamo's site a link to the online version of the book "Underground". I downloaded the book (of course choosing the plain text version - update: the old link lead to a scam site) and started reading. Kept me hooked busy for a few days of intensive reading. The book recounts the days of old, when teenagers dialed their modems into BBS's and later learned to "hack" (which in this context means to break into other people's computers). I enjoyed the book and it ignited some good thoughts...

PGP κρυπτογράφηση και άλλες μοντέρνες παράνοιες

betabug — 2007-04-02T19:37:34Z

Αν μέχρι τώρα δεν εμπιστευόσασταν τα email για λόγους ασφαλείας... Από τις 22 Απριλίου και μετά θα ηρεμήσετε. Το HelMUG, διοργανώνει: στις 22 Απριλίου 2007 και ώρα 13.00 στο χώρο του Dasein cafe, Σολωμού 12 στα Εξάρχεια το πρώτο θεματικό σεμινάριο: "PG...

PGP Talk for HelMUG

betabug — 2007-03-20T20:15:01Z

Yesterday evening I was with citylop (of HelMUG fame) at the Dasein in Exarheia. We were going through my notes for a PGP Talk which I will be giving for the Hellenic Macintosh Users Group HelMUG. We also signed up for the Dasein's event room. The ta...

ADAE / ΑΔΑΕ are you listening?

betabug — 2007-02-13T10:47:49Z

It was forever and a day ago that I wrote about rumours about a telnetd root Backdoor in Vodafone's Ericsson Systems. Now like a puppy peeing on an old carpet, around comes this gem from the 80s: Solaris Telnet 0day or Embarrassment. Apparently a "ho...

Phishing National Bank of Greece Customers

betabug — 2007-02-07T09:46:49Z

This morning at work I was greeted by a phishing mail (nothing rare) but in Greek - a first for me. The phishers are attempting to get people click on links labelled "homebank.nbg.gr", apparently the homebanking site of the National Bank of Greece - ...

Forged E-Mails Enter Swiss Politics

betabug — 2006-12-28T14:38:10Z

According to an article from swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger (online in german likely only for a short while), forged mails where sent from a computer in the building of the swiss parliament in Berne. The mails (and SMS) carried the name of Laurent Schaffter, member of the regional government of the canton of Jura. Those mails expressed the wish to change his position as minister for "buildings and ecology", with the result that he got assigned a new position as minister for "health, social, and personnel". I've been waiting for something like this to happen, as it is much, much too easy to forge mails...