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Category Archives for "Security"

Some notes on space heaters (GPU rigs)

So I carried my GPU rig up to my bedroom to act as a space heater. I thought I'd write some notes on it.

This is a "GPU rig", containing five graphics cards. Graphics cards have highly parallel processors (GPUs) with roughly 10 times the performance of a CPU -- but only for highly parallel problems.

Two such problems are password cracking [*] and cryptocurrency mining.


Password cracking is something cybersecurity professionals regularly need to do. When doing a pentest, or assessment, we'll get lists of passwords we need to crack. Having a desktop computer with a couple of graphics cards is a useful thing to have.

There are three popular cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ZCash. Everyone is using ASICs for Bitcoin, so you can't mine them on a GPU any more, but GPUs are still useful for Ethereum and ZCash.

The trick to building a rig with lots of GPU is to get a PCIe 1x extender, so that you can mount the card far away from the motherboard for better cooling. They cost around $10 each. You then need to buy a motherboard with lots of PCIe slots. One with lots of 1x slots will do Continue reading

Securing Electronic Healthcare Records: The New Frontier

We didn’t find any medical sutures or gauze at HIMSS last week, but there sure was a lot of talk about the future of healthcare IT security. The status of electronic health record (EHR) security as a hot topic is clear, too: patient information is increasingly being moved to electronic form in order for healthcare organizations to increase clinician efficiency and remain compliant, but as we’ve seen in other industries, electronic information is difficult to keep safe. EHR data contains our medical identities, complete with medical histories, address histories, extended family names and histories, and more, making it a prime target for bad actors attempting to steal personal information.

What is the current threat landscape for this EHR data? A recent Accenture survey found approximately 26 percent of Americans have been impacted by a healthcare data breach. To combat the rise in healthcare cyber attacks, health providers are looking to IT for infrastructure and application support that prioritizes data security while continuing to maximize clinician workflow efficiency and drive better patient outcomes.

That’s where VMware NSX comes in. NSX empowers healthcare organizations to secure the infrastructure that EHR systems and other critical care applications live on. This ensures the healthcare Continue reading

A quick note about iconoclasm

I'm an iconoclast [*]. Whenever things become holy, whereby any disagreement is treated as heresy, then I disagree. There are two reasonable sides to every argument. When you vilify one of the sides in the argument, then I step into defend them -- not that they are right, but that they are reasonable.

This makes many upset, because once a cause has become Holy, anybody disagreeing with orthodoxy (like me) is then, by definition, a horrible person. I get things like the image to the right.

(Please don't harass/contact this person -- she believes what many do, and singling her out would be mean).

For the record, I'm rabidly feminist, anti-racist, pro-LGBT, pro-civil-rights. It's just that while I care a lot, I'm not Orthodox. I likely disagree with you about the details. When you vilify those who disagree with you, I will defend them.

...which is the best troll, ever. Admitting somebody is wrong, but defending them as reasonable, seems to upset people more than just arguing the other side is right.

Border Digital Safety for Journalists

The CPJ, the "Committee to Protect Journalists", offers some horrible advice [*] on Digital Security, especially when crossing the border.

The most important piece of advice I can give you is this: if somebody's life depends upon it, then no simple piece of advice, no infographic, is going to help you. You have to learn about cybersecurity enough to make intelligent decisions for yourself. You have to make difficult tradeoffs yourself. Anybody giving you simple advice or infographics is a charlatan.

So I thought I'd discuss what's wrong with the following infographic:


I. Passwords, managers, and two-factor

The biggest issue is don't reuse passwords across different accounts. If you do, when hackers breach one of your accounts, they breach all of them. I use a simple password for all the accounts I don't care about, then complex unique passwords for all my important accounts. I have to write them down on a piece of paper I've got hidden at home, because sometimes I forget them.

Password managers certainly help you have multiple strong passwords across many accounts. On the other hand, it puts all your eggs in one basket, and the police can grab them from the company.

Continue reading

Skillz: editing a web page

So one of the skillz you ought to have in cybersec is messing with web-pages client-side using Chrome's Developer Tools. Web-servers give you a bunch of HTML and JavaScript code which, once it reaches your browser, is yours to change and play with. You can do a lot with web-sites that they don't intend by changing that code.

Let me give you an example. It's only an example -- touching briefly on steps to give you an impression what's going on. It's not a ground up explanation of everything, which you may find off-putting. Click on the images to expand them so you can see fully what's going on.


Today is the American holiday called "Presidents Day". It's actually not a federal holiday, but a holiday in all 50 states. Originally it was just Washington's birthday (February 22), but some states choose to honor other presidents as well, hence "Presidents Day".

Thus of us who donated to Donald Trump's campaign (note: I donated to all candidates campaigns back in 2015) received an email today suggesting that to honor Presidents Day, we should "sign a card" for Trump. It's a gross dis-honoring of the Presidents the day is supposed to commemorate, Continue reading

Reaction; Do we really need a new Internet?

The other day several of us were gathered in a conference room on the 17th floor of the LinkedIn building in San Francisco, looking out of the windows as we discussed some various technical matters. All around us, there were new buildings under construction, with that tall towering crane anchored to the building in several places. We wondered how that crane was built, and considered how precise the building process seemed to be to the complete mess building a network seems to be.

And then, this week, I ran across a couple of articles arguing that we need a new Internet. For instance—

What we really have today is a Prototype Internet. It has shown us what is possible when we have a cheap and ubiquitous digital infrastructure. Everyone who uses it has had joyous moments when they have spoken to family far away, found a hot new lover, discovered their perfect house, or booked a wonderful holiday somewhere exotic. For this, we should be grateful and have no regrets. Yet we have not only learned about the possibilities, but also about the problems. The Prototype Internet is not fit for purpose for the safety-critical and socially sensitive types of Continue reading

You don’t need printer security

So there's this tweet:



What it's probably refering to is this:


This is an obviously bad idea.

Well, not so "obvious", so some people have ask me to clarify the situation. After all, without "security", couldn't a printer just be added to a botnet of IoT devices?

The answer is this:
Fixing insecurity is almost always better than adding a layer of security.
Adding security is notoriously problematic, for three reasons

  1. Hackers are active attackers. When presented with a barrier in front of an insecurity, they'll often find ways around that barrier. It's a common problem with "web application firewalls", for example.
  2. The security software itself can become a source of vulnerabilities hackers can attack, which has happened frequently in anti-virus and intrusion prevention systems.
  3. Security features are usually snake-oil, sounding great on paper, with with no details, and no independent evaluation, provided to the public.

It's the last one that's most important. HP markets features, but there's no guarantee they work. In particular, similar features in Continue reading

Technology Short Take #78

Welcome to Technology Short Take #78! Here’s another collection of links and articles from around the Internet discussing various data center-focused technologies.

Networking

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around, sorry!

Security

Ixia Vision ONE – Tap the Planet

Ixia LogoWhenever I start talking about network visibility and aggreagation taps I can’t help but think of The Matrix. Millions of packets flowing through your network every minute of every day, tapping into that can be a daunting exercise. Luckily we have some new blood in this space, at least in my view, Ixia Vision ONE. For those of you that recognize the name, yes I’m talking about that Ixia.. previously one of the leaders in the load testing market, they’ve moved into the network packet broker space.

Vision ONE is Ixia’s all-in-one product attempts to provide assurance that the network traffic you want to reach your monitoring and security tools is actually reaching your tools. Vision ONE is able to take the input from your device, and send it out in several directions, applying filters to the traffic as needed. This means that you can filter out specific traffic and send it to a monitoring / security tool with traffic it doesn’t need to process. All of this is managed through a clean, easy to user interface that displays the connections between the TAP’s physical ports, filters, and tool ports.

Take a look at the Vision One demo here.

My Continue reading

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