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Wired Article on DNSGate..

Wired magazine has covered the DNSGate saga with full dramatic details like: “never, ever repeat what you just told me over a cell phone“. Its a quick read, and worth it for the classic line: “The DNS community had kept the secret for months. The computer security community couldn’t keep it 12 days”

HBN Bootcamp – Christmas Edition

As a Christmas special we have scheduled an additional training course, Hacking By Numbers – Extended Edition (Bootcamp) in Pretoria, South Africa on November 24-28th. The course runs for a full 5 days. This course will be offered at a never-to-be-repeated discount price of ZAR 10,999-00 (15% discount on the usual training price). Each trainee will be given a t-shirt and a Christmas hat! For more on our training please visit http://www.sensepost.com/training.html.

“Unix Terrorist” in trouble over TJX ?

Anyone who was around for Defcon-10 will have an opinion on the infamous Gobbles-Silvio-UnixTerrorist talk in which mail spools where published and everyone was slammed [1] According to mumble on the Interwebs (and a comment from RiskyBusiness) it appears as if the Stephen Watt who allegedly “modified and provided a “sniffer” program used by the conspirators to monitor and capture the data crossing corporate computer networks” == Unix Terrorist.. It’s not clear the extent of Watts involvment with the breakin, but it does send a cold shiver down the spine of anyone who puts out tools / software..

Preflighting Application Error (0xE800000*) on iPhones

For those writing apps for the iPhone, you have a good chance of bumping into the highly annoying preflighting application error: Ralf Rottmann of [24100.net] has a [pretty comprehensive post on how to fix this] (the problem resides in xcode not corerctly tagging the applications BundleID)

HITB08 Slides available..

Slides from the latest Hack in the Box conference [are available] [SensePost slides are listed as owing / not there yet] SensePosters can grab a local copy [here]

You know you are getting old..

When you blog a link to poetry: [The man watching] is a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, that i picked up from a talk by Tim Oreilly during his [recent talk] where he chided the audience for focusing on trivial banalities while leaving bigger problems un challenged. A subsequent speaker picked up the theme, and likened it to abandoning NASA to work on DisneyLand. I think the sentiment is grand, and the poem is inspiring.. and in particular the following lines, are probably going to keep me up nights for a while:

Windows servers are now a (beta) option on Amazon Ec2

EC2 is now out of beta, and supports windows based ANI’s. [Big Day for EC2] EC2 blows my mind, and from a bazillion miles away, i was truly surprised the Amazon got the jump on Google/MSFT/Apple/* with their offerings.. /mh PS. how i managed to write on this as opposed to the [Stack based, pre-auth, wormable windows RPC overflow is anyones guess] PPS. Actually.. in part its because im miffed. I just wrote a diatribe on how the fact that we werent goign to see another code-red / worm scare anytime soon was going to hurt us (ala aitel.owasp08) and this bug shuts me up for a bit – stay tuned for “is the industry still running on code-red?”

OWASP NYC Talks Posted..

The full videos from the OWASP NYC Conf have been posted. At least one BlackHat re-run, but some look well worth the watching.. Most people can grab the videos and slide decks [here], SensePost’ers (except for those actually currently living in NY) can grab selected talks locally [here]

BiDiBLAH 2.0 BETA

Good news to all the blah’ers out there! The BETA version of BiDiBLAH 2 is available for download here. As you probably know, [a real quick and easy] registration is required, and version 2 of BiDiBLAH runs on dotnet framework 2. ./frankieg

Vulnerability management and the Blogs

Gegroet just a quick note on VM. Google is now offering Google Blog Search Beta and I thought it interesting to see who is blogging on vulnerability management.Some of the output includes: i) “Vulnerability Management” = 6,330 hits ii) “Vulnerability Management” + Dummies = 314 hits iii) “Vulnerability Management” + ineffective = 16 hits iv) “Vulnerability Management” + effective = 314 Probably 90% of all hits came from vendors and it was also evident that they were punting the “successes” of VM, utilising their products and services.