10 things I hate about Outlook, and you should too

Okay, so, it should be strikingly obvious that I probably hate Outlook. I stopped using Outlook in 2001, had to use it for a customer for awhile, and my love for it hasn’t gotten any fonder.

1. Non-Standards compliant. Really Microsoft? You didn’t like how all the other email programs that have been around for years have been doing it? You had to go create that MIME format crap that not only isn’t standards compliant, but that every other email program has issues with.
2. Calendar invites. Seriously? Why are Outlook’s Calendar invites so screwed up when sending them to people not on the same Exchange server as you? CALDAV anyone?
3. Exchange? Didn’t like the standards based email servers that were out there? Had to go create one? “But there wasn’t one that did all these “X” features on one server” Wa. Cry me a river. Apple did it. Yeah so what they had to invent a couple open standards and submit them.
4. Top-Posting by default?! Seriously? Lotus Notes you are guilty too, don’t think I am letting you off the hook. Although I will give you credit, Microsoft, for finally building in bottom posting into “Windows Mail”. How many years did it take you? And then, it’s only in Windows Mail!? Why not Outlook! Oh and Google, Gmail top posting? You should be ashamed. Going totally against an RFC! Mail.app for OSX. GUILTY.
5. Tasks. Really? I can drag an email to the bottom left and make a task, I can even drag an email over to the right and make it a task. I can FLAG an email and it will make it a task, but if I move the email out of the Inbox, the task goes away. Awesome job there.
6. PST -- Yet another “our own special standard” email thing from Microsoft. Good job! How about you store things in mbox? How about it? Did you know you can define a PST size up to 33TB? Are you serious? I’d love for the IT department to try and backup someone’s 33TB PST. That’s awesome!
7. Inline Picture attachments. God forbid you should actually display these inline like I told you to. Oh, and I can’t drag the picture to where it should be in the email? I have to go to Insert and do 3 menu calls? Seriously? If I drag it into the email, it places a picture as an attachment? What if I am trying to explain to someone which screen to click on, and you don’t format my email correctly.
8. No real-time Spellcheck? Seriously? You do it in Word! That means I have to select Word as my email editor? I have to launch a separate application to write an email!?
9. Contact suggestion. There is a whole painful hurt of explanation I can do about this section here... not suggesting a contact if it’s in my address book? Not knowing which people I email the most? Which email address am I sending to if my contact has multiple email addresses?
10. Spam Filter. Does one even exist? Does it work? Thunderbird’s Spam filtering kicks ASS compared to Outlooks.

Basically, if you are using Outlook, and you aren’t on an Exchange server, why are you using Outlook? Use something else. God I hate Outlook.

10 things I hate about Outlook, and you should too

Okay, so, it should be strikingly obvious that I probably hate Outlook. I stopped using Outlook in 2001, had to use it for a customer for awhile, and my love for it hasn’t gotten any fonder.

1. Non-Standards compliant. Really Microsoft? You didn’t like how all the other email programs that have been around for years have been doing it? You had to go create that MIME format crap that not only isn’t standards compliant, but that every other email program has issues with.
2. Calendar invites. Seriously? Why are Outlook’s Calendar invites so screwed up when sending them to people not on the same Exchange server as you? CALDAV anyone?
3. Exchange? Didn’t like the standards based email servers that were out there? Had to go create one? “But there wasn’t one that did all these “X” features on one server” Wa. Cry me a river. Apple did it. Yeah so what they had to invent a couple open standards and submit them.
4. Top-Posting by default?! Seriously? Lotus Notes you are guilty too, don’t think I am letting you off the hook. Although I will give you credit, Microsoft, for finally building in bottom posting into “Windows Mail”. How many years did it take you? And then, it’s only in Windows Mail!? Why not Outlook! Oh and Google, Gmail top posting? You should be ashamed. Going totally against an RFC! Mail.app for OSX. GUILTY.
5. Tasks. Really? I can drag an email to the bottom left and make a task, I can even drag an email over to the right and make it a task. I can FLAG an email and it will make it a task, but if I move the email out of the Inbox, the task goes away. Awesome job there.
6. PST -- Yet another “our own special standard” email thing from Microsoft. Good job! How about you store things in mbox? How about it? Did you know you can define a PST size up to 33TB? Are you serious? I’d love for the IT department to try and backup someone’s 33TB PST. That’s awesome!
7. Inline Picture attachments. God forbid you should actually display these inline like I told you to. Oh, and I can’t drag the picture to where it should be in the email? I have to go to Insert and do 3 menu calls? Seriously? If I drag it into the email, it places a picture as an attachment? What if I am trying to explain to someone which screen to click on, and you don’t format my email correctly.
8. No real-time Spellcheck? Seriously? You do it in Word! That means I have to select Word as my email editor? I have to launch a separate application to write an email!?
9. Contact suggestion. There is a whole painful hurt of explanation I can do about this section here... not suggesting a contact if it’s in my address book? Not knowing which people I email the most? Which email address am I sending to if my contact has multiple email addresses?
10. Spam Filter. Does one even exist? Does it work? Thunderbird’s Spam filtering kicks ASS compared to Outlooks.

Basically, if you are using Outlook, and you aren’t on an Exchange server, why are you using Outlook? Use something else. God I hate Outlook.

Why is your Blog named Finshake?

Someone wrote in and asked me why I named my blog “Finshake”. Well..

Finshake is an internal joke between me and the guys in VRT at Sourcefire. A while ago, I was an author on the “Snort IDS and IPS toolkit” book from Syngress. Well, with the rush to deadlines and things, there are several mistakes in the book. Okay, so there are alot of mistakes made in the book...

Well, one of the biggest mistakes in the book, actually happened in my chapter. (Chapter 6). I was talking about TCP Session initiation and TCP Session tear down and how Snort interprets those. In the final book, I wanted pictures of the TCP Handshake for session initiation, and the TCP exchange for session tear down.

In my copy of the manuscript I simply indicated where the pictures should go:

I didn’t actually draw the pictures. I knew Syngress had the pictures from the 2.1 book, and I just asked them to use those.

So in my final proofread of the pdf that I got from the publisher:

The place holder was there, but no picture. Oh well.

The picture was inserted later, and no one ever checked to see if the picture was right. 

So it’s become such a funny joke around the VRT, someone made the suggestion that I should rename my blog “Finshake”. (Since obviously, Session initiation does NOT take place with a “FIN” packet!?)

Research

Okay, so MS08-067 Worm(s). I got some intel from some various listservers that I belong to about a new worm (or worms) that were starting to be seen in the wild. So I got a few url’s to play with and started poking around. Note, these are not all the url’s that I tried to get the exploit/worm from. They are not all of the same worm, and they may or not be related... BTW -- I am not a very good malware analyzer, Just an FYI.

It appears, one of the variants of this worm that I am looking at attempts to spread, not only though network vulnerabilities (08-067), but also through P2P networks like Emule.

So, I tried to get one of the files, named 6767.exe in this case. This EXE file does several things, some of which are very unclear as to the reason... as I said, I’m not a malware guy...

This exe downloads, and upon execution (again, in my particular sample, I am sure it will change), from a network perspective, on MY machine, it didn’t do anything. I have read several write ups of the 6767.exe variant, and I saw what it was “supposed” to do. But in my particular example, it didn’t do anything. I don’t know if it some kind of virtual machine detection in it, and that’s why it didn’t execute? I don’t know. Just throwing that out there. Maybe it has some kind of sleep function so that it won’t execute right away.. making reverse engineering difficult. (boring!) For a list of what it does to a machine, take a look here. At this point I am more interested in how it spreads, not really what it does to the machine.

So, I downloaded a second sample “10wrjcenew.exe”, and executed it.

It tried to download two files, the first was “mimi.1268772” from ls.lenovowireless.net, and the second was pp.av from “218.4.137.213”. After this pp.av file was downloaded, the malware then attempted to register my computer on ce.10wrj.com. With this string:

This connection succeeded, but was immediately terminated. Since this particular HTTP connection was tried over and over again to register, and since the mac address is a vmware mac address, I can only guess that the machine receiving the Client Registration knows which mac addresses are vmware and doesn’t attempt to infect those? Just a theory. I found some interesting information about this here.

The two files were saved, actually on the desktop (because the malware I had executed was sitting on the Desktop), and were named svchost.exe and winlogon.exe.

So, you can tell that this is a completely different worm from the first one I tried.

Then, after that, scanning commenced on port 139 to try and find other hosts. Now I have a double NAT going on here, (172.16 addresses (vmware) are being bridged out to 192.168 (home network) addresses, then translated to the internet.. I didn’t notice it, but the worm must have looked up my ‘external’ address at some point because the malware never did scan my local subnet, it only scanned the public address scheme of my local subnet. Upon further review of the malware through other websites, I also found this to be the case.

After successfully connecting (which didn’t happen in my case) on port 139, it then exploits the other machine on port 445. Which is detected by Snort through rules:

[1:7224:8] NETBIOS SMB-DS srvsvc NetrPathCanonicalize unicode little endian overflow attempt

[3:14817:1] NETBIOS SMB srvsvc NetrpPathCononicalize unicode little endian path cononicalization stack overflow attempt

[3:14783:1] NETBIOS DCERPC NCACN-IP-TCP srvsvc NetrpPathCononicalize little endian path cononicalization stack overflow attempt

So I suggest you check out the newest subscription ruleset through Sourcefire at www.snort.org. Like I said, I am not a malware guy, I just did some clicking around to see what was out there and what it did. I haven’t reversed a binary in almost 4 years. Who has the time!? ;)

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