Sorry for the lack of posts, I've been particularly busy.

Been pretty busy lately with my two full-time day jobs at Sourcefire.  The good news is, if you are a Snort user, that I am working on a lot of things that will not only make our community better, but improve how Sourcefire interacts with that community and allow us to move forward in a more progressive manner.

Aside from Sourcefire/Snort stuff, the shop that is restoring my Mustang is almost done (should get it back this week, and when I do, I'll post pics), I'm working on the shops website too (as the old one needed some TLC).  I got with the owner and we decided to redo the whole thing, so I am doing that in my spare time as well.

Thank you Squarespace!

Also working on another website that I tighten up a bit (aside from tightening up Snort.org a bit as well) for another company (Car alarm company) that I do a bit of consulting/marketing for.  So, it feels like I am buried in html lately.

On top of all of that, my son is doing well, my daughter is awesome and my wife's Grandmother died this past week, so we are all dealing with that as well.

Busy Busy Busy.  Stay tuned.  I've got a few posts lined up for the pipeline for not only this blog but for another blog I am starting, so when that all comes together, stay tuned!

Updated Mustang Page

I updated my "My Mustang" page today. Mostly just a link to the current pictures.

Click here for the page

"So I have this IDS now what?" presentation at BSidesDE

Joel Esler, so I have this IDS now what BSidesDE1 on USTREAM. Conference.

Above is a link to my presentation from BSidesDelaware a couple weeks ago.  For some reason the audio and video are like 5 minutes off, but the presentation (for the most part) is intact.

Snort Pig Roast was a success!

Snort :: Snort Pig Roast was a success!.

Just wanted to put up a couple pictures from the Pig Roast we had at corporate headquarters recently.  Enjoy!

Building an HTML5 Drag & Drop File Uploader Using Sinatra and jQuery: Part 1

Building an HTML5 Drag & Drop File Uploader Using Sinatra and jQuery: Part 1 • Caffeine • Onehub.

Just an interesting post I'd like to draw attention to. Give it a read. This could have some application in security.

Part 2:

http://onehub.com/blog/posts/designing-a-drag-drop-experience-for-the-web/

New Role at Sourcefire

This is just an announcement to let the users of our OpenSource products know that we have a new community manager here at Sourcefire.

Over the past year or so, Mike Guiterman, our former Community Manager has taken on a different role within Sourcefire.  In the meantime, I've been filling some of the void.

For those of you that weren't able to make the Snort Rally/Pig Roast this past Friday at Sourcefire HQ, I have been officially assigned the role of Sourcefire's OpenSource Community Manager.

I know many of you, but for those who I don't, I came from the OpenSource community, working for the government using Snort in actual deployments.  I submit rules to VRT, and was one of the original submitters to BleedingSnort (Now Emerging Threats).  I've worked with both the OpenSource community and with our Corporate customers since I came to Sourcefire giving me first hand knowledge at how the community plays a vital role in the direction, development, and QA of our products.

I'll be focusing on product innovation in our OpenSource projects, as well as:

• Communicating with the communities.


• Being available to answer questions and receive comments.


• Coordinating the release of OpenSource project software.


• Providing whitepapers and instructional materials on our software.


• Providing the go-between for the OpenSource communities and Sourcefire software developers, including receiving OSS feature requests and bugs.  Entering these into our internal bug tracking system, and following up with the submitters.


• Snort-Groups.  Standing these back up, both virtually and in person.


• Speaking about our software at events and shows.

I have several projects in mind alerady, but the first thing is I want to hear from you.  Suggestions, ideas, complaints, and compliments.

• How we can make things better.


• Problems with Snort, ClamAV, DaemonLogger, or Razorback


• Features you'd like to see with these projects


• What isn't working now?


• What is working now!


• How can we make bug tracking more efficient?


• How can we make False positive submissions better?


• What can we put out (in terms of training and whitepapers) for better understanding and results?


• ???

Let me hear it.  Email me directly at jesler@sourcefire.com.  I want to be able to track your ideas so I can write you back when we make movement.

I'll summarize your submissions in a blog post in the future and let everyone know where we are at with the progress of these great ideas.

I'd like to thank people both internally at Sourcefire and the community for building the community into what it is today, and I look forward to a great future!  Also thanks to Mike Guiterman for his years of hard service working with our OpenSource communities.

For Razorback(tm) please continue to submit feature requests and any
other Razorback items to the Razorback Trac at:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/razorbacktm/

And for Nugget related items please use:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/nuggetfarm/

You can of course, also use the mailing lists for Razorback and the
Nugget Farm.

Apple releases Mac OS X 10.6.5 with no mention of AirPrint

AppleInsider | Apple releases Mac OS X 10.6.5 with no mention of AirPrint.

A nice roundup of everything in 10.6.5, including a gigantic flash update. From adobe.

Security B-sides Delaware tickets are almost gone!

If you are in the area (or even if you aren't, I know of people traveling a pretty good distance to get here) and you haven't got your ticket for Bsides DE yet, you may want to get on it.

The first round of tickets are all gone, and there are only 40 left of the extension tickets.

<plug>

I'm speaking at 1:00, right after lunch.  See the speaker's schedule here.  But anyway, if you haven't got your tickets yet, you might want to hurry up and grab them from here.  Cost?  Free.

Archiving Emails in Mail.app, there's an app for that.

If you are using Mail.app on OSX, this post is for you.

It's been well known to people that read my blog that I am an Inbox-Zero ninja, and generally pride myself on my ability to get through vast amounts of email quickly because of the system that I have refined over the past several years of experimenting.

Techniques in Archiving

One of the things about Inbox Zero is the ability to quickly move an email out of your "Inbox" and into another folder.  If you sort your emails that come into your Inbox by topic or subject or whatever, different folders may do good things for you.  For instance I have a folder where all Snort related email goes.  The three Snort mailing lists go straight to my inbox where I read most of them and then file them away using a keyboard shortcut.  Other Snort related mailing lists just go straight to this box, leaving me with only the important ones in my inbox.

Most listserver traffic of the 40 or so listservers that I belong to go straight to a "listserver" folder, where I can deal with it later.  You get my point.

But everything that I don't filter, is in my inbox, which usually nets me about 200~ emails a day that I need to deal with.  When I read an email I have possible outcomes.

• Delete it


• Archive it (if I need it later)


• Respond to it (if it takes shorter than 2 minutes to accomplish this task)


• Delegate it (if I am not the appropriate person to deal with "x" email)


• Make a todo to deal with it later.

Delete it

Duh.  I don't do enough of this.

Archive it.

This is the meat of the post, and kind of the point of writing this article.  I am a firm believer in leaving your hands on the keyboard if possible.  Learning the keyboard shortcuts in your favorite app will not only save time, but it also keeps your hands where you need to be doing work.  On the keyboard (instead of continually reaching for your mouse).  There are keyboard shortcuts for almost anything in OSX, and if you can't find it, or the menu command doesn't have a keyboard shortcut, you can make a keyboard shortcut to do what you want in Snow Leopard.  Heck, there are keyboard shortcuts in Gmail (learn em!)

Now, how do you do this in Mail.app, well there is a little app called "Archive" that will allow you to do this.

Archive.  Archive allows you to do exactly that.  Archive the email that you are presently on.  It creates a folder in your email accounts named "Archive", and when you mash the shortcut in your inbox, it puts the email that you have lighted in the appropriate Archive folder.  Simple, clean, done.

There is also Mail Act-On, which I've talked about before here, is a nice little app if you need to do more advanced things than Archive, but for 99% of you, check out Archive, it does what you need.

Respond to it

If I think it'll take less than 2 minutes to respond to the email that I am currently reading, I'll bang out a response.  I try to not bang out a "quick" response "just to keep the ball moving" as Kevin Rose says.  I try to write out a through response.  My point in doing this is to eliminate further email by providing any answers I can, by asking the appropriate question so that the response to my email is full of exactly what I need it to be, and so that people don't waste more time by me not wasting theirs with a "short terse banged-out email".

Delegate It.

Otherwise known as the "Forward" button.  I get a ton of email, not all appropriate for me to handle, some need to go to our web team, some need to go to our research team, but it comes to me, because I "handle" the email, as opposed to ignore it.  I don't mind being the conduit to which people communicate, at least I know things are getting done, and I have a pulse on what is going on.

Todo It.

If the email contains an action that I need to perform, but I can't do it right now, I have a keyboard shortcut that allows me to highlight a section of text, mash a keyboard shortcut, and Omnifocus will grab the hightlight-ed input that I selected and makes a Todo out of it, along with a link in Omnifocus back to the email that generated it.  (This is called "Clipping" for you Omnifocus nerds, get ON IT.)  I quickly set a context (email) and a due date.  Then I go onto the next email.  Everyday, I get to the bottom of the "Todo"s that are due that day, and that includes the thoughtful emails.

Matter of fact, writing this post about "Archive" was a Todo.

Let me go mark it done.

BTW -- Inbox Zero comes from Merlin Mann.  I'm not stealing his work.  It's insightful.  He rocks.  MerlinMann.com and InboxZero.com

Snort Community Pig Roast

(If you read this on Twitter, please RT!)

Sourcefire is going to throw a community pig roast at our World Wide Headquarters on November 12, 2010.  We'll have some talks by Marty Roesch (our fearless leader) and Matt Watchinski (or VRT fearless leader).

Date: Friday, November 12, 2010
Time: 12:00PM

Where: Sourcefire HQ
9770 Patuxent Woods Dr.
Columbia, MD 21046

The event is open to our community, and we'd like you to come on over and hang out!

Please RSVP at: http://now.sourcefire.com/?elqPURLPage=2?elqformname=101112_snort_bbq&URL=

Notes syncing between Mail.app and iPhone, finally

I've written several times over the years about the need for Notes to sync automatically between the iPhone and the Mac Mail.app Desktop application.  Well, unbeknownst to me (because I stopped using Notes in Mail.app because of the lack of this feature), in iOS 4.0 Apple has built this in.

I didn't test it right away when the release came out, and just now that I haven't written about it either since they built this in.  But it works.

If you have an IMAP account, you can go into your account settings on your iPhone and turn on "Notes" in that account's preferences.  Mail will create a folder called "Notes" on the IMAP server, and your "Notes" on Mail.app will be sync'ed Over-the-Air with your iPhone.

I have my Mail.app set up like this:



So that all my notes and to-do's stay intact in one account, and not spread apart different accounts.  But there is more than one advantage to MobileMe for this particular feature.  If you set it to MobileMe, Notes are pushed.  (As opposed to pull, as they would be with other IMAP accounts.)

In short, Apple enabled Notes syncing in iOS 4.0.  It works.  Give it a shot.

Facetime

Facetime, Apple’s new iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 video chat application got a bit of an update on Tuesday of this week.

Jobs said it himself, the biggest thing that people wanted when facetime was shown on the iPhone for the first time was the integration of the system into the Mac desktop.  I talked about this back on this original post when the iPhone 4 came out.  Finally, at Tuesday’s speech Jobs and Apple rolled out the Facetime client for the desktop.

It works.

You can call Mac to Mac using Facetime, you can also call Mac to iPhone or iPhone to Mac, likewise with the iPod Touch. The resolution is good (it’s scaled down a bit if you are used to iChat’s resolution), audio is excellent, and it works flawlessly. In fact, when it came out, I was on a hotel network. I tried to initiate an iChat connection to my Dad, and we couldn’t do it for lack of bandwidth, however, Facetime connected right away without a problem.

The only thing that I thought was a bit strange, and I know I'm not the only one, was that Apple released it as a separate application for the Mac.

However, after I thought about it for a bit, I came back to my original conclusion that this is a temporary step. The application is simple and easy to write, so that’s what Apple did. I imagine in order to build the feature into iChat, they'd have to rewrite the whole application, and while they didn’t at all indicate that this was going to happen in 10.7 Lion (which they also started talking about on Tuesday), it makes a lot of sense to have it built into the OS.

One of the other things that i noticed about facetime is that it doesn’t really give you any kind of “presence” notification. For instance, it would make sense that since Apple knows you are connected to the internet via $device, they would be able to provide some type of presence notification along with it, I assume this is going to come with 10.7 too.

The Mac App Store, why it's awesome.

On Tuesday this week, Steve Jobs got up in front of journalists and announced several things.  I'd like to cover them all at once, but I realized the post was going to be way too long, so I thought I'd cover them in separate topics.

The Mac App Store

First let me talk about, what I thought was the biggest announcement of the entire press conference.  The Mac App Store.

Similar to the iOS App store that you can find in iTunes, Apple will be rolling out a separate application onto the OSX platform where developers can upload their apps to Apple in order for them to be purchase-able through the "one-click" easy access of this app.



Apple is taking the same 'cut' that it takes for the iTunes app store, 70/30.  70% of the developers revenue for selling an app goes to the developer, the other 30% goes to Apple to pay for the store, the hosting, the bandwidth, etc.  Some developers will think that this is Apple gouging into their profits, and while true, they have to think of a couple things:

1) I can raise the price of my app, just enough, to make it worthwhile for me.

2) The prices of the apps in the Mac App store will generally be higher, as they will be of higher quality. (Theory of mine, as they won't be just little fart apps for the iPhone.)

3) You would now be featured in the "showcase" as it were for Apps.  This is a genius idea.  Yes you have to sacrifice the 30% of your revenue, but your download count will go through the roof.  Look at the developers that have made millions off of the iPhone app store in just a short amount of time after it's release.

Conspiracy Theories

Some people I've heard talk about the App store seem to think this is Apple's way of locking you into their platform.  Let me share my opinion on this.

They already have you locked into their platform.

First off, if you buy your app from the app store, you click the button, it downloads over the internet (further reinforcing my theory that I wrote a couple years ago when the Macbook Air came out, I said that it was going to be the end of distributing software via physical medium), it installs by itself.  Done.  Easy.

If you want to update the app, you go to the "updates" section of the app store, and you click "update" or "update all" and all your apps are automagically updated.  What I'd like to see Apple do is have all their updates take place through this system.  I think "Software Update" and the "Updates in the App store" may be confusing for some users, but that will remain to be seen I guess.

At the same time yesterday we found out that Apple is depreciating Java on their system, and the new Macbook Air (which I'll talk about in a later post) is shipping without Adobe Flash.  I think both of these are smart decisions, and would like to see both of these in the App Store.  Oracle submits a Java build, and Adobe submits Flash.  You download both of these with one click, from one place (instead of going all over the internet to find them and their updates), and that way when a new update comes out for Flash or Java, you just click "Update" in the app store.  This does two things:

A) Makes security better, by providing an easy way for people to update their apps.

B) It absolves Apple from having to maintain older software on their system and keep it updated (such as Flash).

Great idea.

More Conspiracy Theories

Yesterday on my drive home I was listening to the latest "MacBreak Weekly" podcast, and even though Alex Lindsay has been saying it for several months now, he reiterated it again in the latest broadcast.  He thinks that the OS on the Mac is going to iOS.

I think he could not be more wrong, and let me explain why.

Steve Jobs said yesterday that they were bringing some of the things they have learned form the iPhone and iPad back to the Mac.  Good idea.  It's great to have a unifying experience across all your platforms.

Does that mean that the OSX Operating system will be all touch based?  No.  Jobs said that yesterday, trying to manipulate objects on a vertical surface doesn't work.  Think about it as you are reading this right now, if you are reading this on a traditional computer.  Think about not having your mouse, and moving the cursor or using gestures on your monitor.  Play with that idea a second.  Your arm would get so tired and you'd get frustrated after awhile.  Heck, when I dock my iPad and use a regular keyboard with it, and I have to reach up and tap something on the screen when it's in a vertical configuration, it's annoying.  This won't work.  I agree.

Does that mean that OSX can't learn some multi-touch gestures?  No.  In fact, you can already scroll with two fingers (have been able to do for years on the Mac), three finger swipe forwards and back, even rotate photos and documents by the same rotation method that you use on the iPod Nano's screen.  Add a few more of these and the system will not only be intuitive, but you'll be able to get a lot done, faster.  That's why Apple invented the Magic Mouse, and that's why they invented the Magic Trackpad.  Look at the direction of the Operating System and it makes sense.

OSX is not becoming iOS.  It won't work.  But there are advantages that iOS has that OSX does not have, again, let's come back to the App Store.  The App Store on the iTunes/iPod touch/iPhone/iPad system is an easy one-click access to any app on the Apple store.  The App store on the Mac is going to be the same way.  However, what side effects does this provide that people may not have thought of yet?

1) Your Apps are tied to your iTunes account.  Okay, that means that if I want to rebuild my computer, or buy a new one, all I have to do is open the App Store and I can suck down all the apps that I've already paid for without having to re-find them on the internet, or from a backup.  Better yet, I don't have to keep track of licenses and other non-sense like that.

2) Easy updating.  This is important, not only for functionality, but for security.  I think this is one of the best features of the App Store.

3) Your Apps are tied to your iTunes account.  Which means what?  That's right.  They are DRM'ed to your name.  Which means what?  That's right.  You can't pirate the Apps.

Let me pause for effect.

Apple.  Just figured out a way.  To stop.  Software piracy.

Yup.  That's just happened.

Genius.  I buy all my applications anyway, so it doesn't affect me, but that's awesome.

The apps that are sold through the app store can't be packaged up and sent to your friend anymore.

Yes, you can still download apps and what not from the Internet in general (meaning that developers for the Mac don't HAVE to sell their apps through the app store), but then you are dealing with not being in front of tons of eyes through the App Store, licensing and purchasing schemes.  You have to maintain all of that yourself.  Whereas through the App Store, Apple has taken care of all of that for you and prevented the piracy of your Apps.

I also think this will totally increase the amount of apps available for the Mac platform.  All of a sudden people will have easy access to a way to simply get their Mac Application out there without having to shrink wrap it and get it into the big-box stores.

Problem?

Honestly, I see nothing but good things here.  The only time I'll have a problem with the Mac App Store is when Apple says that the only place you can get the apps is from them.  .....and they are still taking their 30% cut.

That's not really fair (which isn't happening, I'm just theorizing).

Although it would be interesting, because then all code would come from Apple, approved, and signed.  Malware and what-not could be rendered totally non-existant.

Apple has also stated in their terms of service that "violent" video games can't be on the App Store.

That sucks.  I think that'll hurt the store overall, but who knows, they may fix that.

Ray Ozzie leaving post as Microsoft's chief software architect

Ray Ozzie is the gentleman that took Bill Gates's place after he retired from his day to day duties at Microsoft, and unfortunately, this kinda makes me feel more confident in the opinion I had when that event took place.

Microsoft is losing their spirit.

Let's face it, it's quite obvious now that Bill Gates was the driver behind the Microsoft brand and direction.  This is the third notable post that is being vacated since Bill Gates left (the first being the designer behind the Zune interface Robbie Bach, second being CFO Chris Liddell), and yet, somehow Ballmer stays in charge.

Don't get me wrong, Ballmer knows how to make money.  Which is why he's a good CEO, but in my opinion, it doesn't feel like he is ushering in a strong "direction" for the company.  But maybe I'm being a little critical, trying not to compare him to Steve Jobs, but hate him or love him, Steve Jobs is a great CEO.

It just feels to me that Microsoft is playing the catchup game.  Saying "me too" to everything that is coming out.  Windows Mobile Phone 7, (which was started a long time ago, but not until the iPhone came out was serious pressure put on this), the Xbox360 (which is probably Microsoft's best product), the Zune copied after the iPod, Windows's constant comparison to OSX, chasing after Google with Bing, and chasing after the iPad now with whatever-the-heck tablets (slate) they come out with.

Sad part is, Microsoft almost invented the tablet business.  They pretty much pioneered it.  However, they tried to shoe horn a Desktop OS into a tablet PC and wrote enough software to be able to use a pen.  Well, it doesn't appear to have caught on en-masse.  They didn't go back to the drawing board (like they did with Windows Mobile Phone 7) and design a new user interface, even if they copied the WMP7 interface from the Zune HD.  Their current tablet offering does not bode well for touch, and it's unclear where their future direction is going as far as touch is concerned, but it doesn't look good right now.  It still looks like they are trying to shoehorn Windows 7, the desktop operating system, into the tablet.  It's not going to work!  You tried that once, and it failed.  So I refer to the current class of computing devices (the iPad, and all the competitors that are trying to come out now as "slate" devices.)

Ray Ozzie, as it states in the below linked article, is best known for creating Lotus Notes.  Which really doesn't speak volumes to quality, but it does speak to success.  Even a totally awful program can make tons of money.  But Mr. Ozzie didn't seem to provide the direction that Gates did.  Face it, Gates was the genius behind the Microsoft brand.  Even if his tactic was to copy everything he saw, which I'm not saying he did, but even if his tactic was that, it was genius and it worked well.

I am not a Microsoft Shareholder, heck, I'm not even an Apple shareholder anymore,  but I'd wonder why Ballmer was still in power considering the stock price hasn't moved much in over 10 years.

Ray Ozzie leaving post as Microsofts chief software architect.

MobileMe Calendar Comes out of Beta

Following up on this post that I wrote back in July, the MobileMe calendaring system has come out of Beta.  Which means that if you are using the MobileMe service and you are on Snow Leopard (or Leopard) your iCal calendar should automatically switch over to WebDAV.  As well as your iPhone's calendar if you are running 4.0.

The nicest part about the system is the ability to invite other people to events from your iPhone and iCal, as well as see their Free/Busy schedules.

Update:  Apple's article on the subject.

I'm speaking at Security B-Sides Delaware

We have a lot going on in Delaware.  Tax-free shopping, we elect crazy people, and we have the Security B-sides Delaware event happening in November.

I was asked if I would submit a talk to the conference, and lo and behold, it was accepted. (Along with a bunch of other great presenters, check out the first round of CFP accepts here.  Hopefully lots of people will come.  I actually have a confession to make, I've never actually been to a Security B-sides, although, from watching the Twitter, they are very popular.

Abstract of my talk:

Shining light into the "now what" arena of IDS and IPS tuning, I'll talk about  what the next steps should be with the alerts, tuning, and maintenance of the ruleset and  configuration deployed into an IDS or an IPS.  General guidelines will be provided, however,  all guidelines must be adapted to your specific environment.

I look forward you seeing many of you there, thanks for supporting B-sides.  Okay, back to making slides.

Security B-Sides / BSidesDelaware.

Snort 2.9.0 has been released

Now available from Snort.org, Snort 2.9.0 and DAQ 0.2.    I'll be writing some articles at some point to expand upon some of the functionality of Snort 2.9, but for now, know that there are some very nice new keywords in 2.9 and also an improved Stream model, as well as lots of improvements all over the place in the engine.

...and now some cut and paste from the release notes!   Download it now!

http://www.snort.org/snort-downloads

[*] New Additions
* Feature rich IPS mode including improvements to Stream for
inline deployments.  Additionally a common active response API is
used for all packet responses, including those from Stream,
Respond, or React.  A new response module, respond3, supports the
syntax of both resp & resp2, including strafing for passive
deployments.  When Snort is deployed inline, a new preprocessor
has been added to handle packet normalization to allow Snort
to interpret a packet the same way as the receiving host.

* Use of a Data Acquisition API (DAQ) that supports many different
packet access methods including libpcap, netfilterq, IPFW, and
afpacket.  For libpcap, version 1.0 or higher is now required.
The DAQ library can be updated independently from Snort and is
a separate module that Snort links to.

* A new rule option 'byte_extract' that allows extracted values to
be used in subsequent rule options for isdataat, byte_test,
byte_jump, and content distance/within/depth/offset.

* Two new rule options to support base64 decoding of certain pieces
of data and inspection of the base64 data via subsequent rule
options.

* Added a new pattern matcher that supports Intel's Quick Assist
Technology for improved performance on supported hardware
platforms.  Visit http://www.intel.com to find out more about
Intel Quick Assist.

[*] Improvements
* Updates to HTTP Inspect to extract and log IP addresses from
X-Forward-For and True-Client-IP header fields when Snort generates
events on HTTP traffic.

* Updates to SMTP preprocessor to support MIME attachment decoding
across multiple packets.

* Updates to the Snort packet decoders for IPv6 for improvements to
anomaly detection.

OpenFPC, in other words, Leon is a Ninja

I put this up to basically draw attention to this project.  Leon (a fellow Sourcefire employee and Ninja over in the UK) can explain the project much better than I can, so I'll let him:

OpenFPC is a set of tools that combine to provide a lightweight full-packet network traffic recorder & buffering system. It's design goal is to allow non-expert users to deploy a distributed network traffic recorder on COTS hardware while integrating into existing alert and log management tools.

OpenFPC is described as lightweight because it follows a different design model to other FPC/Network traffic forensic tools that I have seen. It doesn't provide a user with the ability to trigger automatic events (IDS-like functions), or set watch events for anomalous traffic changes (NBA-like functions) as it is assumed external open source, or comercial tools already provide this detection capability. OpenFPC fits in as a companion to provide extra (full packet/traffic stream) data as a bolt-on to these tools allowing deeper analysis of event data where required.

Full packet capture is something that has been suggest as the answer to all by many.  I don't disagree, it does aid in the forensic investigation of traffic.  Heck I do it at my house (full packet capture).  I find this idea to very intuitive and interesting, especially the search capabilities.

To be honest, I've seen something like this before when I worked for the military.  I don't want to disclose where or what agency was using this, but it was vastly helpful when we wanted to investigate something.

We used Snort and another IDS to prompt us to look for something and we'd start going through the full packet captures to investigate it.  I got the idea for this from another Army agency that had a GUI for it, and the whole nine yards.  I thought it was a beautiful system and it worked great.  I was quite impressed.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that Leon is making a tool like this Open-Source.  I think this is a phenomenal idea, and I'd like to see something like this used in a test-production network system somewhere, just to prove how useful it could be.

OpenFPC.

Let me tell you about my past two weeks

The past couple weeks I've had the opportunity to do some really amazing work, something that most people, if they could do, would understand a lot more of what goes on behind the veiled curtain.

The last two weeks I worked for Sourcefire's Vulnerability Research Team (VRT).

First I'd like to say that I've never worked with a more professional organization.  Period.  I came in to do some technical work with them, which consisted of analyzing hundreds of pcaps, tons of analysis, and as a result writing rules for those threats.  We did, kind of a tech exchange type of thing.

Now, we weren't shooting in the dark.  (even though there is no overhead lighting in the VRT offices, and you have to watch for getting hit in the head with a Nerf dart)  The VRT doesn't take the random vulnerability or exploit found on exploit-db.com or milw0rm or whatever, and just bang out a rule for it.  They do labor intensive work.

For instance, I had to write a rule for a vulnerability in a piece of software that had to do with email.  In order to test of this vulnerability, could I have taken a piece of a malicious attachment, or looked for a malicious attachment and written a "signature" to check for the exploit here.  Sourcefire's standard is higher than that.  We try to not do that kind of thing.  We try and write a rule to look for the vulnerability itself.  For example: If the vulnerability is actually the fact that a certain field, if it's over 512 bytes, can be used to overflow a buffer in the software, looking for a series of "A"s isn't going to work.  Looking to see if the field is bigger than 512 bytes is the correct way to do it.

But I digress….

The easiest way to emulate this problem is to send an email with an attachment on it, and capture the pcap, then pick it apart from there.  The problem with that is, most  email (well at least Sourcefire's) is encrypted.  So, I got with one of the other VRT guys and we came up with a solution.

Write an email delivery system.

So he did.  It's in ruby, and it allows you to send an email, just like any other email client would, unencrypted, and much faster and more reliable than a regular email client would, if we were trying to trick the client into doing something.

We took the ruby script that he wrote, made it attach a file in base64, and captured the pcap.  Now, you may ask me a question, "Heck, why didn't you just make a new email with Outlook Express and make an attachment and send it?"  Because Outlook Express uses a different attachment system, it's crackheaded, and it's non-standard.  Don't believe me?  Send an email with Outlook and then send an email with Outlook Express and compare the two pcaps.

So I captured the pcap -- that's all well and good, except that I noticed that the checksums in the pcap was wrong.  Sometimes when you capture traffic on an interface, on certain OSes, it will capture the traffic before the checksum is computed, so it will write to disk incorrectly.  So that has to be corrected before you can write a rule to look for the vulnerability.

So, I used tcprewrite to correct the checksums on the packet, and off I went from there.

Now, you come up with the realization that this happens, sometimes 10-20x a day for the VRT, and you come to realize that the rules that are written by these guys are very professional and come with a higher degree of accuracy and purpose.

I'd like to thank the VRT to allowing me to come in and learn and share with them.  I hope I helped them out as much as they helped me.

Final thought -- Take your time when writing your rules.  The time spent writing them makes for a much more reliable rule than just banging out a rule…. and I have seen a lot of "just banging out a quick rule" lately.  A quick rule usually isn't a rule.  It's a signature.  There is a difference.

Oh, and whomever wrote the Microsoft Word and Excel standard is a crazy crack smoker.

Long live Razorback.

Verizon Rumored To Replace Google With Bing On All Android Devices

Yesterday, Spetember 9th, Verizon gave a preview to their newest "Android" phone coming out for their network, Samsung's Galaxy S.

It has a 4-in AMOLED screen, 1GHZ Hummingbird Processor, and it has the ability to become a hotspot.  However, Verizon has ruined the phone, and may ruin every phone on their network from now on.  Why?

The thing that makes Android great is it's integration.  Google built the OS, it's integrated into Google's infrastructure, and that's the way it works best.  Just like the iPhone, which works best with Apple's infrastructure (MobileMe, iTunes, etc).

Verizon has decided to cripple this phone by instead of tying it to Google, they have tied it to Bing.  Bing Search, Bing Maps, and instead of Google's awesome navigation app, they have replaced it with Verizon's own Navigation app, which, btw, they cleverly charge you 10 bucks a month to use.

Bloatware..  Blockbuster apps, Tetris apps that charge you money, etc.

To make it worse, Verizon has stated that they will be moving all of their "Droid" line to Bing.  It won't be exclusive, (meaning you can switch everything back to Google), but this is basically how to ruin a franchise.  (Verizon having Android on everything.)

This is where Verizon did it wrong with the iPhone as well.  When Apple came to Verizon and said "We are going to make a phone, you can be the carrier, but you can't put any apps or logos or anything on it"  Verizon said No.  So Apple went to Cingular (which later was bought by AT&T).  Cingular agreed, therefore the iPhone is on AT&T right now.

Apple's iPhone doesn't have bloatware (unless you count the apps that Apple puts on there themselves, which, I can understand your argument), it starts off with Google as the search engine by default, but you have the option to change it.

The iPhone doesn't force you to use a service, they force you to use the apps that are built in (unless you download new ones), like the "Maps" application, it's Google Maps and Google Search, but you'd almost never know it.  So far Apple hasn't ruined it, but we'll see.

Verizon may be ruining a good thing here.  Hopefully they don't.

Here's Gizmodo's review as well: here.

Verizon Rumored To Replace Google With Bing On All Android Devices | Markets | Minyanville.com.