Thoughts of a Cyber LOONATic

Internet USB Radio

Internet USB Radio

As can probably be inferred by some of my previous posts, I'm a supporter of using throw-away hardware [https://www.packet-broker.co.za/tablet-take-up/] to learn new things. A few years ago, I came across a cheap USB dongle that I believed could be used for some SDR [https://en.

Managing an Android Fleet

Managing an Android Fleet

There are a handful of android devices used by my family and, being a geek+dad, management of those devices has been ignored left to be my responsibility. While a MDM (Mobile Device Management) would be the immediate solution that comes to mind, the privacy-conscious part of me didn't want

Isolated Communication Platforms for Security Teams

Isolated Communication Platforms for Security Teams

I fail to understand why it hasn't become best (or even common) practise for security teams to utilise an isolated communications platform that is not tied to their organisation's Active Directory (AD) infrastructure for its auth(z). Refer to slide 80 [https://speakerdeck.com/mimeframe/homebrew-incident-response] for more explanation. As

Remmina's Keyboard Layout Segfaults

Remmina's Keyboard Layout Segfaults

Being South African, it has always been natural for me to choose the ZA keyboard layout along with other ZA localisation options. However, for a number of years, my remmina [http://www.remmina.org/] experience has been haunted by a weird segfault issue related to my chosen keyboard layout -

Specialists and Generalists

Specialists and Generalists

Disclaimer: Whilst I can easily categorise myself as a generalist, my familiarity of some the industry leaders within the various fields of Information Security prevents me from considering myself a true specialist of any subset of knowledge. How could any modern-day painter rank himself at the same level of a

The Sleeping Bug (re)Awakens

The Sleeping Bug (re)Awakens

With close onto five years of an idling blog, it's fair to say that I'd easily win the blog-version of IdleRPG [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Idle+RPG] if pitted against my friends like singe [http://singe.za.net/blog/]. For far too long, I've allowed the chaos

Tablet Take-up

I've fallen victim to the tablet PC craze and recently acquired a Sansui LifePad (ETAB) 700. In all honesty, it wasn't completely my fault. I just happened to be casually browsing an Incredible Connection [http://www.incredible.co.za/] store that happened to be giving the on-sale device away for

Bitcoins and Geek Security = ?

Many tech-savvy geeks over-engineer the simplest of solutions, solely for extensibility. Moreover, security-minded geeks tend to be unusually paranoid [http://xkcd.com/538/] and enforce (sometimes complex) security practices accordingly. Neither of these should be seen as faults, but rather as unique traits that us (as geeks) often share. Bitcoin

Enabling KDE Plasma Netbook Workspace on OpenSUSE 11.4

Update: After many years away from RPMs, I still cannot stand them and have uninstalled OpenSUSE. Also, Unity-2D is available through the base repositories. While this is closer to the 10. Unity than the 11. Unity, it's fine. I'm still sticking to KDE4 on the netbook though, but using Kubuntu

Mimicking Command Prompt with a Batch Script

Without a doubt, kiosk hacking [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiosk_software] assessments have the simplest objective... Gain command execution! During one of my engagements, I was provided with locked-down desktop that had most/all functionality disabled. The user account, of course, was unprivileged. The system administrators blacklisted cmd.exe

Sony: You disgust me!

It disgusts me whenever I think about the manner in which Geohot is be prosecuted by Sony. Unfortunately, there are number of journalists (with absolutely no concept of vulnerability research or security for that matter) determined to portray George as a criminal that hacked the PS3 only so that pirated

HP Printer Bloatware & Wifi Security

After experiencing each of the major printer brands, I quite liked HP for their quality and reliability. A short while back, I was on the prowl for a new printer and happened to come across a couple of wireless printers. Being a geek, I immediately knew this was some tech

Mobile History: Nokia E51

While Nokia had always been a popular brand, there was always that "little something" that kept me away from their products. The D500 had done well to protect me from myself, but this was only accomplished by restricting everything I did. There use to be some really wierd restrictions that

Mobile History: The Samsung D500

Like many of my other possessions, I have always tried my best to preserve my mobile phones in proper condition ... at very least until I am willing to replace them. As such, it's not surprising to me when I look back and recall how each of my phones had lasted

SourceForge, US Laws and FOSS

> FOSS = Free and Open Source Software. Casually reading through my usual list of news websites, I stumbled across a link which led me to a recent post about Notepad++'s new website [http://notepad-plus-plus.org/content/notepad-new-site-notepad-plus-plus-org]. It turns out that Notepad++ has moved hosting of their site due to

Pixel-based Reverse Engineering

With rare exceptions, source code is never released for proprietry software applications. This is primarily in an attempt to prevent other developers from cloning the application (and its functionality), as well as to protect the security of the application (security through obscurity). The legitimacy of these (and other) reasons is

Copyleft Hardware: Ben NanoNote

All geeks know that new (and sometimes not so new) hardware doesn't always work with our chosen operating systems. Often it's not a lack of drivers or driver developers holding back progress, but rather hardware manufacturers who prolong the release of chipset information and documentation. Many companies would rather: 1.

Folding@Home 100k Points

Having recently updated / replaced my home network with new hardware, I felt it would be best to donate the 'extra' power to something useful. The led to a renewed interest in my old folding@home team [http://fah-web2.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=162045], which I created

The Leap to SensePost

Almost a few months into my new position as a senior analyst for SensePost [http://www.sensepost.com], and things are great. Moving from a corporate back to a smaller company gave me sensations of dejavu. This is almost certainly due to my previous experience of not only moving from

Creating a Proxy/Shim DLL

A while back I found the need for a Win32 shim DLL, so I took the opportunity to create a quick hack-up. Shim DLLs are normally used to extend or alter the functionality offered by a regular DLL. In my case, I just wanted to observe the data being transmitted