Xato

It’s 2009, how secure are you now?

MBs Windows Security — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:09:35 GMT

A month ago I downloaded a well-known shareware application from a download web site–a site that has been around long enough for me to recognize the name. I wanted to test the download speeds on a freshly installed Windows 2008 server in my data...(read more)

A CAPTCHA Nightmare

MBs Windows Security — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:23:33 GMT

What distinguishes an effective CAPTCHA from a poor CAPTCHA is the ability to make things hard on non-humans without making things hard on humans. Most of the CAPTCHAS I see out there fail in one of those two features. But while I thought I had seen the...(read more)

So many Windows to break

MBs Windows Security — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:29:30 GMT

I just finished writing patch reports for Windows systems I must support for my clients or for my own business. After you put together all the Vistas, XP’s, 2000’s, 2003’s, SP’s, R2’s, x64’s, and IE6 and 7’s,...(read more)

10 Ways to add to my paranoia

MBs Windows Security — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:00:20 GMT

A couple of years ago I wrote an article at SecurityFocus.com about my security paranoia, which ended up in a lot of people thinking I went way too far and perhaps needed some mental help. In the article I wrote that instead of the word paranoia, I prefer...(read more)

There’s always a good analogy in an old lady driving down the road dragging a mattress

MB's Windows Security — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:25:48 GMT

Today I was driving on the freeway and couldn’t avoid driving over a flattened cardboard box. I looked in my rearview mirror waiting for it to fly out behind me but it never did. Great, I was driving down the freeway with a box stuck to my car. It reminds...(read more)

Why I miss hacking

MB's Windows Security — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:58:56 GMT

I have a problem with my two-year old: he keeps getting out of his bedroom. This morning it was 4am and he was climbing over me and my wife, patting us on our heads. It’s not like we haven’t tried containing him. It started when he wouldn’t go down for...(read more)

Mandatory Integrity Control

MB's Windows Security — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:59:31 GMT

I thought I would write about a technology introduced in Windows Vista called Mandatory Integrity Control (MIC), which is an access control scheme that Microsoft developed partially based on previous work by others, in particular the Biba model. There...(read more)

Superbowl commercials, a broken window, and a virus

MB's Windows Security — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:30:03 GMT

This morning, after being startled by two of my sons arguing over who had the longest turn playing Guitar Hero, and still not quite ready to get out of bed, I grabbed the remote control and started up the DVR recording of the Super Bowl. As my eyes were...(read more)

Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 RTM

MB's Windows Security — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:25:17 GMT

For those of you who have been waiting for SP1 before you move to Vista, that time has come: http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/02/04/announcing-the-rtm-of-windows-vista-sp1.aspx Read More......(read more)

IT Security Through Sibling Rivalry

MB's Windows Security — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:44:10 GMT

Some of you who know me know I have four kids—all boys. Now when you have four brothers growing up together under the same roof there is a lot of competition. In some families this competition would be with sports or academic achievement. In my house...(read more)

New Tool: Delete files in use and Windows protected files

MB's Windows Security — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 23:04:44 GMT

I thought I would share a tool I had developed a while back as part of my Windows lockdown procedure. Deleting files that are in use and particularly WFP-protected files can be a pain and the methods vary with each version of Windows. X-Out is a simple...(read more)

Making sense of Microsoft malware protection

MB's Windows Security — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:55:12 GMT

In case you haven’t noticed, in the last few years Microsoft has released a number of different client protection tools. First it was Windows Defender, then OneCare, and now we are seeing a big push on the Forefront product line. In fact, there are a...(read more)

Recanting my compaint of Vista’s Start Menu

MB's Windows Security — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:18:03 GMT

In my last post I vented out some Vista complaints I had. One of those was how Microsoft changes the Start Menu with every version of Windows. In fact, after writing that I did a personal protest and changed the properties of the Start Menu to use the...(read more)

The Vista bugs that bug me the most

MB's Windows Security — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 19:51:24 GMT

Vista has had some pretty bad press this year, some people blame Microsoft for initially overhyping but eventually poorly marketing the OS, some blame the “I’m a Mac” commercials, and some blame the security features. As for me, I just...(read more)

Fun with open proxies

MB's Windows Security — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 03:34:01 GMT

I was recently playing around with web proxies at my data center lab and got an idea to open up a couple anonymous proxies to see how long it would take for someone to start exploiting them. I fired up two anonymous proxies–using 3APA3A’s...(read more)

The NSA controls most of the Internet, or at least that’s what they want you to think

MB's Windows Security — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 09:52:02 GMT

Today I was looking at a post at cryptome.org that shows all the IP addresses controlled by or somehow affiliated with the NSA. I had seen previous versions of this post and at first glance it seemed like someone did a lot of work to gather all of that...(read more)

A bad month for CAPTCHAs

MB's Windows Security — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:58:10 GMT

Shortly after my last post on CAPTCHAs, some of you may have noticed MustLive’s CAPTCHA bypass tests in the comments below the article. Although I moderate all comments to my blog, I allowed those through because I thought they were a good follow...(read more)

Pakistan Wants to Learn How to Hack?

MB's Windows Security — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:26:36 GMT

I was playing around with Google Trends today which is always interesting trying to find a correlation between search volume of various terms (do more people hack when it snows?) I use Google’s keyword tool, to find out the most popular search phrases...(read more)

China caught hacking, good thing our government does not do that

MB's Windows Security — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:50:18 GMT

China denies that it’s military hacked into British government networks. They also deny hacking into the Pentagon. The funny thing is that they probably did both and everyone knows it. Think about it. Considering that many people now consider a...(read more)

VMWare Guest Isolation Vulnerability

MB's Windows Security — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 03:12:30 GMT

I have run across a design issue in VMware’s scripting automation API that diminishes VM guest/host isolation in such a manner to facilitate privilege escalation, spreading of malware, and compromise of guest operating systems. VMware’s scripting API...(read more)