I haven't posted a thing about the elections in Iraq, mostly because I'm not close enough to the subject to offer any value over what dozens other blogs are already saying. With that said, I would ask that you read the story of an anti-Bush American who went to talk to some of the Iraqi ex-pats at a polling location in America. Money quote: You may think that you have felt dumb before, but let me tell you something: until you have stood in front of a man who knows real pain and told him that you are against your country's alleviation of...

I owe Kirk Bailey, the CISO for the City of Seattle, an apology.  After hearing him talk at my first A g o r a meeting, and a subsequent conference, I made some flippant comments about his penchant for gab, and that was uncalled-for. In the subsequent months, I've had the chance to spend some more time with Kirk, and got to experience first-hand how hard he works to bring the infosec community in Seattle together.  He's a great role model for other CISOs, and someone I've come to look up to and admire.  I wish I could talk about all he...

(Why is it “near-miss” anyway?  You didn't nearly miss something, you nearly hit it.  But I digress.) So a year and a half ago, Alton Brown was in Seattle, touring his new book, I'm Just Here For The Food (a fantastic body of work, by the way).  I remember at the time seeing his tour schedule, and noting that he was going to be at Pike Place Market's Sur La Table doing some signings.  It was a month or so out, so I just set a mental reminder and went on about my business.  Which turned out to be a bad...

I was recently looking for an online version of a newspaper story I had read about Seattle radio rankings, and stumbled across this site that has quite a bit of interesting demographic information about the city in which I have made my home for the past dozen or so years.  It's all slanted towards radio ratings, since that's the kind of information I was originally looking for. While some of the information is patently wrong, like the amount of snow Seattle gets in the wintertime (if we get a trace of snow, schools start shutting down, so we certainly do not...

I registered today for the Directory Experts Conference in March, as I mentioned previously.  It's going to be held in Vancouver B.C., which has become the city of choice for security conferences in the greater GREATER Seattle area (is there a geographical label that encompasses Oregon, Washington and British Columbia?  I need one). It's a 3-day show (can be 4, with an optional day of Active Directory security training), and I'll probably be driving up the Saturday prior.  So if anyone wants to hook up for some beers or something, just drop me a line. I'm still planning on attending CanSecWest in May...

Michael Howard mentioned an interesting site that I was not previously aware of, CastleCops. They have been publishing a series of fairly detailed checklists to secure home-based Windows installations, and operate them in a secure manner.  I haven't gone through all the articles (there are 9 at last count), but they obviously put a lot of effort into them.  The first few made some good recommendations, so I'm encouraged. I took a look at the rest of the site and it looks pretty informative.  I think I might add them to my list of daily reads, at least for a while.

Cellphone anti-virus developer SimWorks is reporting (pdf) that 2 new cell phone viruses have been identified, and they can render a cell phone completely inoperable to the point of having to replace it. Gavno.a infects the phone when a user downloads and installs an infected software package onto their phone.  Gavno.b on the other hand, attempts to spread itself over BlueTooth.  Both files claim to be a patch in an effort to trick unwary users into downloading and activating them. Once activated, the viruses halt a critical process on the phone, preventing it from making any calls, and often causing it to constantly reboot. ...

So I live in Issaquah, where Modest Mouse sprang from the proverbial womb.  And that's cool, I guess.  But for some reason I never really picked them up.  I think it was because my first exposure to them a few months back was on 107.7 The End, where they played Float On, and I recall thinking “What the hell is The End doing playing the Stones?” And so for the first couple songs that ended up getting air time, I wrote them off as a Stones cover band, and I never particularly liked the Stones.  Ergo, I didn't really care for Modest...

[Continued from Part 1, which can be found here...] My data center dropped off the 'net 3 minutes ago.  The point-to-point back-channel T1 went down at the same time.  I can't get anyone on the phone.  It might be a firewall issue, or the building might be a pile of rubble.  I don't have any information. Some background on our data center: The building houses the Emergency Broadcast System for the Seattle region.  As such, it's one of the most survivable buildings in Seattle. The data center has peering agreements with 8 Tier 1 Internet providers.  Meaning any single provider can go dark and triffic will get...

Imagine you are in charge of security and infrastructure for a data center that gets around 100,000 revenue generating visitors a day, on behalf of around 60 customers.  Further imagine that downtime for the facility is measured in seconds per quarter. Now imagine that you just made a trivial change to a firewall's rulebase and 10 seconds later the entire site drops off the 'net.  The back-channel T1 line that is used for management just went dark too.  You just lost all connectivity to the data center.  Seconds later, the phone is ringing because the data center team's monitoring systems just went berserk, and...

Comment spam pisses me off.  It's akin to slapping a bumper sticker on someone else's car.  Money for the bandwidth this site uses and everything that goes along with maintaining bmonday(dot)com comes out of my own pocket, and I don't appreciate spammers hitching a ride on the Free Advertising Express. I've been getting a few comment spams a day, and it's steadily increasing.  I've been trying to keep on top of it, but it's annoying to babysit the comments section when I am at work or have other things to do.  So I finally did something about it. Miguel Jiminez has worked...

Every once in a while I come across a blog that has such promise that I can't help but watch over it like a vulture, hoping beyond hope that the author stays motivated and engaged enough to continue writing.  Typically they tend to be Microsoft employees who are generally excited about what they do, and want to get other people excited about it too. Sadly, more often than not, these bloggers make a couple fantastic posts, and then appear to fall off the face of the Earth. One such site is Aaron Margosis' “Running As Non-Admin” blog.  Ah, such promise this blog had! ...

Sometimes when I'm bored, I'll look at the blogroll of some of my favorite blogs, just to see what those people like to read.  I find some of the best blogs this way. For instance, I found the blog of Peter Torr (recently moved from the Visual Studio Tools for Office team to the Secure Windows Initiatives team), from a link in a post on the blog of Larry Osterman (old timer at Microsoft, was involved in the original Windows NT), whose blog I discovered in a 4-month-old post from Aaron Margosis' blog. It really drives home how limitless the Internet is, doesn't it? ...

My friend Steve pointed out to me that the 4th Edition of Inside Windows 2000 has been released by the fine folks at SysInternals.  The name of the tome has been changed to Windows Internals. From the site: Windows Internals, 4th edition replaces Inside Windows 2000, 3rd edition.  With 25% more content than the previous edition, it has been updated to cover Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, including 64-bit support, while also still covering Windows 2000. This new edition is even more valuable to the IT professional/system administrator as it takes the internals information and applies it to advanced troubleshooting, such...

I've closed the comments on a couple old posts regarding sending gifts to American forces in harm's way.  The comments have degenerated into little more than a dating service, and the useful information was being buried in the noise. These two posts received a ton of traffic over the past 12 months, including over 35,000 referrals from other web sites.  This was primarily due to the fact that one of them became the top result for people searching Google for “sending gifts to soldiers in Iraq“.  Google loves blogs, what can I say. If you want to send gifts to soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere...

I recently had the pleasure of attending a talk given by local DDoS and Worm expert Dave Dittrich at a quarterly forum called The Agora that's held locally in Seattle but I've been explicitly forbidden from blogging about (Dave mentions The Agora briefly on his site, so I feel safe saying at least that much).  The most recent forum was really cool, and I'm near exploding not being able to tell you what it was about.  But I want to be invited back, so I bite my tongue.  Really hard. What I can tell you is that Dave, the Senior Security Researcher at Seattle's...

I cleaned up the Blogroll a little bit tonight.  Actually just added some sites that I've been selfishly hoarding all to myself: Harlan Carvey, author of Windows Forensics and Incident Response, and a frequent contributor to a number of popular security discussion groups, finally started a blog.  Added to the blogroll.  I'll forgive him this time for not telling me he started a blog. Bruce Schneier, as I mentioned previously, has a great blog going, and seems to be contributing to it quite often.  Blogrolled! Some guy with the initials “mt“ from a company called Qaddisin has a security-related blog that looks interesting. ...

Pulitzer Prize winning humor columnist Dave Barry recently gave us a brilliant recap of the year that was 2004. My favorite quote: In November, the 2004 U.S. presidential election campaign, which has been going on since the early stages of the Cher Farewell Tour, finally staggers to the finish line. John Kerry easily sweeps to a 53-state landslide victory in the exit polls and has pretty much picked out his new Cabinet when word begins to leak out that the actual, physical voters have elected George W. Bush. Democrats struggle to understand how this could have happened, and, after undergoing a harsh...

Last year Microsoft published a lengthy TechNet article about using built-in technologies to enhance the auditing and intrusion detection capabilities of servers running Windows 2000.  While it certainly doesn't take the place of dedicated IDS facilities, it does add valuable data to the collective when it comes time to determine why a machine might be misbehaving.  Another layer of defense is always a Good Thing. Check out the whitepaper here.

The National Security Agency's repository of damn fine security configuration guides can be found here.  They provide solid guidance on everything from Apple to Windows, and many things unrelated to operating systems at all.

If you've ever been to Bavaria, or if you're a beer drinker I'm likely to hang around, you know about the Hofbrauhaus in Munich.  This place is the center of the beer universe.  It's where Oktoberfest is held every year (in September, though, go figure), and it's the place where the kings of Germany's past got their brew.  In fact, if I recall, the Hofbrauhaus was originally built to brew beer for one of Bavaria's past kings.  I could be wrong.  I don't feel like looking it up. So I reacted with a mixture of horror and giddiness when I was...

Let's see if I can get through a post without dropping the f-bomb 8 or more times, shall we? Just before I broke for the holidays, Lance Spitzner (personal hero of mine, yada yada) dropped a message to Focus-Honeypots about a paper the Honeynet Project recently put out about the life expectancy of new, unpatched Linux boxes. “Life expectancy”, if you are not familiar with the term in this context, refers to how long a machine remains on the Internet without being compromised by a hacker.  These days it's measured in hours, with most systems being probed for possible weaknesses within 15...

My wife and I spent a good portion of last week in Sin City, Nevada, a.k.a. Las Vegas.  Actually, there are more sinful places to go in Nevada, with Vegas residing in one of only two counties in the state where prostitution is illegal.  But I don't think that really gets Vegas any closer to sainthood, given the myriad of other vices the city embraces and encourages. My wife had never been to Vegas before.  Me, I lived there for 3-ish years before I had enough and headed North to Seattle. I can't say I'm a fan of the place.  Vegas is one of those...

I haven't felt like blogging, as I've mentioned previously.  I've been trying to understand why. And I think I've hit upon the root cause. It's actually illustrated quite nicely in the following image, which graphs the usage of bmonday.com: 1.7 *million* hits for the year.  Over 200,000 in November alone, where I wrote, if you recall, a whopping 5 posts. Do you know how many times I've embarrassed myself on this blog?  How many posts I fight the urge to go back and delete because they were born of too much beer and too little reason? 75% of these posts would have never seen the...