Sudonix

Sudonix

How to destroy a community before it's even built

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  • phenomlabundefined

    There’s a lot you can learn about a person just by the way they present themselves online - whether that is in a positive or negative light is really up to the individual posting the content. Several of my followers have questioned why I choose to part company with Peerlyst, and here’s why. Firstly, let’s understand the word “community”. Taken literally, it’s something like the below

    “The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.”

    Anyone calling themselves a community should abide by this basic description at all times. Especially the part “having certain attitudes”. It’s this very part of the description that is capable of destroying a community much faster than it takes to create one in the first place. It was always my dream and wish to give something back to the industry that adopted me at the age of 16 as a school leaver, and I promised myself that once I reached a plateau in my career, I would start giving something back in order to help others.

    This initial drive began in 2016 when I started writing articles for Peerlyst. The very first article I donated to the community here detailed the most common types of compromise, and what to look out for. Fairly soon, I was contacted and asked if I’d consider making this a featured resource that their community could use as a learning tool. Happily, I agreed, and began donating regular articles from my own blog for the benefit of their community. As a side point, there are several authors who write similar content for others, but it’s typically for a fee, or a mention in a larger community in order to promote that individual. This isn’t how I work. I’ve never chased glory - I get my satisfaction from those who read my articles, and engage in active discussion relating to the content.

    I always expected questions and dialogue arising from my articles. In most cases, the exchange of opinions, questions, and content in general made for a pleasant experience. Now, not every piece of creative writing inspires everyone, and I completely understand that. However, opinion can easily be divided when a specific response is used, and counter effective if the response hasn’t been well thought out before clicking that submit button. Written content often suffers from the same central ailment in the fact that it rarely conveys tone or emotion. When you read something someone else has written, it’s impossible to gauge body language or tone of voice. For this reason, diplomacy and a careful selection of words is often a good idea (also known as “think before you post”), as is reading your input before submitting it. Often, the first response to something isn’t always the best one, and you’ll find yourself effectively sanitising content before you submit after renewing it.

    However, the story (unfortunately) doesn’t end here. I was not on the receiving end of the diatribe about be unleashed, but watched (with a mixture of disgust and disbelief) as this whole scenario unfolded. The focal point of discussion was from this post

    Some of the comments left for the author of this post were in my view nothing short of disgusting to say the least. Here’s the opening comment

    Those are great academic credentials. Let’s talk about “in the trenches” experience. Were you ever an engineer or specialist hunting threats and vulnerabilities? Run a NESSUS scan? Perform threat mitigation? Get called at 3AM because your network was hacked? What I am seeing is a professional test taker and academic. Perhaps with a photographic memory and tons of charisma? Getting a PhD at an early age and knowing 5 different languages leads me to believe the previous sentence.

    Where is the actual, bonafide experience?As for your “acting chief information security officer for regulated businesses”, again, where is the actual experience? Anyone can be a CISO including a person with a Music background. Just saying.

    There was a comment from the original author of this post, but it has since been removed. It was essentially threatening the author of the above comment with a lawsuit for defamation of character. Unsurprisingly, the response below was then posted

    Feel free. I am well known on here. And your lawyer can contact me at the provided address. If you were truly serious, you would offer the proof I am requesting. I will gladly acknowledge your certification and knowledge when the proof is provided. But you have not done so and that is an indication of your true meaning. I doubt your certification as a CISSP and you have done nothing to prove me wrong. The truth is your only defense.

    I don’t claim to be an airplane pilot. I could not tell you how to land a 737. Why should you be any exemption to that? You claim to be a cybersecurity expert with a CISSP requiring 4 years of actual experience. Where is it? If you will acknowledge that experience, I will not only accept it, I will endorse you.

    Have you “attorney” bring suit against me here in the US (I’ll never travel to Singapore so that doesn’t matter). Have him/her contact me at my stated email address. I will gladly share my physical mailing address for service of process. I’ll encourage service! Let’s go to court. Perhaps I know the laws better than you in the US not to mention cybersecurity.

    As for Peerlyst, maybe they will see it fit to remove an individual who is a poser. A fake. A charlatan through her own lack of admissions. If they ask me to be silent on this, I will honour their request. It is their site after all. Guess we will need to wait and see.

    Is this really necessary ? Since when did we consider it appropriate to behave like Neanderthals by publicly humiliating someone else, then dragging their reputation through the mud ? This is when a so called community deteriorates to a battlefield, and if the moderators do not make an effort to ring fence “debates” like this, they quickly spiral out of control and dramatically damage what the community set out the build the in the first place. The best way to extinguish this particular situation is to disable the comments for that post. As a moderator, this is one the immediate mechanisms to prevent brand damage. However, this course of action was not taken, and incredibly, the moderators chose to actually engage in the debate. This was not a wise choice, as the participants then started to respond to the interjection and went off track in the process. Mediation is a powerful tool when running a community, but it’s effectiveness is severely impacted when you decide to air dirty laundry in public.  Why on earth would you want to engage in a debate with someone when they are clearly trolling someone else ? You’re supposed to actually prevent that from happening in my view. And this is the real reason why I will never write for Peerlyst again. They have knowingly damaged their own community - effectively allowing someone else to poison it’s integrity and standing as a reliable information source. I know of two others who have contacted me since my LinkedIn post detailing that I no longer write for Peerlyst, and expressed the same reasons as mine stated above.

    And so, on the 15th of November, I invoked my version of “Article 50”, and decide to leave the Peerlyst community by deactivating my account, and effectively, exercising my Right To Be Forgotten. For those who don’t fully understand the meaning of this, here’s a snippet supplied by the ICO

    The right to erasure is also known as ‘the right to be forgotten’. The broad principle underpinning this right is to enable an individual to request the deletion or removal of personal data where there is no compelling reason for its continued processing.

    I was contacted by Peerlyst the following day asking why I had deleted my account. I’m not convinced it was the fact that they were genuinely sorry that they had lost a member - but where more concerned that the content I had contributed over time was also deleted as part of the account deactivation procedure. Here’s some of the comments I received

    “I’m sorry to hear that you decided to leave for this reason. I understand you have your own initiative, which I hope will work well for you. However, removing the content which serves 100,000 monthly readers and 500,000 unique readers is a pity for those who come to Peerlyst to learn”

    My response was that all content I had previously provided is posted on my own site. It’s actually my work, and Peerlyst are no longer permitted to use it. I was also asked if I would leave my account in place so that they could retain the content. This concerns me somewhat, as that would imply the content hasn’t actually been deleted, but “moved off the site to somewhere else”. I have asked for Peerlyst to confirm that the data has been removed - so far, there has not been any response. I guess they have until May 2018 to delete it from the GDPR standpoint in order be in full compliance.

    The other comment I received was

    “So sad to see you deactivated your account. You used to believe in the mission of sharing everything to help people improve!?”

    My response…

    “And I still do. Just not for Peerlyst”.

    The point I’ll make here is as follows. For a community to succeed it has to have a solid foundation, and a clearly defined policy. There isn’t much to the policies I put together, and they can be found here.

    https://sudonix.org/policies

    Based on what I saw on Peerlyst, I felt the need to update these accordingly. Take a look yourself. I personally want to mentor the next generation of InfoSec professionals, not get into a pathetic “shit slinging” match that yields no real benefit whatsoever. I’ve also been contacted by one of the moderators - evidently, Peerlsyt’s CEO (at the time - they are now defunct) wanted to have a call with her to discuss this. Too little, too late, I’m afraid. The damage is done. I don’t want an apology as one isn’t needed. I don’t want a discussion as nothing will change. In reality, I refuse to associate my name or any of my content with a so-called community that is effectively endorsing  one of the worst online experiences we have to date - trolling.

    Author of OGProxy, Swatch, Threaded, and most of Sudonix's bugs…

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  • phenomlabundefined phenomlab referenced this topic on
  • crazycellsundefined

    @phenomlab I am sorry to hear about your experience. I fully support your decision, and I believe it is waste of time to spend one more minute in those kinds of environments anyway. As you said, the attitudes of the moderators are very important. Even if you can bring a lot of talented people together, if you cannot maintain the atmosphere of the community, it will not lead anywhere good. moderators/admins are quite important, if they are not competent the community is doomed.

    I guess we can think of this as movie remakes that are much worse than the originals… Just because you have a great scenario and better actors, it does not mean the movie will be directed better. With worse directors/directing, you can end up having worse movies like Psycho, The Shining, and Mummy… The remakes are terrible for each one, Mummy remake even had Tom Cruise in it, but it is way worse than the original 😄 So, it is clear that the “director” (moderators) is quite a key.

    phenomlabundefined 1 Reply
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  • Salaundefined

    I can appreciate how important your relationship with them meant to you, and how frustrating it would have been if they hadn’t seen all your efforts. In particular, you can discover similar folks in pubs where the world is like that. If you find time you can read " They have the right to believe what they want to believe "

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  • phenomlabundefined

    @crazycells I guess the worst part for me was the trolling - made so much worse by the fact that the moderators allowed it to continue, insisting that the PeerLyst coming was seeing an example by allowing the community to “self moderate” - such a statement being completely ridiculous, and it wasn’t until someone else other than myself pointed out that all of this toxic activity could in fact be crawled by Google, that they decided to step in and start deleting posts.

    In fact, it reached a boiling point where the CEO herself had to step in and post an article stating their justification for “self moderation” which simply doesn’t work.

    The evidence here speaks for itself.

    Author of OGProxy, Swatch, Threaded, and most of Sudonix's bugs…

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  • Madchatthewundefined

    Blog Setup

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    Madchatthewundefined

    Here is an update. So one of the problems is that I was coding on windows - duh right? Windows was changing one of the forward slashes into a backslash when it got to the files folder where the image was being held. So I then booted up my virtualbox instance of ubuntu server and set it up on there. And will wonders never cease - it worked. The other thing was is that there are more than one spot to grab the templates. I was grabbing the template from the widget when I should have been grabbing it from the other templates folder and grabbing the code from the actual theme for the plugin. If any of that makes sense.

    I was able to set it up so it will go to mydomain/blog and I don’t have to forward it to the user/username/blog. Now I am in the process of styling it to the way I want it to look. I wish that there was a way to use a new version of bootstrap. There are so many more new options. I suppose I could install the newer version or add the cdn in the header, but I don’t want it to cause conflicts. Bootstrap 3 is a little lacking. I believe that v2 of nodebb uses a new version of bootstrap or they have made it so you can use any framework that you want for styling. I would have to double check though.

    Thanks for your help @phenomlab! I really appreciate it. I am sure I will have more questions so never fear I won’t be going away . . . ever, hahaha.

    Thanks again!

  • Madchatthewundefined

    Nodebb as blogging platform

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    phenomlabundefined

    @qwinter I’ve extensive experience with Ghost, so let me know if you need any help.

  • phenomlabundefined

    Hackers aren't evil - separating fact and FUD

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    phenomlabundefined

    1631808994808-scamming.jpg.webp

    One of many issues with working in the Infosec community is an inevitable backlash you’ll come across almost on a daily basis. In this industry, and probably hundreds of others like it are those who have an opinion. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and it’s something I always actively encourage. However, there’s a fine line between what is considered to be constructive opinion and what comes across as a bigoted approach. What I’m alluding to here is the usage of the word “hacker” and it’s context. I’ve written about this particular topic before which, so it seems, appears to have pressed a few buttons that “shouldn’t be pressed”.
    alt text

    But why is this ?

    The purpose of this article is definition. It really isn’t designed to “take sides” or cast aspersions over the correct usage of the term, or which scenarios and paradigms it is used correctly or incorrectly against. For the most part, the term “hacker” seems to be seen as positive in the Infosec community, and based on this, the general consensus is that there should be greater awareness of the differences between hackers and threat actors, for example. The issue here is that not everyone outside of this arena is inclined to agree. You could argue that the root of this issue is mainly attributed to the media and how they portray “hackers” as individuals who pursue nefarious activity and use their skills to commit crime and theft on a grand scale by gaining illegal access to networks. On the one hand, the image of hoodies and faceless individuals has created a positive awareness and a sense of caution amongst the target groups – these being everyday users of civilian systems and corporate networks alike, and with the constant stream of awareness campaigns running on a daily basis, this paradigm serves only to perpetuate rather than diminish. On the other hand, if you research the definition of the term “hacker” you’ll find more than one returned.

    Is this a fair reflection of hackers ? To the untrained eye, picture number 2 probably creates the most excitement. Sure, picture 1 looks “cool”, but it’s not “threatening” as such, as this is clearly the image the media wants to display. Essentially, they have probably taken this stance to increase awareness of an anonymous and faceless threat. But, it ISN’T a fair portrayal.

    Current definitions of “the word”

    The word “hacker” has become synonymous with criminal activity to the point where it cannot be reversed. Certainly not overnight anyway. The media attention cannot be directly blamed either in my view as without these types of campaigns, the impact of such a threat wouldn’t be taken seriously if a picture of a guy in a suit (state sponsored) was used. The hoodie is representative of an unknown masked assailant and it’s creation is for awareness – to those who have no real understanding of what a hacker should look like – hence my original article. As I highlighted above, we live in a world where a picture speaks a thousand words.

    The word hacker is always going to be associated with nefarious activity and that’s never going to change, regardless of the amount of effort that would be needed to re-educate pretty much the entire planet. Ask anyone to define a hacker and you’ll get the same response. It’s almost like trying to distinguish the deference between a full blown criminal and a “lovable rogue” or the fact that hoodies aren’t trouble making adolescent thugs.

    Ultimately, it’s far too ingrained – much like the letters that flow through a stick of rock found on UK seaside resorts. It’s doesn’t matter how much you break off, the lettering exists throughout the entire stick regardless if you want that to happen or not. To make a real change, and most importantly, have media (and by definition, everyone else) realise they have made a fundamental misjudgement, we should look at realistic definitions.

    The most notable is the below, taken from Tech Target

    A hacker is an individual who uses computer, networking or other skills to overcome a technical problem. The term hacker may refer to anyone with technical skills, but it often refers to a person who uses his or her abilities to gain unauthorized access to systems or networks in order to commit crimes. A hacker may, for example, steal information to hurt people via identity theft, damage or bring down systems and, often, hold those systems hostage to collect ransom.

    The term hacker has historically been a divisive one, sometimes being used as a term of admiration for an individual who exhibits a high degree of skill, as well as creativity in his or her approach to technical problems. However, the term is more commonly applied to an individual who uses this skill for illegal or unethical purposes.

    One great example of this is that hackers are not “evil people” but are in fact industry professionals and experts who use their knowledge to raise awareness by conducting proof of concept exercises and providing education and awareness around the millions of threats that we are exposed to on an almost daily basis. So why does the word “hacker” strike fear into those unfamiliar with its true meaning ? The reasoning for this unnecessary phenomena isn’t actually the media alone (although they have contributed significantly to it’s popularity). It’s perception. You could argue that the media have made this perception worse, and to a degree, this would be true. However, they actually didn’t create the original alliance – the MIT claimed that trophy and gave the term the “meaning” it has to this day. Have a look at this

    MIT Article

    Given the origins of this date back to 1963, the media is not to blame for creating the seemingly incorrect original reference when it’s fairly obvious that they didn’t. The “newspaper” reflected in the link is a campus circulation and was never designed for public consumption as far as I can see. Here’s a quote from that article:

    “Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Professor Carleton Tucker, administrator of the Institute telephone system.

    The students have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found.”

    The “so-called hackers” alignment here originally comes from “Phreaking” – a traditional method of establishing control over remote telephone systems allowing trunk calls, international dialling, premium rates, etc, all without the administrator’s knowledge. This “old school” method would certainly no longer work with modern phone systems, but is certainly “up there” with the established activity that draws a parallel with hacking.

    Whilst a significant portion of blogs, security forums, and even professional security platforms continue to use images of hoodies, faceless individuals, and the term “hacker” in the criminal sense, this is clearly a misconception – unfortunately one that connotation itself has allowed to set in stone like King Arthur’s Excalibur. In fairness, cyber criminals are mostly faceless individuals as nobody can actually see them commit a crime and only realise they are in fact normal people once they are discovered, arrested, and brought to trial for their activities. However, the term “hacker” is being misused on a grand scale – and has been since the 1980’s.

    An interesting observation here is that hoodies are intrinsically linked to threatening behaviour. A classic example of this is here. This really isn’t misrepresentation by the media in this case – it’s an unfortunate reality that is on the increase. Quite who exactly is responsible for putting a hacker in a hoodie is something of a discussion topic, but hackers were originally seen as “Cyberpunks” (think Matrix 1) until the media stepped in where they suddenly were seen as skateboarding kids in hoodies. And so, the image we know (and hackers loathe) was born. Perhaps one “logical” perspective for hoodies and hackers could be the anonymity the hoodie supposedly affords.

    The misconception of the true meaning of “hacker” has damaged the Infosec community extensively in terms of what should be a “no chalk” line between what is criminal, and what isn’t. However, it’s not all bad news. True meaning aside, the level of awareness around the nefarious activities of cyber criminals has certainly increased, but until we are able to establish a clear demarcation between ethics in terms of what is right and wrong, those hackers who provide services, education, and awareness will always be painted in a negative light, and by inference, be “tarred with the same brush”. Those who pride themselves on being hackers should continue to do so in my view – and they have my full support.

    It’s not their job solely to convince everyone else of their true intent, but ours as a community.

    Let’s start making that change.

  • phenomlabundefined

    Think 10,000 hours makes an expert? It doesn't!

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    phenomlabundefined

    expert.webp
    One thing I’ve seen a lot of over my career is the “expert” myth being touted on LinkedIn and Twitter. Originating from psychologist K. Anders Ericsson who studied the way people become experts in their fields, and then discussed by Malcolm Gladwell in the book, “Outliers“, “to become an expert it takes 10,000 hours (or approximately 10 years) of deliberate practice”. This paradigm (if you can indeed call it that) has been adopted by several so called “experts” - mostly those within the Information Security and GDPR fields. This article isn’t about GDPR (for once), but mostly those who consider themselves “experts” by virtue of the acronym. Prior to it’s implementation, nobody should have proclaimed themselves a GDPR “expert”. You cannot be an expert in something that wasn’t actually legally binding until May 25 2018, nor can you have sufficient time invested to be an expert since inception in my view. GDPR is a vast universe, and you can’t claim to know all of it.

    Consultant ? Possibly, yes. Expert ? No.

    The associated sales campaign isn’t much better, and can be aligned to the children’s book “Chicken Licken”. For those unfamiliar with this concept, here is a walkthrough. I’m sure you’ll understand why I choose a children’s story in this case, as it seems to fit the bill very well. What I’ve seen over the last 12 months had been nothing short of amazing - but not in the sense of outstanding. I could align GDPR here to the PPI claims furore - for anyone unfamiliar with what this “uprising” is, here’s a synopsis.

    The “expert” fallacy

    Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) is the insurance sold alongside credit cards, loans and other finance agreements to ensure payments are made if the borrower is unable to make them due to sickness or unemployment. The PPI scandal has its roots set back as far as 1998, although compensatory payments did not officially start until 2011 once the review and court appeal process was completed. Since the deadline for PPI claims has been announced as August 2019, the campaign has become intensively aggressive, with, it would seem, thousands of PPI “experts”. Again, I would question the authenticity of such a title. It seems that everyone is doing it, therefore, it must be easy to attain (a bit like the CISSP then). I witnessed the same shark pool of so called “experts” before, back in the day when Y2K was the latest buzzword on everyone’s lips. Years of aggressive selling campaigns and similarly, years of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt - more effectively known as complete bulls…) caused an unprecedented spike that allowed companies and consultants (several of whom had never been heard of before) to suddenly appear out of the woodwork and assume the identity of “experts” in this field. In reality, it’s not possible to be a subject matter expert in a particular field or niche market unless you have extensive experience. If you compare a weapons expert to a GDPR “expert”, you’ll see just how weak this paradigm actually is. A weapons expert will have years of knowledge in a field, and could probably tell you which gun discharged a bullet just by looking at the expended shell casing. I very much doubt a self styled GDPR expert can tell you what will happen in the event of an unknown scenario around the framework and the specific legal rights (in terms of the individual who the data belongs to) and implications for the institution affected. How can they when nobody has even been exposed to such a scenario before ? This makes a GDPR expert in my view about as plausible as a Brexit expert specialising in Article 50.

    What defines an expert ?

    The focal point here is in the comparison. A weapons expert can be given a gun and a sample of shell casings, then asked to determine if the suspected weapon actually fired the supplied ammunition or not. Using a process of proven identification techniques, the expert can then determine if the gun provided is indeed the origin. This information is derived by using established identity techniques from the indentations and markings in the shell casing created by the gun barrel from which the bullet was expelled, velocity, angle, and speed measurements obtained from firing the weapon. The impact of the bullet and exit damage is also analysed to determine a match based on material and critical evidence. Given the knowledge and experience level required to produce such results, how long do you think it took to reach this unrivalled plateau ? An expert isn’t solely based on knowledge. It’s not solely based on experience either. In fact, it’s a deep mixture of both. Deep in the sense of the subject matter comprehension, and how to execute that same understanding along with real life experience to obtain the optimum result. Here’s an example   An information technology expert should be able to

    Identify and eliminate potential bottlenecks Address security concerns, Design high availability Factor in extensible scalability Consider risk to adjacent and disparate technology and conduct analysis Ensure that any design proposal meets both the current criteria and beyond Understand the business need for technology and be able to support it

    If I leveraged external consultancy for a project, I’d expect all of the above and probably more from anyone who labels themselves as an expert - or for that fact, an architect. Sadly, I’ve been disappointed on numerous occasions throughout my career where it became evident very quickly that the so called expert (who I hasten to add is earning more an hour than I do in a day in most cases) hired for his “expertise and superior knowledge” in fact appears to know far less than I do about the same topic.

    How long does it really take to become an expert ?

    I’ve been in the information technology and security field since I was 16. I’m now 47, meaning 31 years experience (well, 31 as this year isn’t over yet). If you consider that experience is acquired during an 8 hour day, and used the following equation to determine the amount of years needed to reach 10,000 hours

    10000 / 8 / 365 = 3.4246575342 - for the sake of simple mathematics, let’s say 3.5 years.

    However, in the initial calculation, it’s 10 years (using the basis of 90 minutes invested per day) - making the expert title when aligned to GDPR even more unrealistic. As the directive was adopted on the 27 April 2016, the elapsed time period isn’t even enough to carry the first figure cited at 3.5 years, irrespective of the second. The reality here is that no amount of time invested in anything is going to make your an expert if you do not possess the prerequisite skills and a thorough understanding based on previous events in order to supplement and bolster the initial investment. I could spend 10,000 practicing a particular sport - yet effectively suck at it because my body (If you’ve met me, you’d know why) isn’t designed for the activity I’m requesting it to perform. Just because I’ve spent 10,000 hours reading about something doesn’t make me an expert by any stretch of the imagination. If I calculated the hours spanned over my career, I would arrive at the below. I’m basing this on an 8 hour day when in reality, most of my days are in fact much longer.

    31 x 365 x 8 = 90,520 hours

    Even when factoring in vacation based on 4 weeks per year (subject to variation, but I’ve gone for the mean average),

    31 x 28 X 8 = 6,944 hours to subtract

    This is only fair as you are not (supposed to be) working when on holiday. Even with this subtraction, the total is still 83,578 hours. Does my investment make me an expert ? I think so, yes - based on the fact that 31 years dedicated to one area would indicate a high level of experience and professional standard - both of which I constantly strive to maintain. Still think 10,000 hours invested makes you an expert ? You decide ! What are your views around this ?

  • phenomlabundefined

    Recovering from a server disk array failure in 1998

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    phenomlabundefined

    dc1.webp
    Why is it that all outages seem to happen at 5:30pm on a Friday afternoon ? Back in the day during 1998 when DEC (yeah, I’m old - shoot me) was still mainstream and Windows NT Server 4.0 was the latest and greatest, I was working for a commodity trading firm in the West End as an IT Manager. The week had typically gone by with the usual activity - nothing too major to report apart from the odd support issue and the usual plethora of invoices that needed to be approved. Suddenly, one of my team emerged from the comms room and informed me that they had spotted a red light on one of the disks sitting in the Exchange server. I asked which disk it was, and said we’d need to get a replacement.

    For those who haven’t been in this industry for a years (unlike me) DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) was a major player in previous years, but around 1998 started to struggle - it was then acquired by Compaq (who later on down the line in 2002 were acquired themselves by Hewlett Packard). This server was a beast - a DEC server 5000 the size of an under the counter fridge with a Mylex DAC960 RAID controller. It was so large, it had wheels with brakes. And, like a washing machine, was incredibly heavy. I’m sure the factory that manufactured servers in the 90’s used to pour concrete in them just for a bit of fun…

    Here’s a little glimpse for nostalgia purposes
    decserver5000.webp
    Those who remember DEC and it’s associated Mylex DAC960 RAID controller will also recall that the RAID5 incarnation was less than flawless. In modern RAID deployments, if a disk was marked as faulty or defunct, the controller would effectively blacklist the disk meaning that if it were to be removed then reinserted, any bad blocks would not be copied into the array hence causing corruption - it would be rejected.

    Well, that’s how modern controllers work. Unfortunately, the DAC960 controller was one of those boards that when coupled with old firmware and the NT operating system created the perfect storm. It was relatively well documented at the time that plugging a faulty drive back into an array could cause corruption and spell disaster. My enterprising team member had spotted the red light on the drive, then decided to eject it out of the array. For some unknown reason, instead of taking it back to his desk to order a replacement, he reinserted the it back into the array. Now, for those of you that actually remember the disks that went inside a DEC server 5000, you’ll know that these things were like bricks in plastic containers. They were around 3 inches in height, about 6 inches long, and quite heavy. These drives even had a eject clip on each side meaning that you had to press both sides of the disk carrier and then slide out the drive before it could be fully removed. Inserting a replacement drive required much the same effort (except in reverse), and provided a satisfyingly secure “clunk” as the interface of the drive made contact with the RAID controller bus.

    No sooner had I said the words

    “…please tell me you didn’t plug that disk back in……”

    to my team member, our central helpdesk number lit up like a Christmas tree in Times Square with users complaining they couldn’t get into email. I literally ran into the comms room and found the server with all drive bays lit solidly as if suspended in its own cryogenic state. For sake of schematics, a standard RAID5 configuration looks like the below. Essentially, the “p” component is parity. This is the stripe that contains information about the array and is spread across all disks that are members. In the event that one fails, the data is still held across the remaining drives, meaning still accessible - with a reduction in performance. The data is written across the disks in one write like a stripe (set).
    raid5_ok.webp
    At this point I’d already realised that the array had been corrupted by the returning faulty disk, and the bad stripe information was now resident on all the remaining drives. Those who understand RAID will know that if one drive in a RAID5 set fails, you still have the other remaining drives as a resilient array - but not if they are all corrupted. What I am alluding to here is shown below. The stripe was now unreadable, therefore, none of the disks were accessible
    raid5_broken.png.webp
    The server had completely frozen up and would not respond. I’m no fan of force powering a server off in the best of circumstances, but what choice did we have ?

    The server was powered off, then turned back on again. I really was hoping that this was just a system freeze and a reboot would make all our problems go away. The less naïve and experienced part of me dragged my legs towards the backup storage area (yes, we had a rotation pool of 2 weeks on site and 2 weeks off), and started collecting the previous day’s backup from the safe. As it stands, this was clearly the next logical step. Upon restart, we were met with the below shortly after NTOSKERNEL completed it’s checks
    bsod.webp
    (Not the actual BSOD of course - camera phones didn’t exist in 1998 - but as close as it gets)

    Anyone familiar with the Windows operating system will have bumped into this at some point in their career, and by the more commonplace acronym BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death). Either way, it’s never a good sign when you are trying to recover a system. One of the best messages displayed by a BSOD is

    IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

    I say “best” with a hint of sarcasm of course as this message is completely useless and doesn’t mean anything to anyone as such. As the internet back in 1998 was fairly infantile, gaining a decent insight wasn’t as simple or clear cut as it is today. Looking at the problem from a sensible angle, it was fairly obvious that the DAC960 controller had either failed completely, or couldn’t read the disks and caused the crash. Deciding not to invest too much time in getting this system back to life, I fired up it’s dormant sister (yes, we had two fridges :)) which started with no issues. This secondary server was originally purchased to split the load of the mailboxes across two servers for resilience purposes, but never came to fruition owing to a backlog of other projects that were further up the chain of importance. Had this exercise have taken place, only 50% of the office would have been impacted - typical.

    With the server started, we then began the process of installing Exchange. Don’t get too excited - this was Exchange 5.5 and didn’t have any formal link to Active Directory, so it was never going to be the case of installing Exchange in disaster recovery mode, then playing back the database. Nope. This was going to be a directory restore first, followed by the Information Store.

    With Exchange installed and the previous service packs and hotfixes applied (early versions of Exchange had a habit of not working at all after a restore unless the patching​ level was the same), BackupExec 6.2 (yes, I know) was set to restore to an alternative Exchange server, and the tapes loaded into the robotic arm cradle. In hindsight, it would have been a better option to install BackupExec on the Exchange server itself, and connect the tape drive to the SCSI connector. However, can you find a cable when you really need one ? In any case, the server was SCSI2 when the loader was SCSI1. This should have set alarm bells ringing at the time, but with the restore started, we went back to our seats - I then began the task of explaining to senior management about the cause of the outage and what we were doing to resolve the problem. As anyone with experience of Microsoft systems knows, attempting to predict the time to restore or copy anything (especially back in the 90’s) wasn’t a simple task, as Windows had a habit of either exaggerating the time, or sitting there not responding for ages.

    Rather like a 90’s Wikipedia, NT wasn’t known for it’s accuracy.

    I called home and solemnly declared I was in for a long night. It’s never easy explaining the reasons why or attempting to justify the reasons you need to work late to family members, but that’s another story. Checking on the progress of the restore, we were averaging speeds of around 2Mbps ! Cast your mind back to 1998 and think of the surrounding technology. Back in the (not so good) old days, modern switching technology and 10Gbps networks were non existent. We were stuck with old 3Com 10Mbps hubs and an even slower Frame Relay connection (256k with 128k ISDN backup) as the gateway. To make matters worse, our internet connection was based on dialup technology using a SHIVA LanRoverE. Forget 1Gb fibre - this thing dished out an awesome [sic] 33.6k speed or even 56k if you were using ISDN. Web Pages loading in about 20 seconds was commonplace - downloading drivers was an absolute nightmare as you can imagine.

    Back to the restore. Having performed the basic math, and given the size of the databases (around 70Gb on a DLT 40 that was compressed to 80Gb), this was going to take over 24 hours. If you think about how hubs used to work, this meant that the 10Mbps speed of the device was actually shared across all 24 ports. This effectively reduces the port speed to 0.42Mbps - and that really depends on what the other ports are doing at the time. The restore rate remained at around 2Mbps for hours, and rather than everyone sit there watching water evaporate, I sent home the remaining staff and told them to be on standby for the entire weekend. I really couldn’t stomach food at this point, and ended up working into the night on other open tasks in an effort to catch up. I ended up falling asleep at my desk around 2am, and then being woken by the sound of my mobile (a Nokia of course) ringing. Looking at the clock, it was 5am. Checking the restore, it had progressed to the information store itself and was around 60% completed. After another 15 hours in the office, the restore finally completed.

    Having restarted all of the Exchange services, even the information store came up, which really was good news. However, browsing through the mailboxes I noticed that only a quarter of the 250+ I was expecting were listed. Not knowing much about the Exchange back end at the time, I contacted a so-called Exchange specialist based in Switzerland (in case you’re wondering, we were a Swiss headquartered entity, and all external support came from there). This Exchange specialist informed me that the backup hadn’t completed properly, and a set of commands needed to be run in BackupExec to resolve this. Of course, this also meant that the restore process had to be restarted - there goes another 24+ hours, I thought to myself. With the new “settings applied” and the restore process restarted, I decided that I wasn’t going to sit in the office for another day waiting for the restore to complete, and so I decided to call one of my team to come in and occupy the watchtower.

    Getting hold of someone was much more difficult than I had imagined. After letting the remainder of the team go, they all forged an exodus to the nearest door like iron filings to a magnet. So much for team ethic I thought. Eventually, I managed to get hold of a colleague who, after much griping, agreed to come into the office. I wouldn’t have minded as much if he didn’t live less than 15 minutes away, but that’s another story. My colleague arrived around 30 minutes later, and then I left the office. Getting home wasn’t a simple task. In the UK, there are often engineering works taking place over the weekend - particularly on the tube, and in most cases, local rail providers also - mine included. What should have taken about 2 hours maximum took 4, and by the time I got home, I flopped into bed exhausted. Needless to say this didn’t go down particularly well with my wife who saw me last on the previous morning - especially as after 3 hours of restlessness and a general inability to sleep, I was called by senior management - and was asked to go back in.

    By now, my already frustrated wife’s temperature went from 36.9c to an erupting volcano equivalent in less than a split second. I fully appreciated her response, but I was young (well, younger), eager to impress, and also had a sense of ownership. After a somewhat heated exchange, I left for the office. I arrived in much the same time as it took me to get home in the first place, and found that the restore was of course still running. My colleague made some half baked excuse that he needed to leave the office as he had a “family emergency”. Not really in the mood to argue this, I let him leave. I then got on a conference call with the consultant we had been using. Unsurprisingly, the topic of the restore time came up.

    “…You have a very slow network…” said the consultant.

    “…No s**t Sherlock…”  I thought. “…Do you honestly think I’m sitting here for my health ? …”

    I politely “agreed”.

    Eventually, the restore process completed. With a sudden feeling of euphoria, I went back into the comms room to start the services and… to my dismay, found once again that only a third of the recipients appeared in the directory. The term “FFS” didn’t go anywhere near being an accurate portrayal of my response. I was brutally upset. Hopelessly crushed. On the verge of losing it… (ok, perhaps that’s overkill). There had to be a reason for this. Something we’d missed, or just didn’t understand. I went looking for answers on a 1998 version of Yahoo (actually, I think it may have been Lycos), and found an article relating to the DS/IS Consistency Adjuster in Exchange 5.5 - this isn’t the exact resource I found, but it goes a long way to describe the fundamental process. The upshot is that the consistency adjuster needed to be run to synchronise the once orphaned mailboxes with the directory service. This entire process took​ a couple of hours - whilst that seems inconceivable to even the extreme Luddite, this is 1998 with SCSI1 drives, a Pentium II Processor, and 512Mb ram.

    After the process completed (which incidentally looked like this)
    dsisadjuster.webp
    I could then see all mailboxes ! After performing several somersaults around the office (just kidding here, but I can tell you I felt like doing it), I confirmed with a 25% random user test that I had access to mailboxes. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see any new mail arriving, but that was only due to a stalled mail connector on the server in Switzerland that received external mail. After a quick reboot of this gateway, mail began to flow. After around an hour of testing, I was happy that everything was working as expected. As for the consultant who had just wasted hours of my life, it’s just as well he wasn’t in the same country as me, let alone room. I went home elated - to an extremely angry wife. She’s since forgiven me of course, and now looking back, I really appreciate why - she was looking out for me, and concerned - I just didn’t appreciate that at the time.

    Come Monday morning, users were back into email with everything working as expected. An emergency Exchange backup had been run, and I was in the process of writing up my postmortem report for senior management. I then got a phone call. Anyone remember a product by Fenstrae called Faxination ? This was peered with Exchange 5.5, and had stopped working since the crash. The head of operations demanded that this was resolved as a priority… Another late night… another argument at home, but that’s a story for another day.

  • phenomlabundefined

    Why you should never neglect physical security

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    phenomlabundefined

    bg-min-dark.webp
    It’s a common occurrence in today’s modern world that virtually all organisations have a considerable budget (or a strong focus on) information and cyber security. Often, larger organisations spend millions annually on significant improvements to their security program or framework, yet overlook arguably the most fundamental basics which should be (but are often not) the building blocks of any fortified stronghold.

    We’ve spent so much time concentrating on the virtual aspect of security and all that it encompasses, but seem to have lost sight of what should arguably be the first item on the list – physical security. It doesn’t matter how much money and effort you plough into designing and securing your estate when you consider how vulnerable and easily negated the program or framework is if you neglect the physical element. Modern cyber crime has evolved, and it’s the general consensus these days that the traditional perimeter as entry point is rapidly losing its appeal from the accessibility versus yield perspective. Today’s discerning criminal is much more inclined to go for a softer and predictable target in the form of users themselves rather than spend hours on reconnaissance and black box probing looking for backdoors or other associated weak points in a network or associated infrastructure.

    Physical vs virtual

    So does this mean you should be focusing your efforts on the physical elements solely, and ignoring the perimeter altogether ? Absolutely not – doing so would be commercial suicide. However, the physical element should not be neglected either, but instead factored into any security design at the outset instead of being an afterthought. I’ve worked for a variety of organisations over my career – each of them with differing views and attitudes to risk concerning physical security. From the banking and finance sector to manufacturing, they all have common weaknesses. Weaknesses that should, in fact, have been eliminated from the outset rather than being a part of the everyday activity. Take this as an example. In order to qualify for buildings and contents insurance, business with office space need to ensure that they have effective measures in place to secure that particular area. In most cases, modern security mechanisms dictate that proximity card readers are deployed at main entrances, rendering access impossible (when the locking mechanism is enforced) without a programmed access card or token. But how “impossible” is that access in reality ?

    Organisations often take an entire floor of a building, or at least a subset of it. This means that any doors dividing floors or areas occupied by other tenants must be secured against unauthorised access. Quite often, these floors have more than one exit point for a variety of health and safety / fire regulation reasons, and it’s this particular scenario that often goes unnoticed, or unintentionally overlooked. Human nature dictates that it’s quicker to take the side exit when leaving the building rather than the main entrance, and the last employee leaving (in an ideal world) has the responsibility of ensuring that the door is locked behind them when they leave. However, the reality is often the case instead where the door is held open by a fire extinguisher for example. Whilst this facilitates effective and easy access during the day, it has a significant impact to your physical security if that same door remains open and unattended all night. I’ve seen this particular offence repeatedly committed over months – not days or weeks – in most organisations I’ve worked for. In fact, this exact situation allowed thieves to steal a laptop left on the desk in an office of a finance firm I previously worked at.

    Theft in general is mostly based around opportunity. As a paradigm, you could leave a £20 note / $20 bill on your desk and see how long it remained there before it went missing. I’m not implying here that anyone in particular is a thief, but again, it’s about opportunity. The same process can be aligned to Information security. It’s commonplace to secure information systems with passwords, least privilege access, locked server rooms, and all the other usual mechanisms, but what about the physical elements ? It’s not just door locks. It’s anything else that could be classed as sensitive, such as printed documents left on copiers long since forgotten and unloved, personally identifiable information left out on desks, misplaced smartphones, or even keys to restricted areas such as usually locked doors or cupboards. That 30 second window could be all that would be required to trigger a breach of security – and even worse, of information classed as sensitive. Not only could your insurance refuse to pay out if you could not demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that you had the basic physical security measures in place, but (in the EU) you would have to notify the regulator (in this case, the ICO) that information had been stolen. Not only would it be of significant embarrassment to any firm that a “chancer” was able to casually stroll in and take anything they wanted unchallenged, but significant in terms of the severity of such an information breach – and the resultant fines imposed by the ICO or SEC (from the regulatory perspective – in this case, GDPR) – at €20m or 4% of annual global (yes, global) turnover (if you were part of a larger organisation, then that is actually 4% of the parent entity turnover – not just your firm) – whichever is the highest. Of equal significance is the need to notify the ICO within 72 hours of a discovered breach. In the event of electronic systems, you could gain intelligence about what was taken from a centralised logging system (if you have one – that’s another horror story altogether if you don’t and you are breached) from the “electronic” angle of any breach via traditional cyber channels, but do you know exactly what information has taken residence on desks ? Simple answer ? No.

    It’s for this very reason that several firms operate a “clean desk” policy. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but for information security reasons. Paper shredders are a great invention, but they lack AI and machine learning to wheel themselves around your office looking for sensitive hard copy (printed) data to destroy in order for you to remain compliant with your information security policy (now there’s an invention…).

    But how secure are these “unbreakable” locks ? Despite the furore around physical security in the form of smart locks, thieves seem to be able to bypass these “security measures” with little effort. Here’s a short video courtesy of ABC news detailing just how easy it was (and still is in some cases) to gain access to hotel rooms using cheap technology, tools, and “how-to” articles from YouTube.

    Surveillance systems aren’t exempt either. As an example, a camera system can be rendered useless with a can of spray paint or even something as simple as a grocery bag if it’s in full view. Admittedly, this would require some previous reconnaissance to determine the camera locations before committing any offence, but it’s certainly a viable prospect of that system is not monitored regularly. Additionally, (in the UK at least) the usage of CCTV in a commercial setting requires a written visible notice to be displayed informing those affected that they are in fact being recorded (along with an impact assessment around the usage), and is also subject to various other controls around privacy, usage, security, and retention periods.

    Unbreakable locks ?

    Then there’s the “unbreakable” door lock. Tapplock advertised their “unbreakable smart lock” only to find that it was vulnerable to the most basic of all forced entry – the screwdriver. Have a look at this article courtesy of “The Register”. In all seriousness, there aren’t that many locks that cannot be effectively bypassed. Now, I know what you’re thinking. If the lock cannot be effectively opened, then how do you gain entry ? It’s much simpler than you think. For a great demonstration, we’ll hand over to a scene from “RED” that shows exactly how this would work. The lock itself may have pass-code that “…changes every 6 hours…” and is “unbreakable”, but that doesn’t extend to the material that holds both the door and the access panel for the lock itself.

    And so onto the actual point. Unless your “unbreakable” door lock is housed within fortified brick or concrete walls and impervious to drills, oxy-acetylene cutting equipment, and proximity explosive charges (ok, that’s a little over the top…), it should not be classed as “secure”. Some of the best examples I’ve seen are a metal door housed in a plasterboard / false wall. Personally, if I wanted access to the room that badly, I’d go through the wall with the nearest fire extinguisher rather than fiddle with the lock itself. All it takes is to tap on the wall, and you’ll know for sure if it’s hollow just by the sound it makes. Finally, there’s the even more ridiculous – where you have a reinforced door lock with a viewing pane (of course, glass). Why bother with the lock when you can simply shatter the glass, put your hand through, and unlock the door ?

    Conclusion

    There’s always a variety of reasons as to why you wouldn’t build your comms room out of brick or concrete – mostly attributed to building and landlord regulations in premises that businesses occupy. Arguably, if you wanted to build something like this, and occupied the ground floor, then yes, you could indeed carry out this work if it was permitted. Most data centres that are truly secure are patrolled 24 x 7 by security, are located underground, or within heavily fortified surroundings. Here is an example of one of the most physically secure data centres in the world.

    https://www.identiv.com/resources/blog/the-worlds-most-secure-buildings-bahnhof-data-center

    Virtually all physical security aspects eventually circle back to two common topics – budget, and attitude to risk. The real question here is what value you place on your data – particularly if you are a custodian of it, but the data relates to others. Leaking data because of exceptionally weak security practices in today’s modern age is an unfortunate risk – one that you cannot afford to overlook.

    What are your thoughts around physical security ?

  • phenomlabundefined

    We DON'T Need Blinky Lights

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    phenomlabundefined

    1631810017053-netsecurity.jpg.webp
    I read an article By Glenn S. Gerstell (Mr. Gerstell is the general counsel of the National Security Agency) with a great deal of interest. That same article is detailed below

    The National Security Operations Center occupies a large windowless room, bathed in blue light, on the third floor of the National Security Agency’s headquarters outside of Washington. For the past 46 years, around the clock without a single interruption, a team of senior military and intelligence officials has staffed this national security nerve center.

    The center’s senior operations officer is surrounded by glowing high-definition monitors showing information about things like Pentagon computer networks, military and civilian air traffic in the Middle East and video feeds from drones in Afghanistan. The officer is authorized to notify the president any time of the day or night of a critical threat.

    Just down a staircase outside the operations center is the Defense Special Missile and Aeronautics Center, which keeps track of missile and satellite launches by China, North Korea, Russia, Iran and other countries. If North Korea was ever to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile toward Los Angeles, those keeping watch might have half an hour or more between the time of detection to the time the missile would land at the target. At least in theory, that is enough time to alert the operations center two floors above and alert the military to shoot down the missile.

    But these early-warning centers have no ability to issue a warning to the president that would stop a cyberattack that takes down a regional or national power grid or to intercept a hypersonic cruise missile launched from Russia or China. The cyberattack can be detected only upon occurrence, and the hypersonic missile, only seconds or at best minutes before attack. And even if we could detect a missile flying at low altitudes at 20 times the speed of sound, we have no way of stopping it.

    Something I’ve been saying all along is that technology alone cannot stop cyber attacks. Often referred to as a “silver bullet”, or “blinky lights”, this provides the misconception that by purchasing that new, shiny device, you’re completely secure. Sorry folks, but this just isn’t true. In fact, cyber crime, and it’s associated plethora of hourly attacks is evolving at an alarming rate - in fact, much faster than you’d like to believe.

    You’d think that for all the huge technological advances we have made in this world, the almost daily plethora of corporate security breaches, high profile data loss, and individuals being scammed every day would have dropped down to nothing more than a trickle - even to the point where they became virtually non-existent. We are making huge progress with landings on Mars, autonomous space vehicles, artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, and essentially reaching new heights on a daily basis thanks to some of the most creative minds in this technological sphere. But somehow, we have lost our way, stumbled and fallen - mostly on our own sword. But why ?

    Just like the Y2k Gold Rush in the late 90’s, information security has become the next big thing with companies ranging from a few employees as startups to enterprise organisations touting their services and platforms to be the best in class, and the next “must have” tool in the blue team’s already bulging arsenal of tools. Tools that on their own in fact have little effect unless they are combined with something else as equally as expensive to run. We’ve spent so much time focusing on efforts ranging from what SEIM solution we need to what will be labelled as the ultimate silver bullet capable of eliminating the threat of attack once and for all that in my opinion, we have lost sight of the original goal. With regulatory requirements and best practice pushing us towards products and services that either require additional staff to manage, or are incredibly expensive to deploy and ultimately run. Supposedly, in an effort to simplify the management, analysis, and processing of millions of logs per hour we’ve created even more platforms to ingest this data in order to make sense of it.

    In reality, all we have created is a shark infested pool where larger companies consume up and coming tech startups for breakfast to ensure that they do not pose a threat to their business model / gravy train, therefore enabling them to dominate the space even further with their newly enhanced reach.

    How did we get to this ? What happened to thought process and working together in order to combat the threat that increases on an hourly basis ? We seem to be so focused on making sure that we aren’t the next organisation to be breached that we have lost the art of communication and the full benefit of sharing information so that it assists others in their journey. We’ve become so obsessed with the daily onslaught of platforms that we no longer seem to have the time to even think, let alone take stock and regroup - not as an individual, but as a community.

    There are a number of ”communities” that offer “free” forums and products under the open source banner, but sadly, these seem to be turning into paid-for products at a rate of knots. I understand people need to live and make money, but if awareness was raised to the point where users wouldn’t click links in phishing emails, fall for the fake emergency wire transfer request from the CEO, or be suddenly tempted by the latest offer in terms of cheap technology then we might - just might - be able to make the world a better place. In order to make this work, we first need to remove the stigma that has become so ingrained by the media and set in stone like King Arthur’s Excalibur. Let’s first start with the hacker / criminal parallel. They aren’t the same thing folks.

    Nope. Not at all. Hackers are those people who find ingenious ways of getting into networks and infrastructure that you never even knew existed, trick you into parting with sensitive information (then inform you as to where you went wrong), and most importantly, educate you so that you and your network are far more secure against real attacks and real criminals. These people exist to increase your awareness, and by definition, security footprint - not use it against you in order to steal. Hackers do like to wear hoodies as they are comfortable, but you won’t find one using gloves, wearing a balaclava or sunglasses, and in some cases, they actually prefer desktops rather than laptops.

    The image being portrayed here is one perpetuated by the media, and it has certainly been effective - but not in a positive way. The word “hacker” is now synonymous with criminals, where it really shouldn’t be. One defines security, whereas the other sets out to break it. If we locked up all the hackers on this planet, we’d only have the blue team remaining. It’s the job of the red team (hackers) to see how strong your defences are. Hackers exist to educate, not infiltrate (at least, not without asking for permission first :))

    I personally have lost count of how many times I’ve sat in meetings where a sales pitch around a security platform is touted as a one stop shop or a Swiss army knife that can protect your entire network from a breach. Admittedly, there’s some great technology on the market that performs a variety of functions to protect your estate, but they all fail to take into consideration the weakest link in any chain - users. Irrespective of bleeding edge “combat platforms” (as I like to refer to them), criminals are becoming very adept in their approach, leveraging techniques such as social engineering. It should come as no surprise for you to learn that this type of attack can literally walk past your shiny new defence system as it relies on the one vulnerability you cannot predict - the human. Hence the term “hacking humans”.

    I’m of the firm opinion that if you want to outsmart a criminal, you have to think like one. Whilst newfangled platforms are created to assist in the fight against cyber crime, they are complex to configure, suffer from alerting bloat (far too many emails so you end up missing the one where your network is actually being compromised), or are simply overwhelming and difficult to understand. Here’s the thing. You don’t need (although they do help) expensive bleeding edge platforms with flashing lights to tell you where weak points lie within your network, but you do need to understand how a criminal can and will exploit these. A vulnerability cannot be leveraged if it no longer exists, or even better, never even existed to begin with.

    And so, on with the mission, and the real reason as to why I created this site. I’ve been working in information technology for 30 years, and have a very strong technical background in network design and information security.

    What I want to do is create a communication, information, and awareness sharing platform. I created the original concept of what I thought this new community should look like in my head, but its taken a while to finally develop, get people interested, and on board. To my mind, those from inside and outside of the information security arena will pool together, share knowledge, raise awareness, and probably the most important, harness this new found force and drive change forward.

    The breaches we are witnessing on a daily basis are not going to simply stop. They will increase dramatically in their frequency, and will get worse with each incident.

    Let’s stop the “hackers are criminals” myth, start using our own unique talents in this field, and make a community that

    is able to bring effective change treats everyone as equals The community once fully established could easily be the catalyst for change - both in perception, and inception.

    Why not wield the stick for a change instead of being beaten with it, and work as a global virtual team instead ?

    Will you join me ? In case I haven’t already mentioned it, this initiative has no cost - only gains. It is entirely free.

  • phenomlabundefined

    What system did you first use?

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    phenomlabundefined

    @Sala impressive. That’s actually a lot harder than it looks. I once worked for a trading firm in the 90s and a trader came to me with a corrupted floppy disk demanding I get it to work.

    Evidently, it had all of his trading positions on it and he had no backup 😧 and he wasn’t impressed when I told him that the chances of data recovery were less than zero.