Well it’s the last day of April (can’t believe it!) and I’m stuck home with the Flu. I hadn’t been sick all winter so I guess I was due.

Here’s the list for today:

A Safer Apple Experience per Grandma Roberts

In these days where everyone is getting worked up over OS X vulnerabilities it’s somewhat easy to not know quite how to respond. I love my grandmother partially because even though she may not read all the warnings on SANS Internet Storm Center or read John Grubers surprisingly enjoyable and fair interview with Dino Dia Zovi she will email me anything she sees on CNN.com or gets via email about computer security. It’s really quite touching and means a lot that she cares enough to take an interest in what I do.

Addressing Privacy: There Will Never Be a Technology-Only Solution Because of the Human Factors Involved – I completely agree.

I’ve written about many times, but it is worth repeating many times more; technology alone will not solve a company’s information security, privacy or compliance challenges and requirements. The human factor is significant and must be addressed.

Friday Quickies – April 27, 2007 – I don’t agree with Rothman’s declaration that SIM is dead. Just because a vendor adds log management, an important data point when performing incident handling, doesn’t mean that they’re grasping at straws. As he said in his own article…the space is “evolving”.

SIMs not dead, eh? – Then why is almost every SIM vendor announcing a dedicated log management appliance? NetForensics is the latest (NetForensics press release) and they also extended their monitoring capability to databases (another NetForensics release). How many more data points do we need about the evolving SIM space before we can finally start shoveling dirt on it?

Video: Exploring Metasploit 3 and the New and Improved Web Interface – Part 1 – Make sure you turn down your volume as the music is A LITTLE LOUD FOR WORK!!!!

In this video we explore the revised MSFWeb interface for the Metasploit Framework 3.0. We specifically take a look at running auxiliary modules against a server running MSSQL, and then we’ll take a look at using the MSFweb GUI to run the idq exploit with the meterpreter payload. What is unique about the idq bug is that it will NOT give you administrator or system on the box, but you can use the rev2self command in meterpreter to elevate your privileges from IUSR_MACHINENAME to SYSTEM. While we’re at it, we also dump the hashes using hashdump for a little extra fun.

Video: Exploring Metasploit 3 and the New and Improved Web Interface – Part 2 – Part 2 (and the music isn’t as loud this time)

In this video we explore the revised MSFWeb interface for the Metasploit Framework 3.0. We specifically take a look at running “browser” exploits where you have to get the victim to connect back to your listening Metasploit instance. We’ll use the ie_createobject exploit via the MSFweb GUI, and then we’ll use the wmf_setabortproc exploit using the built in msfconsole (a new addition in MSFWeb 3.0). We’ll also take a look at using custom meterpreter scripts; first to see if the victim is running in vmware and second, to clear the event logs.

Something New To Look For – Danger…danger…

So, what’s this all about? Remember how some malware tries to shut off AV software or the Windows Firewall? Well, the script that Hogfly found uses reg.exe to set all of the values (except the first one) to 0, and effectively shuts down any error reporting, which is essentially a visual notification that something is wrong on the system.

CSIRTM resources online – I’ll have to make time in the coming days to read through this white paper.

As part of the preparations for a new graduate course in CSIRTM to be offered to students as an elective in the Norwich University Master’s of Science in Information Assurance (MSIA) program, I put all my articles together into an edited white paper on the subject and added some new material.

Protected but Owned: My Little Investigation – Good write-up with screen captures.

Check out my write-up here. It is about my investigation of a desktop protected by various security software, but 0wned nonetheless. And to those paranoids who are dying to ask a question “Was this my own system?” I can give a resounding “NO!” 🙂

Movie Time: DNS Changer trojan – Grab your popcorn…it’s MOVIE TIME!

Adam Thomas in our malware research labs took a video of a Trojan DNS Changer a while back. This is a piece of malware that uses rootkit technology and changes your Windows DNS settings. Its purpose is to redirect your search results in popular search engines.

Log Management Summit Wrap-Up – I’ll have to go to this some day.

My favorite presentation on Monday, though, was Chris Brenton’s talk, entitled Compliance Reporting – The Top Five most important Reports and Why. As you know, I’ve been doing a lot of work recently on NSM reports, and although log reporting isn’t quite the same, the types of things that an analyst looks for are very similar. I got some great ideas which may show up in my Sguil reports soon.