I made a post the other day about worms without mentioning Stuxnet, which may have hosed the nuclear processing going on in Iran. Current theory is that the worm was a joint US/Israel venture, but there are other theories out there.
There have certainly been other instances of computer worms endangering infrastructure both online and offline:
In 2003, the SQL Slammer worm caused network problems in an Ohio nuclear plant, although there was an analog backup for much of the functionality and furthermore the plant was offline.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
worms! or, a note on computer security
It's been twenty five years since the release of @Brain, the first PC computer virus.
It wasn't until November of 1988 that the Morris worm[1] ran around the Internet and mucked things up, spurring the creation of CERT.
Trivia: The use of the term "worm" to refer to self-replicating computer worms comes from Brunner's excellent novel "The Shockwave Rider".
[1] When I first encountered the term "RTFM", it was shortly after the worm, and I assumed it meant "Robert T Fucking Morris", which led to a bit of confusion on my part.
It wasn't until November of 1988 that the Morris worm[1] ran around the Internet and mucked things up, spurring the creation of CERT.
Trivia: The use of the term "worm" to refer to self-replicating computer worms comes from Brunner's excellent novel "The Shockwave Rider".
[1] When I first encountered the term "RTFM", it was shortly after the worm, and I assumed it meant "Robert T Fucking Morris", which led to a bit of confusion on my part.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
My 802.1x problem
I straightened out the Windows side of my 802.1x issue (previously discussed here), but was still having problems on the switch side of things.
Basically, the switch would request authentication twice. Which is not just weird but wrong. After a bunch of back and forth with the excellent folks at Cisco tech support, I upgraded the code on the catalyst switch and the aberrant behavior stopped.
Serves me right for running 5 or 6 year old code. :)
Basically, the switch would request authentication twice. Which is not just weird but wrong. After a bunch of back and forth with the excellent folks at Cisco tech support, I upgraded the code on the catalyst switch and the aberrant behavior stopped.
Serves me right for running 5 or 6 year old code. :)
Sunday, January 9, 2011
History!
Thanks to metafilter, I found this set of pictures of a data center room from back in the day (late 1960's). It looks like many, if not most, of the computer operators (but not the programmers) were women. Some of that comes from the cultural categorization of that sort of computer operations work as 'clerical'.
I'd like to think that some of it goes back to a number of computer pioneers being women back when "computer" was a job title for a person, not the name of a machine. It looks like the eniacprogammers.org folks are trying to get a documentary made about the women who did the initial programming on the ENIAC, and they're taking donations.
Women keep being part of tech and hacking and history and repeatedly forgotten. Every once in a while there's a spate of stories in media about "OH MY GOD! LOOK! WOMEN NERDS AND WOMEN HACKERS!" And every time, it seems like they're newly discovering it. We're here. We've always been here, and we're *still* here, not just newly arriving. But somehow, we're never quite remembered as having been there.
Back to the present and into the future... The CCC (that's chaos computer club not concourse computer center) is having their conference right now, which led to a wired article I just read about the Haecksen group of women hackers. Yay more women hackers! We're here -- still here, not just newly arrived.
I'd like to think that some of it goes back to a number of computer pioneers being women back when "computer" was a job title for a person, not the name of a machine. It looks like the eniacprogammers.org folks are trying to get a documentary made about the women who did the initial programming on the ENIAC, and they're taking donations.
Women keep being part of tech and hacking and history and repeatedly forgotten. Every once in a while there's a spate of stories in media about "OH MY GOD! LOOK! WOMEN NERDS AND WOMEN HACKERS!" And every time, it seems like they're newly discovering it. We're here. We've always been here, and we're *still* here, not just newly arriving. But somehow, we're never quite remembered as having been there.
Never introduced, they never became a part of history. Forty years later, Kathy Kleiman was told that the women in pictures with ENIAC (1946) were "Refrigerator Ladies," models posed in front of the machine.
Back to the present and into the future... The CCC (that's chaos computer club not concourse computer center) is having their conference right now, which led to a wired article I just read about the Haecksen group of women hackers. Yay more women hackers! We're here -- still here, not just newly arrived.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Blocking skype with Cisco's NBAR
ciscotips.wordpress.com has an old post on how to block skype on a Cisco Router. IOS 12.4(4)T and later include a classification for skype, so you can filter and block it using Cisco's Network Based Application Recognition (aka "NBAR")
The Cisco whitepaper on IOS Flexible Packet Matching and this thread in the Cisco support forums are both likely to be helpful.
The Cisco whitepaper on IOS Flexible Packet Matching and this thread in the Cisco support forums are both likely to be helpful.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
... or "trolling for pics on Flickr"
I was poking around on Flickr looking for shots of other people's data centers and wiring closets. For instance, you can look for all pictures tagged with "wiringcloset"
And you can find things like a picture looking upwards at a rack of 1U boxes, which I found in the l0calh0st group
Some other groups with pictures of other people's network/computer/cabling gear:
That last group is where I found these shots of a data rack that got rewired: before and after
Searching for "cabling" gets you everything from knitting to data centers. Using tag clusters to narrow the search down to more wire-geeky (as opposed to fiber-geeky) gets you something more like this.
and I can't help but agree with the caption on this picture: "No matter what runs on top of the communications infrastructure, at the bottom will always be something like this—a bunch of wires connected together somewhere out of sight."
yeah.
(nb: I'm taking a couple of weeks off from posting for the holidays. I may go through and tag/retag a bunch of posts. Apologies if this freaks out rss feeds or osmething)
I was poking around on Flickr looking for shots of other people's data centers and wiring closets. For instance, you can look for all pictures tagged with "wiringcloset"
And you can find things like a picture looking upwards at a rack of 1U boxes, which I found in the l0calh0st group
Some other groups with pictures of other people's network/computer/cabling gear:
That last group is where I found these shots of a data rack that got rewired: before and after
Searching for "cabling" gets you everything from knitting to data centers. Using tag clusters to narrow the search down to more wire-geeky (as opposed to fiber-geeky) gets you something more like this.
and I can't help but agree with the caption on this picture: "No matter what runs on top of the communications infrastructure, at the bottom will always be something like this—a bunch of wires connected together somewhere out of sight."
yeah.
(nb: I'm taking a couple of weeks off from posting for the holidays. I may go through and tag/retag a bunch of posts. Apologies if this freaks out rss feeds or osmething)
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About Me
- regis
- Regis has worked as a network engineer since 1994 for small companies and for large companies.
