Matt’s Blog > Security

I used to get a couple hosts bounced a week… They’d try to brute-force username/password combos over ssh and DenyHosts would ban their IP after 5 failed logins.
For a couple days last week, I probably had about 50 in a 24-hour period, and then they went away as quickly as they started.
Today… Well, today is [...]

I just finished a show on “NatGeo” about the private security firms working in Iraq. It was a really interesting watch. They’re not there to engage in combat, but they’re there for “security,” such as escorting construction materials for a new police station (something insurgents are eager to stop), and transporting VIPs around.
IEDs are apparently [...]

For those of you who don’t monitor police scanners regularly, I’d like to introduce what can be considered a fairly scary fact: their computer systems go down all the time.
Where it usually comes up is when they try to run a license plate or a person, or to query NCIC or similar. The officer calls [...]

I just discovered PhotoRec, a tool for recovering digital camera images.
For the non-geeks, a quick basic background…. When you save a file, it writes it to various blocks on the disk. Then it makes an entry in the File Allocation Table, pointing to where on the disk the file is. When you delete a file, [...]

I won’t lie–I love OpenBSD’s spamd. In a nutshell, it’s a ‘fake’ mailserver. You set your firewall up to connect obvious spammers to talk to this instead of your real mailserver. It talks to them extremely slowly (1B/sec), which keeps them tied up for quite some time. (As an added bonus, it throws them an [...]

For whatever reason, we’ve been getting a lot of calls asking us to donate money to various causes all of a sudden. My mom did some research and unearthed some interesting information. Most of the calls come from “paid fundraising” companies. They take a percentage of what you donate–usually around 40%, it seems. We had [...]

While I don’t believe Rudy is going to make it far in the campaign, and while I really don’t like the attack ad element of politics, I’m frankly pretty appalled with Rudy Giuliani. I think it’s immoral to try to use 9/11 to your advantage. But Rudy’s use seems particularly insidious. He keeps running ads [...]

Why isn’t there a really good “network appliance” as a network gateway? You can get a low-end firewall/router, or you can build your own machine.
Setting up OpenBSD is no walk in the park, though. I want to build an “appliance” based on OpenBSD, and give it a nice spiffy web GUI. You buy the box, [...]

We’ve been having a lot of intermittent network problems at home. Periodically, our Internet cuts out. At first I assumed it was our ISP–it’s no longer Adelphia (run by pharmacists), though–but subsequent research indicated that it wasn’t our ISP’s fault: our router was going down.
My dad set it all up, so I wasn’t too sure [...]

While I make no secret of my political beliefs, I ordinarily try to shy away from outright endorsement of candidates. I used to think that politics was kind of like religion: something that’s a very important part of peoples’ lives, but something that’s bound to offend people if you talk about it much. Plus, I [...]