Paco Hope @paco@infosec.exchange

My 14 year old son just told me how he hacked his online Spanish assessment to get it to translate all the questions into English. He opens Firefox dev tools and disables some client-side javascript that tries to prevent him. Finally a child I can be proud of.

Then we have to have the conversation about how—while it's cool—make sure you actually learn the material. Don't cheat yourself out of an education...

Just replied to someone on slack with hw0dy instead of howdy. I'm obviously tired.

I look at incident announcements like this, (https://www.blackbaud.com/securityincident) where they had an on-prem environment and 2 different clouds. The on-prem environment was attacked with ransomware and data was disclosed. You don't see anyone saying "see! see! this is why you use the cloud! it's more secure!" Because that would be stupid. But when you see these same articles and the cloud environment is the only one breached, you see the reverse all the time. "See, the cloud is not secure."

OK. Time to vent. I was checking out a MUD toolkit (Evennia, anyone know others?). I went to their demo instance. I am using TELNET. T.E.L.N.E.T! Typing a password in the clear, echoed back to my terminal over an unencrypted connection. And you want to tell me my password is not strong enough!? I'm dead.

This is a great reason why I use duckduckgo instead of google. https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/28/google-search-results-prioritize-google-products-over-competitors

I am trying to help my recruiters find places to advertise for infosec roles. They asked me about SecurityWeek. When I looked at the authors of articles there, it's the least possible diversity. The demographics of authorship on that site are Exhibit A in what's wrong with diversity in infosec.

Quick tip. If you're trying to download really old versions of macOS, they're hard to find (e.g., El Capitan, etc.). You can find lots of dodgy sites that you don't want to deal with, but it's hard to find legit Apple web sites. The trick is to search for "enterprise". Then you can find pages like this, which has a legit link to an Apple DMG. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206886

One of the more obscure and least understood #security principles is "psychological acceptability." Nobody spends any time on it. Just google a phrase and see that everyone plagiarizes everyone else. Search for "principle that aims at maximizing the usage and adoption of the security functionality"

I have just used "Why is Gamora" to answer a customer question about TLS certificates. That's probably the high point of my week. :)

Some people might call this "parody". In my world, it's a bit more like "Tuesday". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMOOG7rWTPg

I had a non-delivery notification from my personal mail server to outlook.com. It said "your ISP's network is on our block list.' My ISP is AWS and the network is a /14. It's bonkers.

It's like living in a 500-unit apartment complex and a company says "unit 402 didn't pay for their purchases last month, so we're not selling anything to anyone in that complex any more."
#spam #isp #email #smtp

Green text, meet red text. Red text, meet green text. Now that you guys are acquainted, would you like to go off, have a little chat, and come back to me with a USEFUL error message?

If you have some spare compute cycles and you want to donate them to fighting #covid19, there's a medical research programme called "Folding@Home" which is similar to SETI@Home, but for medical research: https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/15/coronavirus-what-were-doing-and-how-you-can-help-in-simple-terms/

This is a fascinating C2 vector. But I gotta admit: it's hard to take it seriously with this diagram. https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2020/02/25/cloud-snooper-attack-bypasses-firewall-security-measures/

Not mine. But absolutely appropriate for this forum. :) #infosec

That’s big news. #OpenSSH adds support for Fido/U2F tokens. https://www.zdnet.com/article/openssh-adds-support-for-fidou2f-security-keys/

I wrote a blog post on how to use KMS key policies to act as a separate access control for data in Amazon S3. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-use-kms-and-iam-to-enable-independent-security-controls-for-encrypted-data-in-s3/