Sometimes simplest of the errors get you bad….and this was one such time.
I was trying to connect to my Oracle XE DB using SQL*Plus but kept getting this errror

connect hr/************
ERROR:
ORA-01034: ORACLE not available
ORA-27101: shared memory realm does not exist

Turns out I did not start the DB instance.
Start -> All Programs -> Oracle Database 10g Express Edition -> Start Database

An interesting incident happened this past week to a friend – he had his identity stolen. More specifically, someone got a hold of his social security number (SSN), his date of birth (apparently) and his address. What the scammers or their “mules” (a term used to describe criminals who act on behalf of the actual criminal at their behest) did was that they went to the bank and requested to wire a huge sum of money to an account. The neat trick they played was before actually going to the bank they called the Verizon helpdesk and suspended my friend’s phone service. When they reached the bank and showed the bank agent the ID (some sort of a non-standard / fake ID) and gave the SSN to the bank agent, he/she grew suspicious and tried to contact my friend. However, due to Verizon suspending his phone service, the bank agent couldn’t get a hold of my friend. Luckily, the bank agent also sent my friend an email to which he responded promptly. The culprits were arrested and the investigation is still on.
What was quite interesting was, the modus operandi where the criminals know that banks rely on calling the customers if they suspect fraud and they had this covered. Quite intelligent.
So, you know what you need to do if your phone suddenly stops working – check if ID thieves have had a run on you, change all your passwords including email, change your credit card accounts and bank accounts and PINs and place a hold on your credit history with the credit reporting agencies such as Experian, Equifax and TransUnion.

The introduction of low-cost flying alternatives in the Indian skies is a good thing for the Indian consumers as one would reckon. However, the consumers only stand to gain if they get a service which at least gets them their money worth.
Sadly though, the quality of service provided by these low-cost airlines is also “low-grade”. The business principle seems sound that people who want food/refreshments in flight buy it but that does not necessarily mean that one gets hard pressed to board the flight itself. The airline management needs to rethink that low-cost does not mean high tension. My flight experience was as follows:
I was to board the flight from Delhi – Mumbai at around 9:00 pm. However, until 10:30 pm there were no announcements which made me ponder about the very existence of the flight itself. At about 11:00 pm it was announced that the entry would be from Gate # 3. The people rushed in like a horde of animals trying to get into a DTC (Delhi Transport Corporation) bus. Then a technical snag – the key was unable to open the gate # 3 – occurred to make the matters worse. The gates were changed to Gate # 1 resulting into a new frenzy of people trying to reach gate # 1. In what ensued, there were a series of announcements for passengers to board the flight, however, there was a slight problem. The officials on Gate # 1 were not ready to let passengers through. The flights like “Air Deccan” have given a new meaning to the term “fight to the finish” as your fight to get a seat in the flight never ends!

Now I’ve no problems considering that the population of India is huge. However, I do have a problem when seemingly intelligent (?) people do not display basic intelligence. Air Deccan issues unique numbers on it’s boarding passes when people check-in. Why these numbers are not used for seat assignments is a question that only Air Deccan can answer. Apparently, they use these numbers to identify which passengers have / have not boarded the flight.

Unitl these companies realize that cheap tickets should not mean cheap quality the consumers will continue to remain at a loss in these airlines which are advertized as a “high value for money”.

So I decided to use WPA2 Personal with AES+TKIP on my new Linksys WRT54GL router after my old D-Link router died. However, there were some issues in getting it to work on Kubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft with my Intel Wireless IPW3945abg.
So I decided to put my /etc/network/interfaces and the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf files up here for reference:
Suppose BLAH is my ESSID name. The psk value is an altered value for elucidation purposes only:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=0
eapol_version=1
ap_scan=2
fast_reauth=1

# WPA-PSK
network={
ssid="BLAH"
proto=WPA RSN
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
psk=aaaa3fa7bbbbccccf6d44e199ecb2bebccccad25a0778beeee104db0b3fffff7
}

The value of the PSK command was obtained by using the value associated with the prefix “psk=…” after issuing the following command:

# wpa_passphrase BLAH passphrase
network={
       ssid="BLAH"
       #psk="passphrase"
       psk=aaaa3fa7bbbbccccf6d44e199ecb2bebccccad25a0778beeee104db0b3fffff7
}

The /etc/network/interfaces looked like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
wpa-conf managed
wpa-driver wext
wpa-ssid BLAH
wpa-ap-scan 2
wpa-proto RSN
wpa-pairwise TKIP
wpa-group TKIP
wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-psk aaaa3fa7bbbbccccf6d44e199ecb2bebccccad25a0778beeee104db0b3fffff7
pre-up wpa_supplicant -Bw -Dwext -i eth1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant

Once I was done with this configuration all I had to do was, issue the following command to get wireless working with WPA2 and TKIP:

# /etc/init.d/networking restart

Yesterday the whole day was spent in trying to go through the Nutch source code. Chris and Ashish helped me out alongwith this link
Dissecting the Nutch Crawler. This showed me that :
The file Fetcher.java has a reference to the “content” variable (which is of type Content). I found that initially only the URLs are stored during the crawl, then a request is sent. Then based on the MIME type of the content returned, the ParserFactory class creates a parser (html parser, pdf parser etc.). The code for these parsers can be found at nutch-0.6/src/plugin/. These plugins do the parsing and get the content as a “Parse” object. Using the Parse.getText() method (which we also felt was interesting) we can get the text content of any page!!!!!

An interesting thing happened today …I was trying to redirect some input to /dev/null in cygwin…using something like:
some_exec -p params 2>&/dev/null | grep blah
I kept getting an error : bash: Ambiguous redirect.
I then realized that I should probably doing a simple direct and not a re-direct…seemed to solve my problem. Come to think of it…it makes sense, why should I need to redirect when I’m sending it to /dev/null…should simply be able to direct it using:
some_exec -p paraa 2>/dev/null | grep blah

Server-Side Request Forgery is a security issue in applications where an attacker is able to get a server to send some type of a request (these days mostly HTTP/s requests) that the server should not be able to send. This issue is the classic abuse of trust vulnerability – the server tends to sit in a “trusted” environment (e.g., DMZ, your cloud VPC, etc.) and the users of the application sit outside the trust boundary (e.g., mobile devices, cafe, home, corporate environments, API clients within and outside cloud).

A brief history
In this blog post though, I won’t be talking about all the fancy new things that have had SSRF issues – you can likely find a few hundreds of those anyway! I am going to be talking about a brief history of this issue and what happened before we gave this issue a “name” – SSRF. The earliest references to the name “SSRF” appear to come from a talk done in BlackHat US 2012, and wayback machine tells me that the CWE-918 page was authored sometime around 2013. If you look closely at the CWE-918 page though, you will find that there were old CVEs dating back to 2002, and 2004. There was a Shmoocon talk about it in 2008 too but the term SSRF was not established until 2012.

The Issue
I was working on a penetration test for a financial services firm in 2010 of a popular load balancer that offered a GTM (Global traffic manager) solution and that allowed folks to login and obtain restricted execution environments wherefrom certain applications could be exposed and that would allow remote workers or untrusted entities who you only want to expose certain applications could use. The issue was in a POST request post login and IIRC even pre-login (though my details on this are fuzzy). This might be circa 2010 timeframe and to my knowledge the issue was not issued a CVE and wasn’t associated with Knowledge base article – I may not know 100%. The guidance from the vendor was simple – update the software and move on. The issue was this – an authenticated or an unauthenticated user would send an HTTP POST request to a page with a base64 encoded parameter that included a hostname which would trigger a DNS request on the back end of the GTM site. The time it took for the response to get back would indicate whether the domain was legitimate or not. So I used the a popular dictionary and enumerate all the hostnames from that directory that were legitimate and the ones that were not sitting outside on the Internet and mapping the hosts on the internal network.

The backstory
What the vendor of the GTM software did not know was how critical this application was to the business of the customer. They seemed to be dragging their feet without updates and meanwhile the customer – a financial institution with lots at stake could not go live. The pressure mounted on the IT staff to fix the issue and the vendor while being responsive was unable to give a firm date quickly – remember this was 13-14 years ago prior to bug bounties and responsible disclosures still were quite clunky! And the customer was also advising me to push the software vendor so we could discuss. Thankfully, on the vendor side, there was a solid security person who understood the issue immediately and its impact and advised the software teams to do what was right. They made the process post authentication and they also added tokens, limits and constant time responses to fix the issue.

Fast forward
Today, obviously things are a lot better. And I wrote this blog post so the old me can look back and point to this in a meaningful way without forgetting the old experiences among the new.