Installing Firewalk turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be. There were some compilation issues and some library errors.
The chief amongst them was:

checking for arp_get in -ldnet... no
configure: error: No libdnet?  http://libdnet.sourceforge.net.

I did install libdnet using aptitude but it did not do the trick. Thereafer, searching a few forums got me this information. The “Libdnet” that Firewalk looks for is libdumbnet1 in the ubuntu language.
So I got the Debian packages from the following links:
libdnet1
libdnet-dev
I continued to get that error and no wonder because there was nothing in /usr/lib.
So I executed the following commands :

$ cd /usr/lib
$ sudo ln -s libdumbnet.so libdnet.so
$ cd /usr/include
$ sudo ln -s dumbnet.h dnet.h

Then there was a compilation error:

firewalk.c: In function ‘firewalk’:
firewalk.c:193: error: label at end of compound statement
make[1]: *** [firewalk.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/trance/Desktop/Firewalk/src'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

So then opening the firewalk.c file in vim (and following up on line 193) showed that the “break;” statement was missing after default: switch statement.
So then I added the the following characters (without quotes) “break;” at a line above the comment as shown below:

                    default:
                        break;
                        /* empty */

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo cp man/firewalk.8 /usr/local/man/man8

Now firewalk was installed and ready to use!

Using watermarks in word documents looks really cool. But the problem occurs when the documents become too big. In such cases, the document becomes exceedingly slow to react to scrolling. Adobe PDF conversion is an even bigger problem.
To remove the watermark it is simple enough : Format -> Background -> Printed Watermark. Then click on “No watermark” and you are golden (or you should be golden).
I’ve observed that the watermark does not get removed many times when you have too many sections in the document.
In such cases: Goto View -> Header and Footer. Click on “Show/Hide Document Text”.
You should see that all your text has disappeared except the watermark. Click on the watermark and you should be able to select it like a floating image. Press the “delete” key and lo! behold! the watermark is gone.
This took me a while to figure out and it was quite frustrating. I hope this post helps someone!

Silsilay, the latest movie by Khalid Mohammed, a critic famous for his Sunday Times articles, is a disaster to say the least. Mr.Mohammed, who has torn apart most of the movies in his journalism career, to my disappointment, has not proven himself any better than the pack he tore apart. I think if he himself saw the movie impartially he probably would have given it negative five stars.
Silsilay, as the movie is called, is a movie of three stories running one after the other albeit aimlessly. The first story is of a film actress (Bhoomika Chawla) who falls in love with a bookie (Rahul Bose) who is two-timing his girl-friend, who in turn is two-timing him…sounds complex…don’t bother…it’s not complex but just kiwi drainex!
The second story is of a young girl (Riya Sen) who looks stunning in the movie and is afraid to lose her virginity and is consoled by her overly promiscuous friend to do *it*. Ashmit Patel steps into the story as her boy toy (read “snuggies”) and Jimmy Shergill, who is her co-worker from work and is looking to gain her attention. Some good (aimless) smooches result between Ashmit and Riya and Khalid Mohammed succeeds in spinning a story that is as ridiculous as Riya and Ashmit’s acting. For god’s sake Riya, Nirma soap advertisements were better!
As if the torture was not enough, Mr.Mohammed had a life-saver (or at least as he thought) a still more ridiculous story. Well, some B-grade films would have called this 3rd story a *saga*…but I frankly think that Khalid Mohammed doesn’t think!
It’s a combination of a love triangle…sorry…love quadrilateral with a diagonal (please figure out what this means on your own…watching the movie wouldn’t help anyway). In this story Tabu plays a housewife whose husband (KK) is going out with a (super hot) air hostess (Celina Jaitley) and whose son suffers from Oedipus Complex ( where a person falls in love with his own mother). As if this carcass did not stink the theatres…there was more bull**** coming across in the form of Shah Rukh Khan in between stories and scenes. Mr. Khan there are many ways to win Filmfare awards…this is probably the last way to *buy* the awards. Mr.Khan does a saving act by signalling to the audience how he behaves when nature calls arrive…how he insanely goes about dancing for no reason whatsoever.
This is all a part of the crap that I call Silsilay!
-Rajat.
Awesome Japanese Artifacts!

There has been a lot that’s being said about the use of AI in Cyber Security. This is for good reasons – people have said here and folks in information security (as we have called “cyber security” for decades now) have experienced first-hand. It’s only natural that already stretched InfoSec teams look at AI as the “saviour” to the skills / personnel gap to close it. Then again, there is a lot being said about companies selling products as “AI enabled” too.

But realistically speaking are there some things traditional organizations (“non-AI”) can do to actually do what many of these “AI enabled” products do? I wouldn’t have written this blog post now would I if the answer was anything but yes! 🙂

Let’s look at them:

1. Anomaly Detection – this is age old! Almost all security tools that “alert” us on something are essentially using this. How well? That’s debatable. The kind of anomaly detection that I am talking about is simple (but different). For example, abnormal login attempts on your Internet-facing systems is anomaly detection. So is abnormality of DNS queries. Your Cloudtrail logs (in AWS) showing an inordinate spend on EC2 instances is also anomaly. A abnormally small amount of time spent between a git commit and a production deployment of that commit is also odd! Your SaaS or Okta bill being high or your APIs getting throttled (without any known changes) are all anomalies. The response time for these depends on whether or not you have been able to automate these anomalies. The day you automate these “known” anomalies you are already doing what many of these “AI enabled” products are doing today (after of course charging you an arm and leg!)
2. UBA / User behavior analytics – a lot of products do that but the most simplistic things are reduction of logins / preventing logon from areas where you do not expect your users to originate from. This is “reduction” of attack surface. Is that foolproof? Hell no! Why? Generally, speaking adversaries do not attack systems from their home computers. Adversaries operate by using trampoline servers (sometimes layers of them) to send the attack from the “attacker controlled bots”. But it reduces your area of concentration. And then you can use UBA more effectively since you do know where your users are expected from at a macro level. To improve your “AI-ness” you can then add capabilities which are able to say not at a macro-level but on a per user level where that specific user is expected to originate from. And if it looks abnormal (or anomalous) then ask them to step up. There are numerous vendors in this space as well as products on the cheap which you could do. There are open source libraries that can also help you do that on the cheap. Again, something very expensive “AI enabled” products can do too.

I am sure there are many other things that as an organization one can start doing. Obviously, at the end of the day, every initiative takes resources and by no means are any of these simple but YMMV depending the size of your datasets, users, and organizations.

I finally got a candidate on the Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVE) list. Apache Tomahawk also released a critical security update due to my disclosure to iDefense. In case, people are wondering I did not get any money for the disclosure to iDefense. It was just a case of responsible disclosure.
The advisory can be found at:
http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2007/Jun/0305.html.

In the capitalist world, it is said that the companies survive on the hyper-consumerism of the people. The highly competitive economical scenario results in an environment where (as they say) consumer is the winner, but not without a fight.
A few weeks back, my Compaq Presario Laptop 2575us went bad. Well, the laptop is 2 yrs old and it has already been serviced twice so I guess my patience thresholds have diminished over a period of time. But this time around a person with even immense patience could have lost his mind. So here’s what happened. My laptop’s S-video port had been dysfunctional since the time I can recall but I never had so much time to let my laptop go out of my hands. This time when I sent it for repairs my laptop almost disappeared from the face of the earth for almost 25 days. And when they returned it to me to a wrong address I had a premonition of difficult times. The “repaired” laptop even failed to start.
This really infuriated me coz my 25 day wait had gone down the drain. So I called up the customer care and they asked me to ship the laptop to service center yet again. But this time around they wanted me to wait for 3 days before I could FedEx it to them. It was completely unacceptable to me. So I spoke to the supervisor and became as adamant as a stone. I continued to ask him for next day shipping and he continued to repeat that he could not do that. A 2hr45min sparring continued on the phone and it resulted in him being the loser as he disconnected the phone. He kept saying that this discussion is going nowhere as we cannot reach an agreement and I kept insisting that the call had multiple destinations : 1. To the HP supervisors and 2. To the BBB .
This guy called himself Nick and he also refused to give me his employee number. I knew very well (because of past experience that Compaq uses words like “You have no proof for your requests” etc.) so this time I needed some real strong evidence of my conversation. So I requested the permission from this Nick guy to allow me to record the conversation. I think this made him a little wary of my intentions. But still he did not give me his details. I think he was really scared because he felt that my wrath could result in him facing the music from his bosses in Palo Alto, CA. There were a few interesting discussions, for example, he said “I am Nick and you can identify me with this name alone.” to which I retorted by saying “Well…I know that Nick is a common name in U.S and you guys might as well redirect my call to NY Knicks judging by the way things are going.”.
So the next day I called up the HP Customer Care Service Manager’s Line at 1-877-917-4380 , code 94 option 1. This time I spoke to a guy called Douglas Gilmore who was equally tough with me (if not more). He refused to acknowledge any of my concerns initially. But later as the conversation progressed, it went on from being just a plain discussion to a heated argument. However, I did not utter even a single foul word because I knew that he could use my language as a pretext to disconnect my call which I was not willing to risk at all. So throughout the discussion I kept my head cool and tried to explain the things to him. But after going through the history of the whole thing, he realized that I had suffered a lot because of this laptop and that the attitude of the Customer care was rather cold. So he finally agreed to give me a replacement after much requests. This was probably my best argument till date and I think that it was some good thinking on my part as well as some codial behavior on the part of the managers that I could get what I truly deserved: a replacement to my defective laptop.
-Rajat.
Japanese art forms