One of my acquaintances told me today of an innovative scam.
So this friend of mine posted an advertisement for renting her apartment out on craigslist. As soon as she posted the ad, an email response came that looked absolutely legitimate.
The respondent claimed that he was a professor in the UK and would be visiting the US on a sabbatical. He even listed a phone number for contact as well as gave some very legitimate looking references. The respondent also said that he wanted to rent the apartment in about 1 months’ time. So far all good. My friend contacted the respondent over the phone and there was nothing odd about the conversation.
In the subsequent conversations, the respondent requested my friend to collect delivery of the furniture for his apartment (which he had indicated that he was going to rent). The respondent said that he would send a check to her and she should then collect the delivery of the furniture and pay the furniture company out of her own pocket. The respondent even sent in a personal check to my friend in advance. She deposited it and sure enough, the amount showed up in the bank account. But what had her spooked out, was how could someone give away a check to some one just like that. For some reason, due to a weird hunch, she decided that she was not going to engage in any financial transactions on the behalf of someone who was sitting hundreds of miles away who she barely knew. In the end, it was this hunch that saved her from losing the money.
So the respondent (thinking that my friend had agreed to undertake the transaction on his behalf) gave her the phone number and information of the furniture company. My friend googled the furniture company but could not find anything. Moreover, the furniture company would not even pick up the phone. This put my friend in doubt over the dubiousness of the potential renter. As it turned out, that the check bounced a couple of days later and if she’d paid the furniture company it might have been used as a way to steal money from my unsuspecting friend.
I guess what could be interesting to know here is that if there was a legitimate phone number (say from Google voice) and a legitimate website (which costs a few dollars for a month now), then my friend could have possibly been duped.
This serves as a reminder to us of the reality of the world we’re living in where scammers are looking for an opportunity to dupe us.

I wrote a very small script to set static IPs on a kubuntu box.

#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -lt 4 ]
then
    echo "Usage: $0 <interface> <ip> <netmask> <gateway> <dns1>"
exit
fi
ifconfig $1 $2 netmask $3
echo "Static IP set"
route add default gw $4
echo "Routes added"
if [ "$5" != "" ]
then
    echo "nameserver $5" >>/etc/resolv.conf
fi
echo "DNS set"

This is not a post but nostalgia. This post is actually a transcript of the first interview of my life. It was for a top Indian Software Consultancy Company (referred to as “XYZ” from now on). I remember that it was July 9th, 2001 and it was a really rainy day in Bombay. While coming to the college I was totally drenched and was looking rather distraught! I cleared the aptitude test and then came the Big One – The Interview!
I went to the interview thinking that i wanted to completely screw up the interview (coz I was interested in some other company) so i went there casually dressed with a demonic smile on my face >:-) . In hindsight, I think the way I appeared for this interview was really gutsy for me and I probably couldn’t have done that had I been craving to get a job in this company. Here is the transcript of the interview.

XYZ: So Mr Rajat … tell me about urself and ur family in *short*
Me : In the year 1980 i was born in allahabad and spent the initial yrs of mylife in blah blah blah ….and completed my schooling in Shree Ram Welfare Society’s High School, Andheri(W), Mumbai . therafter i went to Sathaye College….(blah blah blah) and i came to this college thinking that this college would be good.
XYZ: & how did u find this college?
Me : (thinkin for a while and then with a heavy heart ) ok !
XYZ: Rajat y did u chose our company (XYZ) instead of other companies.
Me : i did not choose XYZ i’ve just come for this interview ! In fact u guys have come to our college (for on-campus placements) i haven’t come for this interview.
XYZ: but would u like to join our co.?
Me: i’ve come for this interview ! what does this indicate to u?
XYZ: give me one reason why u want to join XYZ?
Me: i don’t want join XYZ… i’ll goto any other co. that comes next…as a matter of fact any other co. will take me!
XYZ: Mr Rajat in this form (these guys had given us a form to fill in whichwe were supposed to write the salary we desired which i forgot to fill… oops faux pas ? well not quite) which we have given to u , uhaven’t mentioned the salary u want…. what r ur expectations?
Me : I want more!
XYZ: MORE !%#$%$#$ y do u want more?
Me: because i know i’m worth it!
XYZ: u say so but it is for us to see whether u r worth it!
Me: put me to test and i’ll prove i’m worth it !
XYZ: but why do u want more ?
Me : everybody wants more so what is wrong if i want more!(the guy seems to be pissed off to my delight)
XYZ: but u must be having some expectations , don’t u?
Me : yes of course , i have . but u r not gonna live up to them. u had made it quite clear the salary u’ll be offering to us … so it doesn’t matter what my expectations are u r gonna give only what *you* want to give us , so there rests the matter.
XYZ: tell me about this person whom u know & works in XYZ.
Me : He is my cousin and he stays at andheri.
XYZ: so what have u heard from him about our co. ?
Me : NOTHING!
XYZ: but u might have heard something at least!!!!!
ME : we meet at social gatherings and the last thing we want to speak about is XYZ!!!
XYZ: ok tell me about ur project … this assembler
Me : blah blah blah
XYZ: ok … so in ur form u write u want “A GOOD NETWORKING PROJECT PREFERABLY BASED ON NETWORK SECURITY” . what do u know about networking?
Me : NOTHING!
XYZ: (a very surprised Mr. Sleepy said) NOTHING !?!? then how can u say u want a project in it?
Me: well , i’ve attended a few seminars @ IIT and it ensured me that that was the only field i’m interested in.
XYZ: then ur interest may change after studying the subject!
Me : No, it won’t change!!!!
XYZ: wat do u know bout networkin?
Me: latest happenings … blah blah blah
XYZ: suppose that we don’t have a project in network securities for you then what will u do?
Me: i have written that it is my ambition to work on a networking project…AMBITIONS ARE NOT ALWAYS FULFILLED.
XYZ: Rajat … there is a rule in ur college that if u get 1 co. u r noteligible for the rest.we offer u 16k .. so if tomorrow infosys comes and offers u 20k wat will u do?
Me : I WILL GO !!!!!
XYZ: u’ll go !?! that means you are after money ?
Me : who said that !? i never said that ! i want more money but more important than that is the work environment & the kind of projects i get. if i getbetter projects there i’ll go money is secondary but still important .
XYZ: (as if trying to juistify a lesser salary) u know rajat that on paper their (Infosys) salary may look large but 20% blah blah blah ….. 12.5 % blahblah blah …6% blah blah blah … (and lots more statistics which lasted foran eternity as far as my viewpoint goes)
XYZ: do u realise that XYZ has a 3yr. service agreement or u r chargedRs.50,000/- . what are your feelings about that?
Me : it is absolutely wrong.
XYZ: why?
Me: The word “bond” itself says that u r “bound” to the co. no matter what.
XYZ: that is why we don’t call it a “bond” we call it a “service agreement”.
Me: ok…that’s just another name for it. i personally think that instead of”binding” people to ur co. u should create such an environment that people like to stay in ur co. with their wishes and so the co. will benefit if peoplework with their wishes.
XYZ: do u havre any questions for us?
Me: yes , sir i do! in ur qns a few minutes back u mentioned infosys and in ur pre-placement talks u said u r no.1 software co. of india. how can u say thatwhen all that we see in the newspapers is infosys and with u comparing urself to infosys?
XYZ: infosys is 12% blah blah blah … 19% blah blah blah …(and lots morestatistics that made me feel as miserable as our indian cricket team witheverything out of control)does that answer ur qn?
Me: ya! sir may i ask another question ?
XYZ: ya sure! (with some uneasiness)
Me: sir, this yr. we have seen our seniors get whole lot of “back out” letters! what r ur feelings about that?
XYZ: OUR FEELINGS !!??!
Me: i mean r u people going to do the same with us?
XYZ: (i think this was it and he lost his complete cool and he pointed to me & said sternly) till this date our company has not given any “back-out” letters to anybody.
Me: Thank u .sir. it was a pleasure!

This was the first interview of my life and I ended up getting selected for this company. It was a great experience working there and I realized that money is not everything! At the end of it I think I was not rude but dangerously honest in giving my answers and this plan could have backfired on me but it didn’t … may be I was lucky or may be this was destiny!

I had to wipe my existing OS and had to reinstall Nessus on the new BT5R3 image. However, I still wanted all my previous scan data and users to be unaffected in the new OS. So how did I do that? Here’s how:

Take a backup and restore the following folders on the new install:

1. Users Folder (/opt/nessus/var/nessus/users)
2. Master.key (/opt/nessus/var/nessus/master.key)
3. Policies.db (/opt/nessus/var/nessus/policies.db)

If you do get an error after this follow these steps to get rid of errors and just reactivate the nessus feed as follows:

1. service nessusd stop
2. /opt/nessus/sbin/nessus-fix –reset
3. /opt/nessus/bin/nessus-fetch –register [activation code]
4. /opt/nessus/sbin/nessusd -R
5. service nessusd start

tl,dr; Blue-Green deployments for critical uptime applications is a strong deployment strategy but if a deployment fixes critical security issues be sure that the definition of “deployment complete” is decommissioning of the “blue” environment and not just deployment of “green” successfully.

Organizations have gotten used to following Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) for software releases. The use of cloud solutions such as AWS Code* utilities, Azure DevOps or Google Cloud Source repositories enables enterprises to quickly and securely accomplish CI/CD for software release cycles. Software upgrades undergo the same CI/CD tooling and the dev teams need to choose how to do the upgrades.

There are a few different ways development teams upgrade their applications – full cut-over (same infrastructure, new codebase deployed directly and migrated in one go), rolling deployments (same infra or new infra gradually upgrading all instances), immutable (brand new infra and code for each deployment and migrated in one go), blue-green deployment (same infra, simultaneously deployed in prod, gradually phasing out old instances upon successful tests from a section of traffic). The Blue-green deployment strategy has, therefore, become quite popular for modern software deployment.

What is a Blue-Green deployment?
When you release an application via Blue-Green deployment strategy you gradually shift traffic as tests succeed and your observability (Cloudwatch alarms, etc.) does not indicate any problems. You can do that via Containers (ECS/EKS/AKS/GKE) or AWS Lambda/Azure Functions/Google Cloud Functions and traffic shifting can be done with the help of DNS solutions (Route53/Azure DNS/Google Cloud DNS), Load balancing solutions (AWS Elastic Load Balancer/Azure Load Balancer/Cloud Load Balancing). Simplistically, take your current (blue) deployment and create a full stack (green) and use either DNS or load balancers to slice out a traffic section and test the “green” stack. This is all happening in production, by the way. Once everything looks good, direct all the traffic to green and decommission the “blue”. This helps maintain operational resilience and, therefore, this is a popular deployment strategy. AWS has solid whitepaper I recommend to review to dive in from a solution architecture standpoint if you are interested.

Security Considerations

Some critical security issues (e.g., remote code execution via Log4j, remote code execution via struts, etc.) demand immediate fixes because of their severity. If your blue-green deployments are going to take days and your tests will run over a very long period (say days) then any security fixes you make also will get fixed after a successful “green” deployment and “blue decommission” only. If during that window or prior, an attacker managed to get a foothold into the impacted “blue” environment, then even decommissioning of the “blue” becomes critical to claim the issue is fully remediated. Typically, when incident responders and security operations professionals breathe a sigh of relief is when the fix is deployed. Typically, the software engineering teams consider fix as deployed is when the “green” is fully handling all traffic (and its unrelated to the decommissioning of the “blue” environment). In this case, the incident responders need to remember its not the deployment time when the risk is truly mitigated, its mitigated after completion of cut-over to green and decommissioning of the blue. There is a subtle, yet important, difference here – and it really comes down to the use of shared vocabulary. As long as security operations and software development teams both have this shared definition of what deployment means, there are no misunderstandings.

9 hrs down the line I’m still capturing packets, now comes the challenging part-to make the hash tables of raw data! My Rabin’s hash algo seems to be working but the only hiccup that could happen was when the negative hash values are obtained. I don’t know whether it is a bug in my code or what but I got negative values for Rabin’s Hash when I gave the string “this is test”! This is gonna test me for sure.

People tend to think that gone are the days when the “RPM Hell” used to exist. We have yum, aptitude and what not! If you install linux on a PS3, I’d like to bring you back to reality, especially like me when you have yellowdog 5.0 installed on a first gen PS3.
What is interesting is that all these package managers rely on repositories in /etc/yum.repos.d/*.
If you do not have the good repositories then you can kiss goodbye to installing the Cell Broadband Engine SDK provided by IBM. This SDK has the spu-gcc, spu-g++ which is the right set of compilers if you want to use the 1 master processor (Power Processor Element – PPE) and the other six SPE (Synergistic Processor Elements – SPEs) …think of these as slaves. You might wonder where’s the 7th of the cell processor, well, you cannot access it because it is used internally by the PS3 for virtualization.
So I got a yellow dog 5.0 iso image from here. I followed the instructions for installing it from here. I did this almost a year ago! Yes…I did actually keep it dead for a while! Then I installed gcc and compiled John the ripper! To my utter disappointment, there was no performance benefit!
Then Marc Bevand told me at Toorcon X that I needed spu-gcc to compile JTR on PS3 to get the benefits. So I got the cell sdk ISO from here. I then mounted the ISO.
mount -o loop cellsdk11.iso /mnt/disk
cd /mnt/disk
cd software
./cellsdk install
I got bunch of errors. It wanted me to install freeglut-devel and tk-8.4.*.
Thus began my journey of 10,000 steps to get the dependencies resolved and I burnt my fingers, keyboard, brains, etc….and although I realized that everyone in the US and the world had found hope…things were not looking bright for me! Until I bumped into this fantastic repository here. Trust me it took me about 8 hours of incessant installing and compiling (almost 120 odd different files) and scores of google searches to land me into this. I installed the glut, libx11, tk, tcl, libtcl, glut-devel, libstdc++, libstdc-so7, and many other packages that I cannot even recall now to get the cellsdk to work! And even though I did, I still couldnt get ./cellsdk install to work! After about 8 hours of effort and being so close to success just seemed evil. Then I realized that all the packages needed were related to the PPC64 simulator (libx11.ppc64, libtcl.ppc.64, etc.)…a quick look into the readme told me that I could neglect that using the –nosim directive to make it work.
Finally,
./cellsdk install –nosim
worked!!!!!
A small step for mankind but a giant step for me!