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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • While the broader cybersecurity field has seen rapid advancements, such as AI-driven endpoint security

    Ya, about that “AI-driven endpoint security”, it does a fantastic job of generating false positives and low value alerts. I swear, I’m to the point where vendors start talking about the “AI driven security” in their products and I mentally check out. It’s almost universally crap. I’m sure it will be useful someday, but goddamn I’m tired of running down alerts which come with almost zero supporting evidence, pointing to “something happened, maybe.” AI for helping write queries in security tools? Ya, good stuff. But, until models do a better job explaining themselves and not going off on flights of fancy, they’ll do more to increase alert fatigue than security.



  • While I hate the idea of people losing their jobs, stepping back for a moment and looking at what they are claiming, its not terribly surprising:

    Spencer said the roles affect mostly corporate and support functions

    When companies merge, this is kinda needed. You don’t need two fully functional HR departments. While the HR staff from the buying company will likely need to expand, it won’t be by the same amount as the HR department of the company being bought. As network functions are merged, you probably don’t need all of the IT staff which came with the merger. A lot of management functions likely end up merged, meaning redundancies. And this sort of thing is going to move through a lot of the non-project work functions of the company.

    Yes it sucks. But, it’s to be expected in a merger. Now, whether or not we want this level of consolidation, that’s a different ball of wax entirely. The last thing we need is more studios falling under the sway of these massive companies. That’s the thing which should be drawing our ire.



  • Not really. IP addresses are really easy to change. And doubtless the threat actors will see that their IPs have been identified and will roll them over soon. The solution is to go after the tactics the attackers are using:

    The attack chains exploit known security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, such as weak credentials, to obtain an initial foothold and execute arbitrary code on susceptible instances.

    1. Install your updates. If you have a server open to the internet and you haven’t patched known exploited vulnerabilities, you deserve to have your network ransomed.
    2. Many products have either vendor provided or useful third party security configuration guides. While there are situations where business processes prevent some configuration changes, these guides should be followed when possible. And weak passwords should not be on that list.

    EDIT: for Oracle Web Logic, you do a lot worse that going through the DoD STIG for it.


  • Yup, this right here from the blogspam:

    he not only failed to challenge the core of Covid ideology—that other human beings are pathogenic so we need to restrict our freedoms and isolate

    It was pretty well demonstrated that COVID was spread via airborne particles and the best way to limit exposure and spread was to keep people away from each other. Unfortunately, people are selfish and don’t understand risk well. So, actual enforcement was necessary.

    And this guy gets funnier.:

    As a final and devastating blow to the traditional understanding of market mechanisms, advertising itself became corporatized and allied with state power. This should have been obvious long before big advertisers attempted to bankrupt Elon Musk’s platform X precisely because it allows some measure of free speech.

    Free speech and freedom of association goes both ways, bucko. When X decided to give platform to Nazis, advertisers are free to say, “ya, fuck you” to that platform. And that shows up again in:

    Similarly, Tucker Carlson’s show at Fox was the most highly rated news show in the US, and yet faced a brutal advertising boycott that led to its cancellation.

    Turns out advertisers don’t want to be associated with Russian assets. Ironically, that’s a case of the free market working the way libertarians claim. Someone does something bad and the market punishes them for it. Unlike the major failure of markets which was stage 4 smog alerts in the '70’s because no one gave a fuck about air quality. So, the EPA was created to actually deal with a “tragedy of the commons” problem which the “free market” would have continued to ignore.

    This is not how markets are supposed to work but it was all unfolding before our eyes: big corporations and especially pharma were no longer responding to market forces but instead were currying favor with their new benefactors within the structure of state power.

    No actually, it is. The advertising boycotts weren’t about “state power”, it was about companies responding to their potential customers. When major market segments are basically saying, “we don’t want to associate with Nazis”, companies respond. Again, that’s actually libertarian ideals in action.

    …while Koch-backed FastGrants cooperated with crypto-scam FTX to fund the designed-to-fail debunking of Ivermectin as a therapeutic alternative.

    And, we’re back to the “pants on head” , anti-science idiocy. It’s funny that this guy seems pretty well read on history and economics, but is falling for all of the anti-vax crap, hard.

    It should go without saying that lockdown is the opposite of libertarianism, regardless of the excuse. Infectious disease has been around since the beginning of time. Are these libertarians just now coming to terms with this?

    Or maybe, they have actually read a history book on the Black Death and were hoping to avoid repeating the joys of cities running out of places to put dead bodies and just shoving them in empty buildings.

    Honestly, if one’s libertarianism cannot manage to oppose decisively a global lockdown of billions of people in the name of infectious disease control, complete with track-and-trace and censorship, even though the disease had a 99-plus percent survival rate, what possible good is it?




  • I live in a county, without an incorporated city; so, our budget reflects the whole county. And thankfully, the county already breaks the budget down by percentages:
    #1 - Public schools - 50%
    #2 - Capital Improvements - 7.7%
    #3 - Debt Service - 7.6%
    #4 - Fire, Rescue and Emergency Services - 7.4%
    #5 - Law Enforcement - 6.3%
    #6 - Social Services - 5.6%
    Everything else drops off sharply from here

    Honestly, not all that unexpected. Education is expensive and is mostly done at the State and Local levels. So ya, that’s most of the budget. “Capital Improvements” could probably be titled “roads, and a couple other things which barely count”. So again, not a surprise. Roads are not cheap to maintain, especially in a rural county. I was surprised that law enforcement was as far down the list as it is. And also seeing Social Service being more than a rounding error was nice. All in all, not terrible.


  • I would assume they have some basic stuff running 24x7. I can’t imagine a network which doesn’t have Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) running 24x7 these days. There’s also things like firewall logs, which are almost certainly being captured (or at least netflow). Stuff like screen recording and mouse monitoring is probably saved for extreme cases. That said, my own experience has been pretty close to:

    We’re not going to look over your shoulder while you watch YouTube videos but if we notice you’re watching a lot of or you start visiting porn sites, we’re going to start monitoring you.

    Quite frankly, no one’s got time for that shit. I work at an organization with a bit north of 25,000 employees, and we have less than a dozen security analysts. While I could run a search against our firewall logs and see evidence of folks dicking around. I have much better things to do, like running down abnormal processes and writing up reports on users who got their systems infected while dicking around. And that’s really the way it comes to our attention, most of the time. Someone is out trying to download movies or software on their work laptop (you’d think people would know better…) and they pickup malware. We get an alert and start investigating. While trying to determine the source, we pull browser history and see the user out on “SketchyMovieSite[.]xyz”. And then their dicking around becomes our problem, mostly because the site had a malicious redirect, which is where the infection came from.

    So ya, they may not be looking, but I’d always bet they are recording. Logging isn’t useful if it isn’t recording at the time of the compromise.


  • Remote work and pay. I was already interested in getting a remote gig when COVID hit. We went to a hybrid schedule and I realized that I really liked working from home. Also that my job was pretty much built for it. While many of the folks I used to work with are still hybrid, fully remote was never an option. I worked with Classified systems and I could never convince them to put a SIPR drop in my home. I guess you need to get elected President for that.

    As the world was opening back up, many companies saw remote work as a carrot to offer cybersecurity folks and I started to see a lot more job postings with it as an option. So, I put my LinkedIn profile to “looking for work” and started getting recruiters messaging me on a regular basis. One hit me up with “REMOTE WORK OPPORTUNITY” (yes, all in caps) as the lead for an offer. What followed that sounded interesting and I started talking with him. A few week later, I put in my notice and started working in the private sector. Got a pay bump in the move as well.

    My time in the FedGov space was overall a positive thing. I learned a lot and got to see systems locked down in a way that actually mattered (I never thought I would miss STIGs). At the same time, I don’t see myself ever going back. The bureaucratic nature of everything is soul crushing. And sitting in an OSS all day long sucks. It especially sucks when you’re the only one in the container and need to go out and take a piss. Clear the room, arm the alarm, spin the lock, sign the sheet, go piss. Open the lock, sign the sheet, disarm the alarm, get back to wishing for the sweet, sweet embrace of death.


  • When I worked as a US FedGov contractor, I was greeted with a long warning banner every time I logged into my computer. The tl;dr version of it is “fuck your privacy”. Being that I was part of cybersecurity for the site I was working at, I was one of the people doing the fucking. While we didn’t read everything from everyone all the time, we were logging it and could pull it up, if we were performing an investigation. We also had some automated stuff scanning for patterns and keywords on a regular basis, which could trigger an investigation.

    While I’m no longer in the FedGov space (thank the gods), I still assume that everything I do on my work system or with work accounts is being logged. Also, I’m still working in cybersecurity and am often still the one doing the privacy fucking. Yes, everything is being logged. We may not look at it today, we may not look at it tomorrow. But, when HR and Legal ask us about a user’s activity, we can usually be pretty detailed. Act accordingly.


  • It is now functionally impossible to detect anything about the traffic or the Wi-Fi router without some serious or illegal methods.

    You should really spend some time learning about WiFi signals. Tracking down rogue Access Points is a pretty common thing and having the SSID turned off does fuck all to prevent it. On the easy end, many enterprise wireless network controllers have rogue AP detection built right in and will show you a map of the location of the rogue AP. Harder, but still entirely possible, is running around with a setup just detecting the signal and triangulating it.


  • If you are located in the US and aren’t currently a complete fuck-up, the Federal Government can be a way into the GRC side of cybersecurity. Between civilian and DoD sites, they have analysts and auditors all over the place and always seemed in need of folks willing to pour over checklists and OQE artifacts. This first place to look for positions in that vein would be on usajobs.gov. Though unfortunately, the FedGov made the decision to classify both GRC and sysadmin positions under the 2210 category; so, you’ll probably have to dig through a lot of sysadmin listings.

    Another path into similar positions is to look for FedGov/DoD facilities in your area. Once you find one, take a drive around the area and look for the names of businesses in the area and start researching those businesses and their open positions. There will almost certainly be the big ones, like Booze-Allen Hamilton, BAE, Boeing (yes, that Boeing. They do a lot outside of crashing aircraft), etc. But there will be a plethora of smaller companies with seemingly random names and little public facing who supply the local site with hordes of contractors. And, while these are contractor positions, they are a lot more stable than contract positions in the private sector. I spent 6 years as such a contractor and only stopped being one when I took a job elsewhere.

    I will say that “entry level” is going to be harder. No one wants to hire an train someone without experience, which puts you in a catch-22. For all the suck involved, you may want to consider putting in some time working a help desk. At minimum, it keeps you in proximity to the field, teaches you something about systems and provides related, if not direct, cybersecurity experience.

    Best of luck.


  • Playtron’s CEO, Kirt McMaster, added, “We are thrilled to join forces with such a legendary games publisher as Square Enix. The PC we know is morphing into new forms that require a purpose built OS for gaming that meets the demands of powerful new gaming hardware such as handhelds and new players who have grown up in a mobile 1st world with much more sophisticated UX sensibilities. This investment will accelerate the development and deployment of GameOS and create new experiences for players around the globe.”

    Huh, so Playton’s CEO is an early example of an AI being used to replace people.




  • LA will be “car-free” for the Olympics. For definitions of “car-free” which include crippling car traffic everywhere except tiny islands around a few select locations. Said locations being strategically placed to make the crippling traffic worse everywhere else. And once it’s all over, everything which was built out will be allowed to fall into disuse and disrepair. As is the Olympic Tradition. But, at least, a bunch of large companies will make a lot of money, with all of the expenses covered by California and LA tax payers. Again, in the best Olympic Tradition.