[idlethreat] Stupid is Durable

Here's a rather old-ish document that I published on Google Docs a while back.

Now looking back on it, it probably needs a revamp. and filling out of the particular bits. There's still a deep need to finish up the bottom bit and make it more presentable.

This evening I spent quite a bit of time coming up with a web-based OpenVPN certificate generator. while successful in writing up an application to do the job, there's still quite a number of dependencies that I need to flesh out and document before I can put everything together and present it.

In any case. Enjoy the other stuff. more later as it comes in.

tom

Yet another one-trick-pony bit of software.

This application will send a "beacon" message every two seconds from one server to another via UDP syslog. To make it go, you will need to run it with an argument- the argument is the IP address you wish to send message to.

Click read more for examples!

I've been working on some components of Utopiaprojekt this morning and run across the idea of sending the contents of the clipboard across the internet. So, after tooling around for a few minutes, I wrote up a working example using Python on OS X.

So, click on Read More for more information on how I did it.

Introduction

This is an old-ish app that I've been sitting on over the past few months and thought I should release it before it joins my BPOUS (Big Pile Of Unpublished Stuff) on a random hard drive somewhere.

Echo.py is a one trick pony. It tails a (configurable) log file on the system and sends the logs off to a syslog server for further processing. It's configurable for either UDP or TCP syslogging and is highly configurable, depending on your environment and needs. It's been tested on OS X 10.5 and Ubuntu 7.10 with Python 2.5.*

Since this application is written in Python, it can run on Windows, Linux, etc. Pretty much any OS with a Python interpreter can run this script. This script can be compiled as a "frozen binary" and run on systems without a Python interpreter installed on it. I will leave that exercise up to you, Dear Reader, on how to accomplish this.

The only real caveat to using the script is that if the application which creates the log file dies and the log is overwritten whenever it comes back up, echo.py will not catch that change and hang up, not sending out logs until it's restarted. Since the standard UN*X 'tail -f' exhibits the same issue, this should be considered normal.

Click Read More for more information.

Like all really interesting ideas I come up with and want to follow up on, this one happened last thing on a Sunday night when I'm at my sleepiest. Basic tenet is that transmitting credit card information across the internet for offsite processing is a huge security concern. The fix is, don't send it at all, but send a one way hash of information from point A to point B.

Click on "Read More" for the particulars.

Earlier today, I was searching today for some article or advice on how best to provide security and courtesy at the same time. I was somewhat startled to find that virtually no one - no one - is writing about the topic. In a security-conscious world, we seem to have forgotten that ultimately, security serves human beings. It's a customer service industry.

A friend of mine once said that his typical experience with network security professionals was that if he had hired them to secure a grocery store, they would proceed to install barbed wire fences, attack dogs, searchlights, metal detectors, and perhaps a helicopter or two before finally saying, 'Yep, no one will be shoplifting from here now!' And not only would they have discouraged any sort of legitimate customer from buying from the store, they'd completely ignore the possibility of a teenager with a forged ID buying beer.

Manners, politeness, and respect for fellow human beings as a whole seems to be something that have fallen by the wayside in popular culture. Being rude has been developed into something approaching an art form - an entire genre of comedy is devoted to just this facet of our society.

Combine this with the fact that we, as human beings, are no longer instinctively equipped to judge risks, and you arrive at the modern airline terminal - please take off your shoes and throw away your water, because out of the two billion airline travelers a year, we know you could be one of the few hundred terrorists.

Security isn't a destination, but a process. It's an ideal that will never be attained, not a product packaged into a box. And while there are always tradeoffs, there's no reason we can't combine good security with good customer service.

Well, it's another July 4th in the states and I'll hunker down for a bit and watch the festivities from a safe distance. Going to a family fish fry this afternoon and will try my best to keep up with people who never use computers in their daily life.

Wish me luck.

AHK is an excellent scripting program that's been around for a number of years now. In it, you can create hotkeys and macros for Windows systems to carry out a bewildering array of tasks.

I'm a Mac guy who, due to the nature of my work, has to spend a whole lot of time on Windows systems at work. Of all the Mac hotkeys that I miss terribly, + W (close window) is probably going to be at the top of my list. So, with a little hacking around last night I've successfully crafted up a hotkey (I use + W due to its location on the keyboard) which closes the foremost open window.

Window Closer

HotKey, #w, WindowCloser
return

; uncomment below to remove tray icon
; #NoTrayIcon

WindowCloser:
WinGet, active_id, ID, A
WinClose ahk_id %active_id%

The only real caveat to it is that Windows task management sees open windows as instances of applications. Close a window and you (may) close the application altogether. The Mac sees all open windows as children of the application. Close all the open windows, and the application is still running (and still requires a + q to quit it). However, it pretty much works as advertised pretty much everywhere. I will warn you that applications like Firefox will just close altogether when this hotkey is used. So, keep using your + w in Windows to those those tabs individually.

And Others...

While working on that script, I managed to fire off a couple of more scripts that will make things handy for me that I thought I'd share. This one will open up a new Explorer window in whatever folder you wish it to (I defaulted to the C:\ drive, but that can be changed). This is another Mac hot key that I have always liked. This hotkey is kicked off by using the + n keys.

HotKey, #n, NewExplorerWindow
return

; uncomment below to remove tray icon
; #NoTrayIcon

NewExplorerWindow:
Run C:\

; This one will open up an explorer window on your personal desktop
;Run C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Desktop

And finally, this one creates a new email whenever you hit the + e keys. I send a whole bunch of emails off every day and know it will be terribly useful here in the very near future.

HotKey, #e, EmailMaker
return

; uncomment below to remove tray icon
; #NoTrayIcon

EmailMaker:
Run mailto:

How to Implement?

Grab and install a copy of AHK on your windows systems and either copy-paste in my examples that I have above into new .ahk files, or just [Download Here].

Once you have them on your system and unzipped, edit the files to your liking and run them as is. If you want them to be runnable executables (I.E. .exe files), right-click on them and select "compile script" from the list.

I just remembered only after writing this was the rather huge project that I once wrote up in AHK at work. This was a few years ago and I was working in the NOC at a web hosting company (that I'm still at, by the way). One issue we alway seemed to run into was running down websites on IIS servers so we could troubleshoot them.

I wrote an AHK script that would pull all the active sites from IIS and copy them over to a Linux server. the Linux box would parse the list (as a .CSV) and inject them into a MySQL database. I wrote a PHP front end to the entire mess and you could perform boolean searches on site names and which server they were parked at.

It was a hackish affair, abd prone to failure, but at the time there was nothing quite like it for a number of years until that functionality was added into our current ERP system. I think I still have the source code for Badger somewhere around here.

Would be interesting to see those scripts again.

Ok, well, enjoy these for now.

Cheers,

tom

Here's some pics from my recent visit to Cozumel and Calicia.

Had a blast. More on this topic later.

tom