I ran Dell diagnostics on the PC, and no problems were detected.  Except when the test go the video card, the test froze up for a while finally ocming back to life, but, no problems were detected.

So I started thinking about getting a new PC for the home office.

After looking for a new computer I went to the back of the computer to check the video connections on the back of my video card.  I unplugged both to find DVI connections.  After reconnecting the first monitor would not come back to life, so I went to the back and really worked on the connection.

BINGO.  I rebooted the machine and its running REALLY fast again.

I believe thsat the monitor is PLUG and PLAY and there was a problem with the connection that caused the PC to quirk out and lock up.

This has to be one of the strangest computer problems I’ve seen.  And my home office PC is back up to FULL SPEED!

My favorite parts of watching the space shuttle were listening to the flight director pole the fight operations teams to get a go / no go decision for the launch, and finally, at T-10 seconds, the sparklers ignighting under the main engines to start them and bring them up to full thrust at T-5 fore the launch at T- zero when the solid rocket boosters were lite and away we went into the heavens.

I typically try to be a positive guy, and have a positive look at things, but, I was sad knowing that the United States and Nasa will probably not have an American Launch vehical ready for another 20 years.

With all of the bizaree entitlement programs and foreign wars not in our countries strategic interests that we have paid for over the years, it is completely ludicrous that Nasa did not have the vision or funding for a replacement for the space shuttle.

Over the last 30 years, the parade of Nasa Adminstrators has been asleep at the wheel, and should at least be identified as being wildly incompetent for not driving forward a replacement vehical for the space shuttle. 

The space shuttle was wholely unique in the history of space flight.  The hugh payload bay is amazing.  The abililty to launch the shuttle like a rocket, and land it like an airplane is amazing!   I believe that the space shuttle is one of the most amazing inventions ever in the history of the world.

But, the program also shows what is completely inane in our country and our ability to piss away money.  We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the space station, and now, have no way for the united states to send repacement parts, supplies or astronauts to the space station.  I predict that in 5 years, we will dump the international space station out of space and into the ocean because we can’t repair a critical component required to keep the space station in space.

And there is the hubble space telescope which has expanded our view into the cosmos.  With the space shuttle, we flew 3 or 4 repair missions where we launched the hubble, and went back to fix key components to keep the hubble alive.  Nasa has already said that on the next catestropic failure on the hubble, they will send it crashing into the ocean, and another chapter of billion dollar scienticific exploration will come to an expensive end.

Nasa should have started designing a new space shuttle 20 years ago, and had the vechical ready to go with the retirement of the space shuttle program.  Imagine apple coming out with the iPad 1, and never designing the next generation technology.  That is unheard of business, but, at Nasa, thats exactly what has happened and we allowed it.

And the cost of human capital in florida is also another tragedy of the shuttle program shutdown.  10,000 or so people will lose their high technololgy jobs associated with United Space Alliance and the Kennedy Space Center.  And what about all of the people who live in the towns surrounding KSC who have businesses that will no longer be frequented during the thrice a year shuttle lunches that bring hundreds of thousands of people to Florida?

I hope that Nasa comes back to its senses and once again dreams of soaring into space.  I certainly hope that they do and can 0nce again “boldly go where no man or women as gone before”.

Final Spsace Shuttle Launch of Atlantis

But, this is interesting.  We refreshed the Objectsoft.com web site a few weeks back, and added a contact us form.  The web site in this current incarnation is new, and the contact form is new, but, in the last few days, I have received a handful of SPAM contact form posts.  Thats right.  SPAM on the contact form with a link to other web sites in the comment field.

That seems to me to be a lot of work.  Write a web crawler that searches the Internet for contact forms, reads the HTML, fills in the fields, like name, email address, telephone number and then, places a link in the comment field.

Rest assured that I am not going to click on the link I received, but, the depths to which these spammers will go to get a person to click on a link and visit a web site is pretty amazing.

Security Land Lives!

A good network behavioral anomaly detection system could have detected the information leaving the Sony network for a new location, but, there is a chance they it could have missed the incursion.

But, if Sony had invested in DLP technology, they could have created an exact fingerprint of the sensitive customer information stored in their databases, and then, using DLP Data in Motion monitoring technology, they would have been notified when the sensitive information was detected traversing outbound from their database server to the Internet. 

If you think about it logically, customer name and credit card information should not be moving from any database at Sony out towards the Internet in clear txt format. Credit card numbers leaving for the internet clear txt is a violation of PCI compliance standands and could result in Sony being restricted from accepting credit cards.  Or if there was some type of clear txt credit authorization process for one credit card, create a rule that monitors for the movement of 10 or more customer names and credit card numbers across the DLP network monitoring sensor and alert on that movement.

With Sony now reporting a $3.2 billion dollar loss for the year, clearly the price point of implementing a complete DLP system would pale in comparision to the cost of the disclosure events now facing the company.

If you would like to dialog about implementing DLP at your company, contact me today!

LG @ objectsoft.com – remove the spaces

And visit us online: http://www.objectsoft.com

Visiting black hat and defcon each year, and seeing the triving hacker community at its finest from Security researchers to hackers sitting cross legged on the floor in the middle of the main hall, you have to believe that hacking for profit is alive and well, and a marque company like Sony getting hacked has to be on the radar screen.

While no web site is complete foolproof, and protected, I am confident that Sony could hire an application security penetration testing firm to review their web site, close the gapping holes, which 8 successfull hacks in the last two weeks appears to indiciate, and get Sony off the Hacker wall of shame and back to making money instead of losing 3.2 billion dollars last year according to published reports.

If Sony is really desperate, the can hire us to perform an application security audit and pentest to help them close the most gapping security holes on their web site.

Visit us online:

http://www.objectsoft.com

There have been a number of companies that I have worked at where my IT security friends who still work there have been emailing me laughing about the misery at RSA.

The RSA press releases and conference calls have been vague at best.  The concept of an advanced persistent threat digging itself deep into the infrastucture of one of the major security technology vendors in the IT space is a mind boggling concept to digest.

Even if RSA had coded an NSA back door into the secure ID product, requiring the user asking for authentication to proivde a valid LAN ID and password would still protect the company from unauthorized access to the company network if the RSA Secure ID is used for VPN authentication.

I think the issue that will affect RSA is ultimately going forward is a companies trust in RSA and their security technology.

How does a malicious virus get installed on an RSA PC in the first place?   Lets go through a list of questions I would ask.

Did RSA have a content aware Firewall on company Internet access to look for malicious code coming down?

Did the RSA PC not have a white list of software that could be installed on the PC?

Did the RSA PC have split tunnelling enabled when not connected to the company VPN?

Even with negative answers to the questions, did RSA have network anomoly detection hardware installed on their network to detect a PC gaining access to the family jewels of security information from RSA?

If the PC infected with a malware virus bot was a develop with access to the source code AND serial number and seed database, why was that information not protected better.  Does a software developer with access to the code need access to the production seed and serial number database?  Again, if there was normal network traffic to either the source or the master database, there would have been a network anomonly detected accessing the other.

How did the malware connect to the command and control center on the Internet?  There are many content aware firewalls that have a black list of known black listed IP addresses and IRC networks.

The scope of the breach looks like RSA will be doing some serious soul searching and security architecture redesign.

And, we will see shortly if there was an RSA NSA back door coded into Secure ID if an exploit is released shortly.

The question is, what can RSA do to regain the trust of the companies who have selected RSA to protect company infrastructure and security.

We made the jump this summer to iPhone 4 for my family when my daughter dropped her phone out of her pocket at Great America when on the American Eagle.  Since I needed to get her a new phone I figured why not.  And I have really enjoyed having a iPhone.

So, I had the opportunity to get a Mac Book Pro and switch from a PC to the Mac Book as my primary laptop.

90% of the work I do on my personal laptop is Microsoft Office, and the new Mac Office 11 is amazing.  I love the interface.  I liked Office 2003, and hated 2007.  Mac Office 11 is much more like the 2003 interface.

When my son’s iPod touch broke, I went to the apple store to get it replaced.  I asked one of the Apple support people which Windows emulator they recommend. Two said Parallel 6.  I bought a copy and have decided that this is one of the coolest software packages out there.

Inserting my XP CD into the MAC drive, Parallel 6 built me an XP VM that runs the one or two windows programs that I still like to use while letting me use this amazing Mac Book Pro with an excellent monitor, keyboard, etc.

Check out a new Mac Book Pro today!

The PC would not reboot.

It started up, but, then complained that one of the hard disks was bad.  Sure enough; one of the two drives raided together was toasted.

When you hear that you should be backing up your computer, its no lie.  When your hard disk dies, you can be up a creak.  But, not me.  In august of this year, I invested in Acronis backup software.  Every night my PC dumped all of its data to a 2TB external drive connected to my PC.  And, this evening, I successfully recovered my data.

Its amazing at Best Buy is selling 500 GB SATA disk drives for $47 bucks.

If you don’t have automated backup software on your PC, rush out and get some today!

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