Capacity

October 29, 2024 - 4 mins read

No one likes the sappy I’m such a good manager look at me manage with my great insights post. But every now and then I learn something and I think other people who are moving from a technical resource to a leader may gain insight or value from it. So I share here. Civilian corporate leadership has been a whole different bag than military leadership. In the Army, most of my unit was planned out months or even years in advance.

2024.10.29.News You Should Know

October 29, 2024 - 6 mins read

Breaches ‘Satanic’ data thief hits 350M Hot Topic shoppers • The Register - HotTopic, Torrid, and Lunchbox shoppers (around 350m) of them have had a few bits of info stolen; names, emails, physical addresses, dates of birth, last four digits of customers’ credit cards, card types, hashed expiration dates, and account holder names. Likely just watch out for My Neighbor Totoro-themed phishes and you’ll be ok. Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow • The Register - A Ukranian hacker group claims to have disrupted 87k alarms, destroyed 70 servers, and wiped 90TBs of data to pull off the hack.

2024.10.22.News You Should Know

October 22, 2024 - 7 mins read

Politics World Iran U.S. and Allies Warn of Iranian Cyberattacks on Critical Infrastructure in Year-Long Campaign Iranian hackers act as brokers selling critical infrastructure access - US and Allies are warning that Iran has ran a year long campaign to break into water, waste-water, electrical plants, government, healthcare, and telecom systems to serve as an Initial Access Broker, selling credentials to other nations, threat actors, etc… These IAB’s aren’t damaging the networks, simply staging an maintaining a presence on the network until it can be sold or made useful.

RSS

October 17, 2024 - 9 mins read

What Is RSS? RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a protocol left over from the early days of the second internet. Adopted widely in the early 2000s, RSS became a privacy conscious way for users to get updated information from disparate news sources, blogs, content creators, and the like without having to visit individual sites. An interested reader could simply drop an RSS link into an aggregator and curate an “OPML” file of interesting blogs, video content creators, news channels, and other interesting content.

Yogurt, Chicken, and Child Labor

October 16, 2024 - 8 mins read

This post began as a diatribe by myself to an invisible audience in my travel journal. My infant daughter (Nibble,1f) is on vacation with us and has been eating copious amounts of Greek Yogurt to help combat the diarrhea caused by an antibiotic, cefdinir. In my musings, I wandered what it would have been like to travel with an infant suffering an ear infection with little to soothe her than the ineffective and near-witchcraft style medicine available prior to the age of antibiotics.

2024.10.08.News You Should Know

October 8, 2024 - 9 mins read

Mobile News Google Adds New Pixel Security Features to Block 2G Exploits and Baseband Attacks (thehackernews.com) - Google will now allow their Pixel phones to be configured to ignore 2G downgrade attacks caused by Stingrays (cell-site simulators) and other devices that emulate a cellular baseband (tower) controlled by their service provider. This will prevent attacks like those performed by Intellexa and Predator using the Triton malware. This will also prevent SMS Blasting which bypass carrier spam protections.

2024.09.10.News You Should Know

September 10, 2024 - 6 mins read

Privacy News Data watchdog fines Clearview AI $33M • The Register - Clearview scrapes photos from all over the internet, adds them to its database, then sells the data to advertisers and governments, some who use it without appropriate legal permissions (think 4th amendment/warrantless surveillance issues) Election News Spamouflage trolls pretend to be American patriots on X • The Register - #China - People’s Republic of China propaganda crew ramps up X and TikTok work claiming to be American citizens and “frustrated Conservatives”.

Fix It One Level Deeper

September 8, 2024 - 2 mins read

The Concept Recently I read a great article called Try to Fix It One Level Deeper by Alex Kladov, in which he discusses a unique (to me) approach to squashing software bugs. Instead of just fixing the bug at hand, Alex encourages the reader, and his team to dig one level deeper. Really determine why the bug exists at all. Is this parameter really being mishandled? Or should we even be asking for this parameter?

2024.08.27.News You Should Know

August 27, 2024 - 4 mins read

Hardware Backdoor Discovered in RFID Cards Used in Hotels and Offices Worldwide (thehackernews.com) - Hardware backdoor means even with appropriate controls, threat actors can still attack hotel and office doors around the globe. The FM11RF08S backdoor enables any entity with knowledge of it to compromise all user-defined keys on these cards, even when fully diversified, simply by accessing the card for a few minutes. Russia fears Ukraine hijacking home CCTV systems for intel • The Register - This is genius, the Russians have asked users in the Bryansk, Kursk, and Belgorod regions to shut off dating apps and IP cameras that Ukranians are using for intelligence gathering.

2024.08.20.News You Should Know

August 20, 2024 - 5 mins read

CISA warns of Jenkins RCE bug exploited in ransomware attacks (bleepingcomputer.com) - Jenkins vulnerabilities from January being used by threat actors for Remote Code Execution. Patches should be applied in every environment. Exploitation of this vuln and proof of concepts hit the web less than 48hrs after the issue was identified. GitHub Actions artifacts found leaking auth tokens in popular projects (bleepingcomputer.com) - GitHub breaks the principle of least astonishment/surprise by including tokens, api keys, other key material in artifacts download.