Plan for IA-240 at Eastern Mi.

** This has been updated:

So one of the classes I'm taking this term is required for my degree. And I have to worry about protecting my computer in it.

The course:
IA 240. The main point of the class, that I took away from the first night, is to learn how to write Analyst reports. The over all goal is to give us the skills required to go work for a government agency. (The program has a lot of students leave and get jobs in the public sector).

The Final:
The professor will assign us something to do an analysis report on at the end of the semester. To teach us on Operational Security, we have to protect our final project from our class mates. He gives extra credit for each student we got information from.

The Problem:
The professor has already said we are required to bring laptops to class, and class mates, as in the past, will try hacking that computer to get your final project. **Update-1: This was said in a warning, not in a you will be hacking each other in this class.

Over all, knowing the above, one really wants to get your hacks in early, get a back door, and be able to come in to the classmates boxes at will. Lots of way to do that. But I'm about not being an easy target. In fact I don't want my system compromised.

Options to protect me:
- Change operating systems every class, either local install, from USB, or DVD / CD.
- Run Backtrack, and use that as the the desktop (not meant for that).
- Run TAILS
- buy dedicated machine, and use nothing on it, doing forensics on it at the end of the semester, and keep nothing on it.
- Be really evil... (run vm or a dedicated box with a sticky honeypot).

The Plan:
I don't have the money for the dedicated machines.

I thought about putting my money where my mouth is and installing Backtrack, on an old hard drive, then harden it. This would fit in with my Linux Hardening applied to BackTrack talk. However don't like the idea of swapping the hardware that often. Trying to hack my class mates would be un-ethical in my eyes anyway.

I don't have an interest in hacking my class mates. Just not being hacked.

So, I've already got Full Disk Encryption, I'm going run with The Amnesic Incognito Live System (TAILS). I'll take an energy hit, the main hard drive won't be touched.

The only thing I have to worry about is saving my work from class (not that I type much in class, I'm more about pen and paper). But if there is something I need to save, I have things for that. I'm using Google's two factor authentication. I also could look into doing File System over SSH. Not sure if I'll have to go that far.



*Update-1: the professor was not giving permission. he was giving a warning.

out of shape

yep... running, between 2.2 and 2.4 miles in 35 minutes (couch to 5k, wearing 20lbs weight vest, and VFF). and that's on week 5. granted took a week off between 3 and 4, and this is my second time on week 5, failed horribly last week. Swings, had to change after every 25 at the fitness center tonight. my 16kg kettlebells. farmer walked there and back, down stairs and up, and 700 feet 1 way. only made it through 2 minutes of Tabata thrusters at 16kg. used to be way better. and could only lift about 5 times every 20 seconds. I hate being out of shape. 246, 22.8% (give or take) body fat. Yes, I know, better shape than I was in almost two months ago, but still just depressing, when I used to do all of that much better.

Wow, not liking the new look of blogger, but that's something for later. Really need to get my site set up. Time is an issue. I'll have to go back over my time management skills and then get them rolling again. Anyway this post is a public shaming. Updated numbers for body fat checking Weight 260.8 waist 46 inches (at navel) hips 47 inches forearm 13 inches wrist 8 inches works out to be 26.4% body fat or something like that. Started reading The 4 Hour Body (4HB). The personal GPS numbers: Mid-Bicept 14 inches L 14 inches R Waist 46 hips 47 Mid-Thigh 25 inches L 25 inches R Total inches (add all those numbers together) 171. I'm going to modify the slow-carb (almost no carb) diet some. Plus couch to 5k (C25k) with 20lbs weight vest, and a Kettlebell program I have going through my head. good mornings, halos, 2 hand swings, shoulder presses, push-ups, rows, squats. 5 sets. We'll see what happens between now and July 31st.

Centos 6 Guest on Virtual Box

Maybe someday I'll get the other blog up and running, but right now I'm working on a project. one of the things I needed to do, was set up a lab.

CentOS 6.2, Virtualbox.

After installing the Development Tools group, and the kernel-devel package, I kept getting errors saying it couldn't find the source code to build. Dug around. finally looked at the run script for the Additions software.

while the kernel and the kernel-devel package were both 2.6.32-220, the directory under /usr/src/kernel/ was called 2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.i686. The installer was looking for 2.6.32-220.el6.i686.

a quick ln -s exiting looked worked magic, it finished with no errors.

The console still doesn't look right, but that is going to have to wait.

more on the new side project

So after looking around, asking a few people and doing a little reading I've updated www.ratsandrogues.com. Kind of funny that that is going faster than setting up rattis.net.

So yesterday, I set up WordPress, and re-wrote the two entries that were on the Rats and Rogues page. Then created two accounts. Then finally set up email using virtual domains (Postfix + Mysql + dovecot, etc).

Wish I could say it was all easy and simple. But it wasn't.

Problems I came across:
Wordpress:

1) www.ratsandrogues.com/feed wasn't working. The feed validator sites were saying not feed webpage. Going there got a 404 error.

2) If I set the url to be a custom for the entries, I could get a 404 error. But leaving the urls set as standard instead of custom would work.

2.5) the settings page for custom url said that .htaccess was not writable.

Solution
It looks like all three issues were related. One large problem with simple solutions but took forever to research.

2.5) created the .htaccess file in the root directory for the wordpress site. then changed ownership to the apache daemon user name.

That allowed the site's setting page to update the .htaccess file.

1 & 2) This one took more time, and lots more research. It looked like that .htaccess file was being ignored. I remember disabling .htaccess when I set up mod_security. Did some reading. I had set AllowOverride NONE in the config file, and I've had to make changes to the vhosts under that global directive. Once I changed that for only the Rats and Rogues site both the rewrites for custom URLS and the feed started working.

Email:
Uh this one was a mess.
1) getting the alias forwarding table to push to multiple people.
2) getting email to forward to the people above.

Solutions:
1) I searched around forever trying to figure out how to insert more than one name in the time. I saw some screen grabs that showed it but no idea how they did it. Then one webpage said that most use PHPMyAdmin. Yeah, didn't want to install that. To make it work:


INSERT INTO forwarding (`source`, `destination`) VALUES ('aliasemail@example.com', 'email1@example.com, email2@example.com');


Which is just the written out way of saying give the value of the 2 columns, 'source' and 'destination', with 2 elements. The first one is the alias email. the second one is a list of emails seperated by commas (,) between the single quotes (') for the second element.

2) With both names in the forwarding table, I gave it a test.

<user2@example.com> (expanded from <alias@example.com>): User
unknown in virtual alias table

<user1@example.com> (expanded from <alias@example.com>): User
unknown in virtual alias table


Fixing that required commenting out:

receive_override_options = no_address_mappings

in the Postfix main.cf

Which left me with:

User unknown in virtual alias table


which was there because while trying to fix the other problem I set the domain name in

virtual_alias_domains =


once I fixed that, everything worked.

Hey look I have new side project

The Rats and Rogues InfoSec Podcast.

www.ratsandrogues.com

new site isn't up.

So the last entry said, I was working on a new site. Sadly I haven't had the time to dedicate to it like I thought I would.

I also realized, I never got around to writing my review for the WIFU / OSWP class. Well.. that's not entirely true. I wrote one, but was never published. I was thinking yesterday about it for some reason, and was planning on writing a review last night from a slightly different perspective.

Now I just need to find the time.