Monthly Archives: January 2016

Spending a weekend re-installing my firewall appliance was not my plan

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So recently while trouble shooting that mail log in problem from my phone, I started going through the web interface on my pfSense box. While in the LAN interface, and it being 4am, I was like why is block RFC1918 for the Wan (which is on every interface tab), and block Bogons, not checked.

So I did what anyone half sleep deprived would do, I checked the boxes and hit apply.  Then I couldn’t get back in to the silly thing. Console wouldn’t work. I just got a blank screen, rebooting while consoled  in would go through the post and loading of BSD but after pfSense started, I didn’t get a menu.

Hey I know, I’m a Nix person, I’ll boot from the live image, go in to recovery find and turn off that setting, sync to the hard drive and reboot.

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It’s all about the pcaps baby

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So my android phone as an interesting problem, granted it’s an S4, running not the latest build so I don’t know if that problem still exists. Apparently the way the default mail application is set up, it can’t sync the mailboxes unless the Sync button is turned on. But that doesn’t stop that the mail application from trying to sync on a schedule.

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Book Review: The Complete Guide to Shodan

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I’ve stumbled around with Shodan.io for a while now. It’s a great tool, but using it effectively has always eluded me. John Matherly has given me some great advice on twitter, and I like Daniel Miessler’s Shodan Primer. But I never really find the information I need at the time.

While I know it is great to find webcams and spying Super Gnomes, that is just something I don’t use Shodan for. A lot of the reason I use Shodan lately is for work. Usually someone in management asks will if anyone knows what Shodan knows about the company. Which of our systems are listed on there.

Today while stumbling around trying to look up the company name and the netblocks, and using Dan’s cheatsheet (linked above), I noticed a new link on the page. Book.

This link goes to Lean Pub’s “The Complete Guide to Shodan” by John Matherly. It is a pay what you want book. They suggest just under $5.00 USD, for the 60 page booklet. I’m saying it’s worth more than that. I paid $10.00, which I still think is too low for this book.

The book can be delivered to your Kindle or downloaded as a pdf, an Epub, or Mobi file. I grabbed the PDF and Kindle copies of the file (too small to read on my phone and never figured out how to get it to show up in the Kindle Cloud reader).

This book is divided up in to Web Interface, External Tools (like the linux command line), Developer API, Industrial Control Systems, Appendices, and Exercise Solution.

There are exercises at the end of the Web Interface, External Tools, and API sections. Not all of them worked the way they were described in the book. For example I couldn’t find the Rastalvskarn Powerplant, even though it shows up with the link in the solution section.

I’ve read some documents on the API and struggled to get them to work. After reading the book, while I still have some questions, I know I can write the Network Alert that management wants.

Get this book, it’s worth more than anything you’ll pay for it. While it is only just over 60 pages, the content is great! Especially especially the Filter list in Appendix B.

p.s. It is worth getting an account, and paying for access.

 

Oh look HTTPS

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Testing out Let’s Encrypt public beta. My thoughts so far:

90 days for the SSL certificate. Does that mean we’ll be seeing spammers setting these up to make their sites look more legit?

Mainly made for HTTPS on web servers. There is a walk through on making it work with email, using links, and some other dark Unix magic (what not everyone is running a linux mail server?). I saw a file for exchange but that’s not my cup of tea. It also brings up that whole 90 days thing again. So for now my mail server has something else.

So while the SSL Cert is good for 90 days, they tell you to update it every 60. Can’t wait to try that in 2 months. (that was sarcasm).

To be honest though, I do like the idea of Let’s Encrypt. I like that it has Debian love and script to make magic happen in the background. Less fiddling under the hood. I like that you can set up either Secure only (all HTTPS all the time) or HTTP and HTTPS. This site used to use a self signed cert for Administration, but now it’s all SSL.

Hopefully in the future we can get at least 365 day certs, more services covered, and most importantly MORE PEOPLE ENCRYPTING their web traffic.