Trade School, Degree, or something else completely?

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Last Thursday I listened to Risky Business 377. The part that really got me engaged was the section with the sponsor, RSA. They were talking about how they are working with schools to build educational SOCs.

What they were talking about though, and I’m paraphrasing from my point of view, was making Universities less theory like and more Trade school like. For example why not add a check point certification class to get students out with some experience and a certification after 3 months of class?

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New Job and stuff

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So for those that hadn’t heard, I started a new job about a month ago. I’m no longer doing firewall audits, secure network design, and mainframe web emulation. I was kind of sad to leave some of the projects I was working on un-finished, but that was the nature of the beast.

So now I’m working in a Security Operation Center, as a CIRT Event Analyst (or at least that was the job description they sent me after I interviewed of what the job was going to be).

The downside is I now have a 2+ hour daily commute. It should take 45 minutes or less, but well we only have 2 seasons. Winter and Road Construction. It also means I have less time to work on things I want to. Reading and projects have been affected.

I’ve also been less than healthy lately. I got really sick before Bsides Detroit. The night before the con, I was at the hospital. I also ended up missing the con because of being sick. A fever for a week, and everything spinning regardless if I was sitting standing or laying down. Turns out I had an inner ear infection. Got drugs that helped but didn’t make me better. I wended up running a fever for 3 weeks. Now I just have this annoying cough.

Updating talk

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For Bsides, as mentioned earlier, I’m making some changes for the talk.

For Bsides Detroit I’m swapping out the original Raspberry Pi B devices from the project for the Raspberry Pi 2 B.

The first time I did this, with the RPi-B, I made one image got it working and then cloned it to the others. It caused minor problems with the wireless card naming. I also still had to touch them all to change names, static ip addresses, and the kismet configs.

This week there was a new version of Kali out for the Raspberry Pi 2 when I checked. So I downloaded it, patched it and installed the software. Then created the clone image.

I am going to have to touch each one anyway so figure I will just get the one image with the software, and then load each one and configure it.

Bsides Detroit 2015

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The last schedule I have seen has me speaking at 4pm on Saturday the 18th at Bsides Detroit.

I know it’s a surprise to me to.

Talk is similar to the one I gave at Circle City Con on Raspberry Pi and Wifi detection.

New this talk: Looking at the clients, email alerts (I hope) and all on Raspberry Pi 2 (again I hope).

ARRL Field Day

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Over the weekend I did my very first ARRL Field Day. It was rather interesting. For those that don’t know what Field Day is, it’s when the Amateur Radio Service (yes there is a public service aspect to the HAM Hobby and License) gets together to make contacts under adverse conditions. The club I am in, Ford Amateur Radio League, teamed up again this year with the Livonia Radio Club. We had a tent with a generator out in the middle of a field.

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Getting the Raspberry Pis ready

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As I mentioned before here and here I’ll be at Circle City Con, talking about the Raspberry Pi WIDS project I did last year at Eastern.

I’ve updated all my Raspberry Pis, including the firmware. I’ve setup a Raspberry Pi B+ and the Raspberry Pi 2 with the respective Kali images. But they still need to be set up as kismet drones, and tested.

I also need to set up the hard drive for the con, and update my slide deck.

1 week to do it in. Plenty of time.  (Famous last words).

Why is useful documentation hard to find?

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I just finished reading The Linux Journal’s “Geek’s Guide to Enterprise Monitoring Success“. It was good, talking about how to leverage the monitoring to work for the IT department in an organization. This also talked about some business problems you can face, which I’ve seen first hand. I’ve been in the “metrics from another group’s monitoring tools” meeting before. Trust me, you need to be sure of yourself and what you’re doing for the company before that happens. I’ve also seen monitoring systems destroyed because the wrong people had too much access and trying to  tune the system for their needs only.

For what it was, this was a good guide. From the title though, I expected something different.

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Yet more with Fail2Ban

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So yesterday, I thought I was all good on Fail2Ban today’s logcheck emails show there were still problems with Dovecot.

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More Fail2Ban fun with Debian Stretch

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Yesterday, going through email yesterday, mostly logcheck emails, I found that Apache wasn’t blocking the attackers. It was seeing them, but not adding the ip address to iptables block list.

The fix was setting up the maxretry it was set rather high, I moved it down to 1 like I had it in the past. I also adjusted the search time to 1 hour and the ban time to 7 days. I thought I was good, and didn’t give it a second thought.

Today, looking at the logcheck emails (really it’s a great IDS for system admins to get a view into their box), there are a lot of automated attacks on the mail server NOT BEING BLOCKED!!! It worked yesterday, there were even banned ip addresses in the chain.

After lots of digging, and several changes that didn’t work, I decided to go for the bad option.

Really the real reason was that Fail2Ban had been around for a while. Things changed, and I had a weird mishmash of configuration files. After the install I removed the files in the package that were not debian related, not sure why bsd; osx; or fedora are in the Debian package to start with.

Followed the local customization file directions creating jail.d/server-defaults.conf with apache-auth and dovecot in them. ssh is handled by defaults-debian.conf. Why the new file, in case the Debian one gets over-written by new stuff later.

Restart the service and…

Still not working for dovecot.!? (tailing the log and watching iptables).

Turns out, it’s where Fail2Ban was set for default to watch for login errors for Dovecot (also noted through the logs). It’s looking in /var/log/mail.warn. I don’t know if I changed it, or it’s legacy left over, or what, but my box it’s /var/log/auth.log where Dovecot login failures go. So I added the logpath to jail.d/server-defaults.conf, restarted Fail2Ban and it worked.