darthfrosty

63 Followers
82 Following
206 Posts
25+ year technologist and Agile InfoSec leader. Purple teams for a safer Internet! I appreciate contrarians with thought-provoking points passionately argued. he/him

I'm not writing an entire blog post about how stupid a US TikTok ban would be because this is all that needs to be said:

If the Chinese government is in your threat model, don’t install TikTok on your device. Otherwise, your actual problem is surveillance capitalism.

Wait wait wait wait

Let me get this straight...

LinkedIn wants to generate crappy AI content and then invite me to fix it, for free, under some guise of flattery calling out my "expertise"

Really?

@SinclairLewis my husband, full sarcasm voice: β€œI’m beginning to think this district is run by a bunch of incompetent people.”
YA THINK?!
How is this supposed to help with our enrollment and teacher/staff hiring problem??????

@jeridansky

Boosting and adding more hashtags:

Birdsite thread with important information on the recent Minneapolis Public Schools data breach. It boils down to that if you've had a child at MPS or been employed by MPS since 1995, you better pay attention. And change your passwords. And set up two factor authentication. And monitor all your accounts for identity theft.

https://nitter.net/IanColdwater/status/1633586154988552193

#MNastodon #MSP #MPS #Minnesota #TwinCities #TwinCitiesMN #Minneapolis

https://sfba.social/@jeridansky/109996999882566128

Ian Coldwater πŸ“¦πŸ’₯ (@IanColdwater)

The Minneapolis Public Schools data breach is really bad. Much worse than we've been told. This affects current & former staff, students, & parents. The district hasn't been forthcoming, so here's a 🧡 w/ facts about what's going on & concrete steps to take to protect ourselves.

Nitter

This idea that somehow search engines _can_ arbitrate "truth" is just so… not how any of this works or could even conceivably work.

The reason that search engines "backstop" with wikipedia is because wikipedia is a giant curated and mostly-audience-appropriate collection of knowledge.

Knowing what is "true" is so incredibly nontrivial.

A friend gave me a broken laptop, with no clear problem description. There was no charger, so after rummaging around in my stuff, I found an HP charger that should work. The laptop was fine, but even though it said "charging" and had s an orange LED the battery stayed in 0% ... Reinstalling, BIOS update etc. didn't help, and the only stuff on YouTube was garbage. So it either the battery or the motherboard. Let's disassemble the battery!
Adulthood means being able to buy as many video games as you ever wanted, but having absolutely no time to play them.
Give your kids an extra hug tonight. Let them know that you’re there for them

Yesterday's Linux DFIR command line trivia asked us to get a listing of the full pathnames of executables for processes that are currently using network sockets. "netstat" and "lsof" can give us a list of PIDs, and then we will need to convert that to executable paths.

Let's start with "netstat":

netstat -peanut | tail -n +3 | sed -r 's/.* ([0-9]*)\/.*/\1/' | sort -un

"-peanut" is a helpful mnemonic for all processes ("-a") using TCP ("-t") and UDP ("-u") sockets, giving process info ("-p") but not converting IP addresses and ports into names ("-n"). "-e" just gives more detailed info and also allows us to spell "peanut" with the options.

We need "tail -n +3" to skip the header lines in the output. And then some crazy "sed" to extract just the PIDs. A final "sort -un" to give us just the unique PIDs in numerically sorted order.

And then @polyna dropped in to remind me that Linux deprecated "netstat" a long time ago. Sigh. Here's the same thing using "ss" like we all should be (but which my fingers generally refuse to type the first time):

ss -natup | sed -r 's/.*pid=([0-9]*).*/\1/' | sort -un

At least there are no header lines to skip in the "ss" output, but it's still some nasty "sed" to extract the PIDs.

Which is why I generally prefer the "lsof" option:

"lsof -i -t"

Yep, that's it. "-i" means show me processes using "internet sockets" and "-t" is "terse mode" which just outputs the PIDs. Terse mode is designed to be used with "kill" but we want to do something else with the PID list:

lsof -i -t | xargs -I{} readlink /proc/{}/exe

I could also do this with a loop, but "xargs" gives us a quick way to call "readlink /proc/<pid>/exe" for each PID from "lsof". The "-I{}" lets us create a marker for where we want "xargs" to put the PID in each command.

Why is this useful at all? See if you can spot the suspicious process in the sorted list of executables:

# lsof -i -t | xargs -I{} readlink /proc/{}/exe | sort -u
/dev/shm/.rk/lsof (deleted)
/dev/shm/.rk/xterm (deleted)
/usr/lib/systemd/systemd
/usr/sbin/dnsmasq
/usr/sbin/NetworkManager
/usr/sbin/sshd

#Linux #DFIR #CommandLine #Trivia

I wanted to take a few moments and apologize to many of my former students.

In the past I said the industry needs people who look at security as a vocation and an avocation.

I was wrong.

Have a life outside of this industry.

Have hobbies that have nothing to do with your computer.

Get outside.

The problems of the industry are not problems of people not working hard enough.

They are not problems of people not being "hard core" enough.

They are problems of education and resource prioritization.

I was wrong.

I am sorry.

Stop breaking yourself on rocks for people who don't really care if you break yourself on rocks.