cave diving - noun phrase - The act of tunneling through multiple VPNs, bastion hosts, and chokepoints to access some network assets, usually production infrastructure in a more restricted network. Less hazardous than but just as easy to screw up as real life cave diving.
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Longtime readers have no doubt observed that I plug a lot weird shit into my exocortex - from bookmark managers to card catalogues to just about anything that has an API. Sometimes this is fairly straightforward; if it's on the public Net I can get to it (processing that data is a separate issue, of course). But what about the stuff I have around the lab? I'm always messing with new toys that are network connected and occasionally useful. The question is, how do I get it out of the lab and out to my exocortex? Sometimes I write bots to …
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Marvin Minsky once said that the human mind operates at only one tenth of its full capacity because the rest is taken up by the operating system's overhead. I always thought that was kind of a funny statement. When you get right down to it, nobody's really sure how the brain functions, or even how the mind operates inside of the 2.8 pounds of matter behind your eyes. People have variously been stabbed in the head (ye gods), lost a full quarter of brain mass in accidents, and even had entire hemispheres surgically excised and gone on to live …
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Just a few days ago it was made official – eccentric systems cracker Gary McKinnon, known as the UFO Hacker by the news media has lost his final appeal and will be extradited to the United States to stand trial. If convicted, McKinnon is looking at 70 years in federal prison for compromising 97 computer networks operated by the US Department of Defense in his quest to prove that UFOs exist. Federal prosecutors claim that McKinnon’s actions may have interfered with their response to the events of 9/11, though there is little to no evidence supporting their claim …
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It’s long been said that science fiction predicts, or at least inspires some of the things which we take for granted every day. While the exact origins of the genre could be debated until the cows come home (and they most certainly are in some circles), it was some time during the 17th century c.e. during the Age of Reason in which people really began to write stories in which the advances of the time were their inspiration. Great voyages by sailing ship and fanciful aircraft were taken to regions of the globe which had only been seen …
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Since the country of China stepped up its activities in Tibet hundreds of pro-Tibet websites have been springing up all across the Net. Predictably, some subset of those sites are being compromised by pro-Communist China crackers, which is a popular political maneuver (of questionable effectiveness). Not content to merely deface these sites, some of them are being infected with a malware agent called Fribet, which attacks vulnerabilities in the user's web browser to silently install itself. Fribet not only sets up a backdoor into the system that allows it to be remotely controlled but it is capable of attacking other …
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Every once in a while a news article about attempts to crack US military and government systems coming out of China or the Middle East hits the 'wires; rumors of groups of systems crackers belonging to the Air Force/United Nations/Department of Homeland Security/Microsoft/the Illuminati regularly make their rounds at hacker conventions. Military data nets are increasingly becoming targets of crackers from abroad, safe from prosecution and extradition because it's so difficult to start legal proceedings against someone you don't even know, let alone can grab by the scruff of the neck (police dramas and MLATs to …
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Yesterday Cisco announced its new product, the Nexus 7000 network switch, which will be their highest-end data switch to date. Attempting to push the state of the art in buzzwords (Web 3.0 already?), the Nexus 7k switch is designed to shuffle packets to the tune of... you know, the article isn't really clear. Marketwatch's news article doesn't give the reader any hard values because it's geared more for management types rather than techies in the trenches. Instead, there are passages like "would be able to copy all the searchable data on the Internet in 7.5 seconds" and "download …
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The United States military is planning to launch a communications satellite that is a dedicated Internet router by the year 2009. The way the Net works right now, some communications satellites are involved in handling net.traffic but there are two major differences from how they want to start doing it: First of all, net.traffic goes from the ground up to a comsat and then is retransmitted to another downlink on the ground; the IRIS project will route traffic from comsat to comsat, something that hasn't been done before. Secondly, traffic is transmitted on fixed communications channels; the IRIS …
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Gary McKinnon, who cracked US government and military networks under the alias 'Solo' in search of information on unidentified flying objects and unusual power sources will be extradited to the United States to stand trial, possibly under the USA PATRIOT Act because he infiltrated a number of sensitive data systems and networks. They're calling it the largest compromise of military systems in history (92 boxen known compromised) but somehow I doubt this because McKinnon certainly wasn't the first person to go wandering around inside their systems after breaking in - Hans "Pengo" Hubner beat him to it by fifteen years, give …
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