Super-Networking Blog

I ran across a pretty sweet product today. It is called Yoggie Pico and it is a security suite for your laptop that is based off of a USB stick. It is a hardened Linux box running off a 520MHz processor is a USB stick. It is supposed to provide all of the security you need on your laptop and you can move it from PC to PC.

Features:

Yoggie Pico combines best-of-breed enterprise-class software with proprietary patent pending developments to provide a comprehensive security solution. With its stateful inspection firewall and NAT, Yoggie hides the laptop�s IP address from the outside world and closes any unnecessary network connection. In addition, the hardware design and hardened OS prevents any tampering on the Firewall (a common Spyware, Viruses behavior). Deep packet inspection is performed by a robust intrusion detection/prevention solution to detect attacks as they begin their operation.

The application layer includes four transparent proxies, two for web traffic (HTTP, FTP) and two for email traffic (SMTP and POP3). Using a powerful true-type detection engine, the proxies can deal with any content type, including decompiled elements such as compressed class and file attachments. These elements are analyzed by seven security agents:

• Adaptive Security Policy�
• Multi-Layer Security Agent�
• Layer-8 Security Engine�
• URL Categorization & Filtering
• Anti-Spam
• Anti-Phishing
• Antispyware
• Antivirus
• Transparent Email Proxies (POP3; SMTP)
• Transparent Web Proxies (HTTP; FTP)
• Intrusion Detection System / Intrusion Prevention System
• VPN Client
• Stateful Inspection Firewall

The U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) has reported a network evasion technique using full-width and half-width unicode characters that affects several Cisco products. The US-CERT advisory is available at the following link:

http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/739224

By encoding attacks using a full-width or half-width unicode character set, an attacker can exploit this vulnerability to evade detection by an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) or firewall. This may allow the attacker to covertly scan and attack systems normally protected by an IPS or firewall.

This response is posted at the following link:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sr-20070514-unicode.shtml

So AOL doesn’t really have a password monster but they will effectively eat part of your password. It turns out that even though AOL lets you put up to a 16 character password in for your AOL.com account it only reads the first 8. So if you put in password$&355# thinking that is a strong password you are actually only putting in password. If someone tries to login to your account with just password bingo they in.

Shame Shame AOL

Full Article from the Washingtonpost

If you are giving away a hard drive, selling it, or even disposing of a hard drive that you have had your data on you are going to want to wipe the drive clean.

Just because you have “deleted” your data doesn’t mean that someone can’t recover it. There is a utility called Secure Erase that you can use to erase all the tracks on your hard drive. This product has been approved by National Institute for Standards and Testing (NIST).

Download it for free here.

Promqry

Kind of a sweet little tool my buddy sent me. I installed it and ran it, doesn’t do you much good if you aren’t an Administrator of the boxes you are scanning but it is an easy to use tool. Good program to have in your toolbelt if you are paranoid like me.