Sharp Ideas

Wireshark is a great utility for doing packet capture and analysis. It is an open source suite of applications that evolved from the ethereal project. My friend Angela Orebaugh has written comprehensive books on both Wireshark and Ethereal (I recommend them both!).
Sometimes while troubleshooting, it is necessary to run packet captures as part […]

[Read more →]

Social networks have been exploding during the past two years.  I think 2007 will be the year that social networking went mainstream.Here are a few topics worth exploring if you are a geek:
Social presence sites:

Twitter - answers the question “what are you doing right now?” and is accessible via web and SMS
Jaiku - Twitter plus […]

[Read more →]

Robert McGrew wrote an article describing how he hacked the auto-run feature on a U3 USB thumbdrive:
hack u3 thumbdrive description
The implications of this are simultaneously interesting and disheartening. Interesting because computer hobbyists could use the capability of hacking an autorun USB device to create some very novel applications. Disheartening because this may […]

[Read more →]

I recently read a humorous (but simultaneously sobering) article on Dark Reading about a group of security engineers conducting an IT security audit at a credit union. They scattered 20 trojanized USB thumbdrives around the work area of the credit union. Within a day or so 15 of the USB drives had been […]

[Read more →]