IE Zero Day: Response Required

Another day, another zero day vulnerability (Gosh, I love that term. So ominous. Like seeing a mushroom cloud). This time it's in IE 9 and 10.

NTP and DDoS Attacks

A novel new method of creating a DDoS attack has been found: NTP. I've read a number of good technical explanations on how the attack was performed and the enormity of the data the attack sent (400 some GB), so I'd like to take a step back and talk about DDoS attacks in general.

WebSockets and Security Infrastructure

Web sockets are new and very cool. If you're not familiar with them wikipedia (as always) has a pretty good article.

Working on a websocket test app recently I had a connection that kept on failing.

Facebook: Finding Ways to Monetize

Facebook Paper is a new app for iOS that came out this week. It was advertised as shiny and new and had an oh-so-hipster commercial.

How Many Requests?

The web used to work like this:

I send an http request by typing say "google.com" into my address bar, I get a single page back.

Simple, right? One request, one

Is Google Chrome Actually Listening?

If you've been watching security news this week, you've probably seen a number of articles about this exploit that the writer claims allows Google chrome to be turned into a surveillance tool. If true, this could be very concerning for Chrome users, but with all things cyber-security related, it's best to apply some analysis to the situation before one runs to the hills. Here is some of the analysis and questions I asked myself going through this exploit.

Target Malware Attack: Are you at risk?

It's recently been made known that the Target security breach was at least partially caused by malware installed on their POS systems. There are already a number of good technical explanations of how these work, so I won't add to that. I'd rather discuss if your business is at risk. Most of the content from this post comes from an email I sent my manager on the subject.