Why the Internet Needs Encryption

The internet was designed to feel like a point to point communication system so when you sign on to Facebook, it feels like you and Facebook are the only two engaged in the conversation.

Because of this encryption on the internet is often a hard topic to discuss with people. It sounds like you're telling them to whisper while talking to someone one on one in their living room.

Heartbleed: Lessons Learned

Fixing Heartbleed has received a lot of investment in a very short amount of time, both money and time wise. In my own company a number of senior Incident Response handlers and network admins were basically given a blank check on resources by management and told to solve the problem as fast as possible, regardless of the cost (Pretty unusual at my company).

Crypto Currency: A really good idea

We are already using digital currency. Credit cards, online stores, paypal, Google Wallet, online banking, and many other activities are all examples of digital currency. We cannot get away from digital currency, even if we wanted to. But our digital currency is modelled after our physical currency which has introduced some difficulties and loopholes in it's usage.

Scan, Scan, and Scan Again for Heartbleed

Whatever scanner you choose to use, make sure to scan your resources thoroughly, both before and after you patch.

Crypto Currency: Making Dollars Distinguishable

In a previous post I discussed that one of the problems with digital currency is that the dollars are indistinguishable. If I pay Bank Eville Guys $100 and Bank Connman $100 there is no way to distinguish the different $100 dollars from each other.

Scanning for Heartbleed Efficiently

So now you have a Heartbleed scanner, what do you do?

At this point in the game you have probably picked at least one (probably two or three) scanners to work with when you're detecting Heartbleed vulnerabilities. Where do you start?

NMAP over Proprietary Heartbleed Scanners

We're a couple days into Heartbleed at this point and there are now a number of different scanners and tools available. I've detailed how to get NMAP to scan for Heartbleed here.

I've looked at a few of them, and I recommend using NMAP as a scanner for a number of reasons.

1. NMAP will allow you to scan interal network resources that are not available to the internet. Web based scanners can only look at what you expose to the greater internet.