Archive for the ‘LINKS’ Category.
September 27, 2001, 5:47 am
TechRepublic: How Xerox got its engineers to use a knowledge management system
One reason the Xerox staff was reluctant to use the KM system was that participation would be an added duty to an already tightly controlled workday—essentially, staff would need to ‘‘share” in the little downtime available to them. Xerox tried a number of incentives to book employee interest and learned that professional credit was the key. With a quick app revamp, Eureka provided engineers an ability to “author’’ their solutions.
“Once we enabled them to attach their name, it became a professional peer process. They’re proud of their solutions and are recognized for it,” Holtshouse explained.
September 27, 2001, 5:44 am
Hitchens on the Left and Islamic Fascism. Christopher Hitchens has been berating fellow leftists for even thinking that the WTC/Pentagon attacks had anything to do with what the US has done in the Middle East.
Let’s pause a moment to appreciate Mr. Hitchens in action.
< [More Like This WebLog]
September 26, 2001, 3:33 pm
SANS Incidents handler of 2001/09/25 Vicki Irwin:
A poster to the Handler’s list came to the following conclusion
after performing an analysis on the worm code with a disassembler:
“After consuming a certain amount of CPU time [Nimda] goes dormant for 10
days. If counts the days as year*365 + month*30 + day_of_month. The
next wave of attacks will be on Sept 28, Oct 8, Oct 18, Oct 28….”
The results of this analysis would explain the slowing very well, and
predicts that we should expect another ramp up in activity on Friday. Other
sources have noted that the use of Nimda’s “GetSystemTime” call is to initiate
the email propagation phase anew every 10 days; but have not said anything
about the worm stopping scanning for web servers upon reaching some defined
limit. In addition to explaining the observed drop off in scan activity, this
analysis would also potentially explain why the strings “Processor Time”,
“User Time”, “Privileged Time”, etc. are found in the worm binary.
Note: The incidents.org Nimda report will be updated tomorrow (9/26)
with new information collected since 9/21.
September 25, 2001, 6:07 pm
September 25, 2001, 6:04 pm
September 25, 2001, 8:59 am
September 24, 2001, 1:13 pm
Gartner, quoted in News.Com: “With the emergence of the Nimda worm — the latest in a long series to attack Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) and other software — Gartner believes it’s time for businesses with Web applications to start investigating less vulnerable Web server products.” 
[Scripting News]
September 24, 2001, 1:04 pm
InfoWorld – RECOVERY – Ellison offers free software for national ID.
There has been an ongoing debate in the U.S. during recent years regarding the creation of a national ID card system, based on the existing Social Security card, that would include a centralized computer-based registry of all U.S. citizens. While some government officials in the past have advocated the creation of such a system as a means of curtailing illegal immigration in the U.S., organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union have repeatedly voiced their opposition to the plan.
ACLU September 17, 1998 – Testimony Against Establishing a National ID Card. An old entry but becoming relevant again, especially due to Mr Ellison.
[Privacy Digest]
September 20, 2001, 3:32 pm
September 19, 2001, 9:13 pm
Technology News from Wired News – A ‘Tarpit’ That Traps Worms.
Network administrators now have a hacking tool that can help them strike back at malicious attackers.
“LaBrea” is a free, open-source tool that deters worms and other hack attacks by transforming unused network resources into decoy-computers that appear and act just like normal machines on a network. But when malicious hackers or mindless worms such as Nimda or Code Red attempt to connect with a LaBrea-equipped system, they get sucked into a virtual tarpit that grabs their computer’s connection — and doesn’t release it.
Worms trapped in the tarpit are unable to move along to infect other computers. Stuck hackers first waste their time flailing away at a non-existent machine; they are then forced to shut down their hacking program or computer to escape.
[ … ]
LaBrea does need a really big playground to operate effectively. Elias Levy, Chief Technical Officer at Security Focus, a security news site, calculated that on smaller networks the odds of LaBrea being able to efficiently capture and trap worms isn’t very good. The larger the network, the greater the chance of success.
“For a tool like (LaBrea) to even make a dent into the infection rate of a worm, you would need to monitor an address space of the same size as a (class B) network,” Levy said. “That’s 65,536 addresses.”
[Privacy Digest]
