Computer Security & Technology

Microsoft seems like it is on track to release the next generation or the next version of Windows, Windows 7 to be tentatively released in 2009.

An indicator of what users wish to see in this next version of Windows has surfaced recently. Following is the full list of these features requested, and it is highly probable that quite of few of these features could be incorporated into Windows 7.

Feedback ID # 244119: Allow users to customize indexing more effectively
Feedback ID # 244127: UAC badge on all icons that will require UAC prompt
Feedback ID # 244352: Record live tv when you rewind
Feedback ID # 246001: Include Pinball into next version of Windows
Feedback ID # 246465: Multi-session remote desktop
Feedback ID # 246472: Basic download manager for Internet Explorer
Feedback ID # 246493: IE7 should include session restore feature
Feedback ID # 246494: Implement Vector GUI in the next version of Windows
Feedback ID # 246496: Add a message to the “computer locked” screen
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Besides manual security hardening of a Linux OS, let’s check out a free open-source tool to automate and simplify the process. Bastille will disable unnecessary services and install operating system updates as well as configure a firewall, enforce password policies, create a second root-level account and more. What’s nice is that Bastille leads the user through a simple series of yes/no questions, giving a detailed explanation of why each question is asked and what will happen if ‘yes’ is chosen. It doesn’t merely expect guesswork, nor does it blindly alter your system – instead, it genuinely hardens your computer and educates on security in the process.

The good thing is that you’re also not locked in to Bastille’s changes should you decide some of the setting changes weren’t for you. Running RevertBastille automatically restores the state of all config files and settings to just how they were before Bastille made any changes. Obviously, if you make changes to your system manually after running Bastille, you will lose these too so it is best to test changes as soon as possible after applying to ensure you won’t harm anything else if you need to revert.

Unfortunately, Bastille is not for everyone: versions exist for Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, Gentoo and Mandrake (as well as non-Linux UNIX variants HP-UX and MacOS X). If you do run one of those systems, you really are well-advised to run Bastille. You can download the latest version from SourceForge.

Let’s give Bastille a run-through.
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Discovery Channel played a very interesting documentary titled “The History of Hacking”. This goes into the whole history of hacking starting with phone phreaking and Blue boxes and to the present state of hacking.

However, a significant portion of this documentary tackles Social Engineering especially the most famous or rather infamous social engineer of all, Kevin Mitnick. Folks in Computer Security should definitely read up on Kevin Mitnick’s books , The Art of Deception and The Art of Intrusion, both very interesting reads.

A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. The process involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Because computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human. A common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen.

One of the strongest and most difficult CAPTCHAs to crack is used by Yahoo which ulilizes a mix of blended alpha numeric characters as show below.

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Sometimes when running through a CSV or any kind of a log file, you may encounter lists with a lot of duplicates. I will show an example of the simplest order here.

Say, you have a duplicates.txt that goes

one
two
three
one
four
two
four

Now, how to remove duplicates from a list such as the one shown above. If you use a command such as

sort - u < duplicates.txt or cat duplicates.txt | sort | uniq

you may end up with a list that while stripping out the duplicates, does not keep the original order

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