Archive for November, 2011

whowas Service

Monday, November 28th, 2011

An email from MAAWG informed me about a new service showing up at ARIN:

There is a new “whowas” – service showing historical data for an IP or ASN.
It will be publicly available in a trial version at:https://www.arin.net/resources/whowas/.

one goal of the trial is to gather data about use cases and how
often the service would be used to determine whether to work on that goal.

So let’s see if this service can be helpful to us.

funny disclaimer

Thursday, November 24th, 2011

The following email disclaimer was found in a mail to the mailing list
“full disclosure”.
Sounds funny to me 🙂

####################################################
***** IMPORTANT INFORMATION/DISCLAIMER *****

This document should be read only by those persons to whom it is addressed. If you have received this message it was obviously addressed to you and therefore you can read it, even it we didn’t mean to send it to you. However, if the contents of this email make no sense whatsoever then you probably were not the intended recipient, or, alternatively, you are a mindless cretin; either way, you should immediately kill yourself and destroy your computer (not necessarily in that order). Once you have taken this action, please contact us.. no, sorry, you can’t use your computer, because you just destroyed it, and possibly also committed suicide afterwards, but I am starting to digress……

The originator of this email is not liable for the transmission of the information contained in this communication. Or are they? Either way it’s a pretty dull legal query and frankly one I’m not going to dwell on. But should you have nothing better to do, please feel free to ruminate on it, and please pass on any concrete conclusions should you find them. However, if you pass them on via email, be sure to include a disclaimer regarding liability for transmission.

In the event that the originator did not send this email to you, then please return it to us and attach a scanned-in picture of your mother’s brother’s wife wearing nothing but a kangaroo suit, and we will immediately refund you exactly half of what you paid for the can of Whiskas you bought when you went to Pets At Home yesterday.

We take no responsibility for non-receipt of this email because we are running Exchange 5.5 and everyone knows how glitchy that can be. In the event that you do get this message then please note that we take no responsibility for that either. Nor will we accept any liability, tacit or implied, for any damage you may or may not incur as a result of receiving, or not, as the case may be, from time to time, notwithstanding all liabilities implied or otherwise, ummm, hell, where was I…umm, no matter what happens, it is NOT, and NEVER WILL BE, OUR FAULT!

The comments and opinions expressed herein are my own and NOT those of my employer, who, if he knew I was sending emails and surfing the seamier side of the Internet, would cut off my manhood and feed it to me for afternoon tea.

Spamfighter died

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

J.D. Falk, well known as beiing a board member of CAUCE (Coalition against unsolicited commercial email) and organizer of MAAWG-meetings died of cancer yesterday.
One last RFC written by him was finished just hours before he passed away by an extraordinary work of the IETF: RFC 6449

bind 9 *again* vulnerable

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

Shortly after the last remote DoS vulnerability of bind 9 ISC announced another possibilty to crash a server (this time only on recursive resolvers). See CVE-2011-4313 for more infos.

Ghost Click: Botnet busted

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

The FBI announced the arrest of 6 estonian nationals for creating the worlds biggest botnet (DNSChanger) so far:
FBI Announcement

German magazin Heise made also an article about that:
Heise-Link

PaloAlto Firewall

Monday, November 7th, 2011

I recently had a look at a PaloAlto Firewall –
an application aware, Deep Packet Inspection Firewall; able to block e.g. facebook chat and still allow “normal” surfing.

I was amazed that a “firewall piercing” posted in January 2011 was still possible.

I managed to remotely control an internal computer from the outside using “rwwwshell”. The Firewall did not recognize the remote connection and logged it as normal web-browsing. Weird..