There’s a site getting around the twitter circuit at the moment called “Twitterank” that’s meant to rate your Twitterness in the “Twitterverse”.
The site in fact is used to steal your Twitter username and password – it’s a farce!
Oliver Marks has done a write up about the events on ZDNet so go and have a read about it over there (I don’t want to pinch his hard work)
“SANS is pleased to be back in Las Vegas for SANS Security West 2009 on January 24-Feburary 1, 2009 with our top-rated instructors and 19 outstanding course offerings. Now is the time to improve your information security skills with the best security training your money can buy. Then, join us and 200 of your closest friends for SANS Super Bowl XLIII Party (February 1). Why not register now?
Managers: Here are five really great reasons to consider sending your IT staff to SANS Security West 2009 in Las Vegas.
Register now and use your remaining 2008 Training budget for 2009 training.
Getting chilly where you are? Vegas in January daytime temps are near 60 degrees.
Depending on the departure city, flights to Vegas can be cheaper than to other major cities.
Between hands-on immersion courses and evening cutting-edge content sessions, your staff will bring back top-level security training that they can use back in your office the first day back. This could be the most important thing you do for you company as you ensure that your IT staff has the tools and knowledge to protect your business.
Seasonal Affective Disorder or Winter Blues can be a demotivating factor in the workplace and lead to discontent and loss of productivity. Give your employees a week in the sun and dry desert heat of Vegas during the worst of the Winter Blues.”
"The popular virus scanner AVG released an update yesterday that caused their software to mark user32.dll as a virus. Since this is a rather critical file, AVG's suggestion to remove it caused problems for users around the world who are now advised to restore the file through the Windows Recovery Console. AVG just posted an update about this (FAQ item 1574) in the support section of their site. Their forums are full of complaints."
An MX record or Mail exchanger record is a type of resource record in the Domain Name System (DNS) specifying how Internet e-mail should be routed using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Each MX record contains a preference and a host name, so that the collection of MX records for a given domain name point to the servers that should receive e-mail for that domain, and their priority relative to each other.
To find an MX record on a Windows machine with nslookup
1. Open a DOS Command Prompt
2. Type "nslookup".
3. Your computer's DNS Server name and IP address will be displayed.
4. Type "set type=mx" – This will cause NSLOOKUP to only return what are known as MX (Mail eXchange) records from the DNS servers.
5. For an example, type "hotmail.com".
6. Results returned should look similar to this:
Server: ns1.xxx.com
Address: 192.168.0.1
Non-authoritative answer:
hotmail.com MX preference = 5, mail exchanger = mx2.hotmail.com
hotmail.com MX preference = 5, mail exchanger = mx3.hotmail.com
hotmail.com MX preference = 5, mail exchanger = mx4.hotmail.com
hotmail.com MX preference = 5, mail exchanger = mx1.hotmail.com
hotmail.com nameserver = ns1.hotmail.com
hotmail.com nameserver = ns2.hotmail.com
hotmail.com nameserver = ns3.hotmail.com
hotmail.com nameserver = ns4.hotmail.com
mx2.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.254.145
mx2.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.252.230
mx2.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.166.230
mx3.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.254.140
mx3.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.253.99
mx3.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.167.5
mx4.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.254.151
mx4.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.253.230
mx4.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.167.230
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.254.129
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.252.99
mx1.hotmail.com internet address = 65.54.166.99
ns1.hotmail.com internet address = 216.200.206.140
ns2.hotmail.com internet address = 216.200.206.139
ns3.hotmail.com internet address = 209.185.130.68
ns4.hotmail.com internet address = 64.4.29.24
7. Note the first line after "Non-authoritative answer".
The "MX preference" specifies which mail server to use and in which order. The lower the number, the more preferred the mail server is. In this case, since the preferences for each mail server are the same, you can use any of the four "mail exchangers".
Are you in Sydney? <insert yes here>
Do you like SANS courses? <insert yes here>
Are you interested in hacking techniques, exploits or incident handling? <insert yes here>
Oh really?? Then you should sign up for Chris Mohan’s next mentoring program!!
Chris has successfully applied to be a mentor for the SANS Security 504: SANS Hacker Techniques, Exploits and Incident Handling course.
He’ll be running the course in Chatswood, Sydney on the starting on Wednesday 21st of January 2009, every Wednesday evening from 6:30pm to 8:30pm for ten weeks.There’s plenty of parking and it’s easy to get to via public transport on trains or buses.
What Chris hopes you’ll come away from the ten weeks isn’t that you’ll be able to break in to top security systems; it’s that you have a better capacity to understand how common, freely available tools are being used against now. Working with that awareness and developing of strategies to build up your own in depth defences and responses to better secure your systems.
For those CISSP’s out there, the course is worth 36 CPE’s.
SANS offers group registration discounts for 2 or more students who register from the same organization. To obtain the Group Discount fee and Registration Code offered for this course, contact Miranda Ruddick at mentor@sans.org PRIOR to registering, and provide the names and e-mail addresses of all the students registering within your organization.
If you’re a member of ACS or AISA, discounts are also available, so check with your local branch for the discount code.
If you’re not a either of those, then drop Chris a line and he’ll beg SANS for a discount code on your behalf!
You can’t ask more that than!
Please drop him a line if you have any questions Christopher {dot} Mohan [@] gmail {dot} com.
While you’re at it, you should check out his site too http://www.chris-mohan.com/
