An Interesting Statistic

According to InformationWeek (Oct. 24, 2005, pg. 24), only 8% of the 500 largest public companies have an IT executive on their boards. They classified an IT executive as a CIO or former CIO. The largest Indian companies, on the other hand, are most likely to have IT execs on their board – 42% of [...]

A Conversation on Due Care

Taken from a discussion this week between myself and a student: Student: The risk of having no controls or auditing going on is that you are a potential victim to virtually every kind of system attack. This can be compared to the relatively few people who keep their doors unlocked. Even in a small town [...]

Discussion About Cracking 4-Char Passwords

This was from one of my students this week… “In my opinion, 4 character passwords are very weak. I could create a password generator in C to brute force a 4 character password using all 95 possible characters (33 special, 10 digit and 52 mixed char) and crack any 4 character password in less than [...]

Text Hacking the City

This was passed to me today by a student – Interesting Article:Text Hackers Could Jam Cellphones, a Paper Says: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/technology/05phone.html?ei=5090&en=d917b9cd43dfaa31&ex=1286164800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print Rwww.micklerandassociates.com

Bypassing Windows Authorization

This was hacked about four months ago – it may not continue to work, but it allows a bypass of official Windows validation for content downloads from Microsoft’s Updates sites… Bypass Windows Authorization As reported by Boing Boing: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/28/microsoft_genuine_ad.html Microsoft “Genuine Advantage” cracked in 24h: window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’ AV sez, “This week, Microsoft started requiring users to [...]

GREP the CIA Factbook

GREP is one of those awesome command-line utilities that never made it officially into Windows. GREP is a utility that performs complex search-and-replace operations on files and is most commonly found on UNIX environments. This is a cool script that will allow you to GREP the CIA Factbook for data extracts -http://douweosinga.com/projects/ciagrep From the author: [...]

Disabling the Mixed Content Message

Internet Explorer displays some awefully annoying messages at times that are just click-throughs for the user. Here’s one that’s quite common: the Display Mixed Content options. When accessing a secure site (SSL layer, HTTPS) and insecure content is preparing to be downloaded – say, pictures for example, or Flash objects – then you’re prompted by [...]