Josh Wieder

 Oooo boy, I can't wait to browse discounted "Dog Supplies" on Amazon. Wait. What?

Three years ago I wrote a blog post demonstrating how the International Business Times appeared to be associated with some extremely shady online advertising networks , resulting in International Business Times article links being advertised on places like malware-filled mirrors of The Pirate Bay. The presence of IB Times on a Pirate Bay clone site was particularly ironic as the online news outlet had recently published several articles detailing exactly how terrible the ads on Pirate Bay were. To be clear: I never found any indication of any malfeasance on IB Times' part. In fact, I think it is much more likely to be the fault of some affiliate marketing firm that did a poor job of tracking its purchases. As such, I contacted IB Times via Twitter to inform them of my findings. I was contacted by a representative of IBT Media, during which I offered (for free) to walk their marketing staff on how to identify the affiliate responsible for the ad placement. IBT declined - instead...

I've written a simple bash script that checks for new files in an AWS S3 bucket and emails any that it finds as a compress (tar.gz) attachment  - you can find it at my Github account under the name "S3-Filer-Mailer". I built it as a supplement for a contact form that relies on S3 as a back-end, rather than a php mailer or database. Using S3 for contact forms is attractive because it is so unattractive to spammers. There is no way to corrupt this sort of setup for spamming or to get hands on a database through the form, because it isn't connected to one. Why not use Amazon's Simple Notification Service (SNS) ? For one, AWS charges more for SNS than it does for S3 queries and downloads. For another, if this sort of functionality is available through SNS it is not clearly documented. Getting back to the topic of security, the script establishes two network connections - one a connection to S3 to retrieve the files, the other sending the email. The S3 connection ...

So it turns out that setting your AWS EC2 server's hostname to be persistent across reboots is a surprising pain in the ass, at least with my usual OS of choice - RedHat/CentOS Linux. If you're like me, setting a hostname is the sort of trivial non-task that at this point you really feel like you dont need to RTFM  to figure out. You know about `hostnamectl set-hostname`. You've tried `nmcli general hostname`. You've manually set /etc/hostname. None of its persists past a reboot. Which can make life very difficult for those planning to use EC2 for email or dozens of other tasks. Here's how to do it the right way, the first time. I'll also describe some circumstances that setting your own hostname will break things, and why its such a hassle to get this done in AWS in the first place. Amazon relies on cloud-init to manage a variety of initialization tasks for its cloud servers; cloud-init was originally built to support Ubuntu images , but it is now used fo...

About a month and a half ago I grew so frustrated by the boneheaded way that Amazon EC2 handles IP aliasing that I wrote a pretty lengthy post about the problems entailed and included a small program that would fix those problems . Amazon provides some pretty productive documentation for some types of users. There is help available for you if you are any one of the following:      - You are willing to pay for a new ENI to support a second IP address      - You are multihoming / load balancing      - You want to use "Amazon Linux" and install their ec2-net-utils But, if you want to just add a second IP address to a pre-existing Linux server, you are pretty much screwed. Well, you were screwed. Now you can install my program - aliaser - as a service and it will route additional IP addresses for you without the need for an extra ENI. I've uploaded aliaser to Github   - it includes a shell script and a .service file, as well...

Scams focused on stealing tax refunds remain highly profitable, despite the fact that they are well known and understood by security professionals and the general public , and have been for years. A variety of distribution methods are used, with the common threads being the use of IRS logos and bureaucratic-sounding language to convince users to click a link, download and execute a file and/or send personally identifying information like a Social Security number. A recent example of one such a scam that I came across is a damning illustration of the failure of online service providers to protect users from obvious and simple malware distribution methods. In the example I wish to discuss today, the distribution method was a spammed email that on a small ISP's installation of SpamAssassin (note: I am not an admin or employee of this system; I'm a customer) received an X-Spam-Status score of 5.3 after being flagged with the following variables: X-Spam-Status: No, score=5.3 re...

UPDATE March 1st, 2017 : I'm glad to see that people are finding this helpful, and thanks to everyone that has contacted me here or via email. Just to be clear, though, the script on GitHub works much better than what I describe here in this post. The idea for this post was to describe the basics of how to get IP aliasing working in EC2 w/out using Amazon's weirdo linux distro, and I wrote it about a while before I posted the script to GitHub . If you want functional code with step-by-step instructions, goto the aliaser GitHub repo . I just don't have the time to rewrite the post each time I (or someone else) has an update for the script. Also, if you have feature requests or feedback, it will be easier for me to get back to you on GitHub than here ... especially if you have something specific you want added or that doesn't work. Also, just FYI, I added a systemd .service file to the script in the aliaser GitHub repo a year ago. IIRC its LFB compatible so should wo...

Amazon S3 subscribers recently received a form letter like this one: Dear AWS Customer, This message explains some security improvements in our services. Your security is important to us. Please review the entire message carefully to determine whether your use of the services will be affected, and if so what you need to do. As of 12:00 AM PDT May 20, 2015, AWS will discontinue support of SSLv3 for securing connections to S3 buckets. Security research published late last year demonstrated that SSLv3 contained weaknesses in its ability to protect and secure communications. These weaknesses have been addressed in Transport Layer Security (TLS), which is the replacement for SSL. Consistent with our top priority to protect AWS customers, AWS will only support versions of the more modern TLS rather than SSLv3. You are receiving this email because some of your users are accessing Amazon S3 using a browser configured to use SSLv3, or some of your existing applications that use Amazon S3 a...

Dynamically uploading information to S3 can be a bit challenging to do initially, particularly in PHP where a lot of the documentation is either really new or really old. Amazon has a PHP SDK , which is available as either a .phar file or can be installed using Composer . That's cool for building a new project, but what if you have a pre-existing project or form and just want to be able to dump the text output to S3? I've put together some code at Github that will take care of that issue. The only requirement is PHP and an Amazon S3 account. Download or clone the files here:  https://github.com/jwieder/s3-http-php-form Your Amazon access keys and other configuration are stored in a single configuration file. Just fill out your login info into the configuration file and include the php form where you need it as outlined in the README.md file and you should be all set!

I have seen indications of periodic connectivity issues impacting Amazon's EC2 Cloud Computing architecture. Personally, I have encountered issues with connecting to Amazon's Yum repository hosts from EC2 instances. Amazon has published Outage notifications of brief connectivity and DNS failures impacting US-EAST-1 Availability zone between October 2nd and October 4th. However, my EC2 instances are within the US-WEST-2 Availability zone and I am experiencing issues today, October 4th 2014 at approximately 11:30 AM EST. For example: # yum provides seinfo Loaded plugins: amazon-id, rhui-lb epel/x86_64/filelists_db         | 4.7 MB  00:00:01 rhui-REGION-rhel-server-optional/7Server/x86_64/filelists_db    | 3.2 MB  00:00:00 https://rhui2-cds01.us-west-2.aws.ce.redhat.com/pulp/repos//content/dist/rhel/rhui/server/7/7Server/x86_64/os/repodata/e5ee2c196ee6525998525a2bf74bb40608dce199-filelists.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14]...