Josh Wieder

Several days ago a document from the corporation Zerofox was leaked on the internet. Zerofox is a domestic spying organization there is no other word for them. They are paid obscene amounts of money to monitor people's Twitter and Facebook accounts, and provide the results of their stalking to police departments and other people who are in theory bound to respect the autonomy of free political speech. In the document that was leaked, Zerofox claimed to have "mitigated" 19 "threats" and "monitored" hundreds of others. The document is available here . What constitutes a threat? Political speech that is critical of the police. At the top of the list of "physical threats" are #blacklivesmatter activists Deeray McKesson and Johnetta Elzie , neither of whom have ever been convicted of a violent crime AFAICT. The report recommends that police engage in "continuous monitoring" of the pair and justify this absurd response because they ha...

Those unfamiliar with my Wikileaks findings should read my (so far) four post series on my discover of malware within files available for download on the Wikileaks website that can, among other things, identify and track those reading infected files: 1st post  |  2nd post  |  3rd post  |  4th post   Note that my posts are lengthy and contain some technical information. If you aren't really into reading technical things you would probably prefer the summaries of my findings available in The Register or  Neue Zürcher Zeitung (for German speakers).  Because Wikileaks has refused to inform its users that the infected files are, in fact malicious, I went public with my findings. Cryptome has just published a letter with a brief explanation of the issues with the Wikileaks malware .  Cryptome is a long time advocate of government transparency, and had already been publishing leaked documents on their website for close to a dec...

I noticed something odd yesterday while reviewing log data on one of the RHEL 7 web servers I look after. Peering through the PHP error log, I noticed that all of the timestamps were formatted using the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC ... because acronyms that make sense are for losers). [29-Jul-2015 14:26:04 UTC] PHP [redacted] on line 511 [29-Jul-2015 14:26:04 UTC] PHP [redacted] on line 530 [29-Jul-2015 14:26:04 UTC] PHP [redacted] on line 574 [29-Jul-2015 14:26:04 UTC] PHP [redacted] on line 607 [29-Jul-2015 14:26:04 UTC] PHP [redacted] on line 629 There is nothing wrong with UTC. UTC avoids the calamities inherent in the highly politicized, frequently changed, deeply flawed and inevitably pointless Daylight Savings rules. And unlike epoch-based timestamps, UTC is human readable. It's good stuff. Your hwclock should use it. With that said, with this particular server a decision was made for logging to consistently be Eastern Time. So I jumped through a number of hoops to ...

What really irks me about this is that I deliberately use gigantic, stupid MTAs like gmail and live mail to deliberately avoid this sort of garbage (deliberately). Those familiar with administrating large volume email can appreciate that you can perfectly configure your mail server and end up bounding all over the place because almost everyone with a mail server is not an actual email administrator and has no clue what they are doing. Email, like high school, is ultimately all about popularity . Even the least competent of email server owners will eventually get tech support to make sure google and microsoft can deliver to and receive from their Zimbra abomination. At least that's what I figured until I started getting bounces like the one below. It seems Microsoft has decided that Security Focus mailing lists are too dangerous. To step up the oddity of this policy, bounces only occur when the originating MTA is with Yahoo. I can receive email directly from securityfocus.com. I c...

By accident I clicked on Eugene Kaspersky's Twitter account and I was greeted with this: What? Everything about this image is FABULOUS . First and foremost, it confirms my longstanding suspicion that any schmuck can make a few bucks in infosec, but to make bazillions you have to be an absolute drug-addled lunatic . But let's get back to the picture. So many questions. Are they standing in front of a green-screen in which someone embossed click-art from Windows 95 or did they pose in front of a cheaply painted wall, like when prison convicts take "click-clicks" to send to their pen pals ? Was I the only one who thought that maybe - just maybe - this was the album cover for an Autobahn reunion tour that I had somehow missed? These men are nihilists. Someone very much needs leak the inter-departmental memo that Kaspersky sent to demand that his least photogenic employees all wear form-fitting pastels to work. It would have to be one hell of a memo to ge...

It's almost like .... they don't want people to look at the financial records for election candidates. For quite some time now, if you were a reporter or opposition researcher or political consultant and you wanted to dig up some dirt on a political candidate in Florida you would spend at least some time on the Florida Department of State's Division of Elections website. On that website was an application that I have always referred to as "Dodo", because its URL was doedoe.dos.state.fl.us and thanks to the miracle of modern browsers, typing "Dodo" into the address bar would usually get me there sooner or later. Dodo was the place to go to lookup campaign contribution records for both candidates and political committees (of which the most commonly known is a PAC) registered in the State of Florida. So you can imagine my surprise when, just for kicks, I decided to pay Dodo a visit and found this: Maybe I made a mistake. I looked up one of the boo...

When installing the vulnerability scanner application Nikto/Nikto2 using yum with RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 or CentOS 7 or even Scientific Linux 7, the odds are good that you will encounter some irritating problems. Namely, the installation will fail while requiring a dependency that appears to not exist for the version of linux you are using. Fun! So you probably think you are safe if you install OpenVAS , a prepackaged suite of security utilities that includes Nikto as a plugin. But you would be wrong! Installing OpenVAS from an RPM will succeed, and everything will look fine, until you try to use Nikto within OpenVAS, which will result in a fatal error. Nikto is included in the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux/EPEL yum repository all recent versions of RedHat linux, which is part of the Fedora Project. While it contains third party applications, it is not a third party repository like RPMFusion or Atomicorp . I have only very rarely had problems with the EPEL yum repo, and t...