“The Shack” Gets Free Press from HLN

I made a post the other day about RadioShack changing their image to “The Shack”.  I really find the whole affair rather ridiculous and quite humorous.  This morning, while performing the early morning ritual of watching the national news (if you can call it that), imagine my laughter when I see that “The Shack” is getting some free press from HLN.  The most disturbing item in the “news story” is the fact that “The Shack” is spending $200,000,000 to perform this image modification.  WTF?  Have you been in their stores?  Why don’t they keep the 90+% name recognition brand name and use that $200 Million to get some actual up to date and cuttin edge technology into their stores like they claim to have now.  Hello RadioShack, or excuse me, “The Shack” corporate offices and C-level employees, almost nothing you have can NOT be found at Wal-Mart for cheaper!  Sure you may have some parts and what not that I can’t get at Wal-Mart, but most of the time, the actual parts I need, you don’t have.  This leaves me ordering on-line and while I’m there I go ahead and pick up those few items that you do have, but for less money.

Bottom line, quit trying to compete with Wal-Mart and get to tech that blows the pants off of Best Buy.  Otherwise, “The Shack” is floundering, if not dead in the water.  Get back to your “hacker” roots.  Have any of you even cracked open a copy of “Make” magazine?  People want to make stuff and buy things that they can make do things they were not necessarily intended to do.

Malware

For some reason we have seen a gigantic increase in the number of people bringing computers to the store that are totally “owned” with malware.  This stuff, the malware, is really potent.  While I do recommend that people with malware infections do a complete re-install of the OS, I do like to see what is infecting the system.  I find it educational and helps in case someone refuses to do the re-install.

One guy brought in his system that was “not running right”.  I fired it up and holy shit, was it bad.  By the time it was all said and done, we backed up his data and re-installed.  I threw every tool I thought would help at it and still, when IE started something was running that caused all sorts of problems.  Please note that this system was on an isolated network connection, otherwise I think that it would have owned the whole network here.

Malware Infection! Why?

A customer called on the phone Monday.  Seems that they are experiencing a malware infection of some type and would like to have their system “cleaned up”.  I started to recommend that he or I re-install the OS.  He cut me off.  Seems he did this before at the recommendation of Dell and proceeded to lose all of his data on the machine.  That’s too bad, had he taken the system to a competent repair person/center, his data could have been saved and he wouldn’t have this poor attitude about re-installing.

I told him that I could see what I could do, but I made no promises.  I did explain that since the HD was is working condition, I could retrieve any data from the drive.  He says that he understands, but he would like to just “have the virus removed”.  OK!

Next the conversation turns to when would be a good time to drop off the system.  I told him that he was welcome to drop the system off anytime.  Next he asks how long I thought it would take to clean it up.  I tell him that without seeing the system, I couldn’t really be sure. So he asked if it would be ready by Tuesday.  I told him that unless it was a really simple infection, it would most likely take much longer that that, unless we did a re-install.  No, of course we can’t do that.  He then proceeded to tell me that he would bring it by Wednesday morning, because he needed it for an investment club meeting on Tuesday evening.  WTF?  You have an infected machine and you want to do investment club activities with it?  Are you crazy? Evidently he is!  He ignored my advice once again and used it Tuesday night.

When he finally brings the system in a 9:00AM Wednesday morning, he proceeds to tell me about the behavior of the machine last night.  Well that is interesting and all, but one thing I have learned is that the customers description of a problem is usually just a distraction.  You start focusing on what they say and miss things that would normally jump out at you.

Then he says something that I have heard many, many times.  “I have Norton’s, why would I get infected?”  This is one of those questions that you want to be political with or risk pissing off the customer.  Generally, these infections occur when the customer installs the malware themselves.  Classic example, a pop-up tells you that you are infected and you need to install this “software” to “fix” the infection.  As soon as the customer clicks, “OK”, they are OWNED!  However, you really want to say, “You installed it you dumb-ass!”.  Why people think that installing some anti-virus program will protect themselves from themselves, I will never know.  By the way, do you get diagnosed and purchase you pharmaceuticals from random people on the streets?

Reasons Why I Hate Vista

Since everyone else has a list of reasons why they hate Vista, I thought that I would put my two cents in also.  I mean, people who don’t even use Vista have a list of things they don’t like about it.  Why shouldn’t I also join this trend.

1.  Vista’s user interface looks like and improved XP interface.

How dare they!  It looks similar to XP, but we all know that underneath it is totally different.  Why on Earth would you want to improve on an interface that has gotten you so far.

2.  Where is everything?

When I first used Vista, I had some trouble finding things that I knew exactly where they were in XP.  Oh Shit,  you mean this isn’t XP.  But it looks so much like it.  Well, this would explain why things are not in the same place.  Kinda like when switching to XP from 98, I had to learn where everything was now that I had a brand new OS.

3.  The network wizard worked the first time.

Oops!  Something must be wrong.  The network wizard didn’t require manual configuration.  While I am a bit of a control freak when it comes to my system, I like that I should be getting fewer calls from people who can’t get the network to work.  Of course, this is assuming that they don’t automatically assume that it isn’t going to work from all the media hype.

Ok, that should be enough for now.  I feel complete since I have bitched about Vista a little.  You know, join the rest of the crowd.

Apple Computer Files Suit Against Psystar

I caught this post to Slashdot this afternoon and I must say that I am surprised.  Not because of Apple filing suit against Psystar, but that it took this long for them to file the suit.  I would have thought that Apple would have been on them like stink on shit within a day or two of them selling their first machine.  Really, what did the Psystar people think was going to happen?  That they would just happily sell computers with OS X installed on them forever and ever.  I don’t think so.

For what its worth, I would like to see Apple loose this legal battle.  Psystar will probably run out of money unless someone with long purse strings takes up their cause.  The FSF maybe.

USB Switchblade Made Easy

I was a little behind on my podcast/netcast listening, so I have been doing a little catch-up.  On episode 110 of the Pauldotcom Security Podcast, Larry mentioned a website that makes creating a USB Switchblade device redicolously easy.  The website is GonZor228.com.  By using this nice little tool you can create your very own USB Switchblade.

The USB Switchblade utilizes the U3 technology to do pretty much whatever you want to a computer system just by plugging a USB device into the system.  For example, you could download the contents of RAM.  You know, the place where encryption keys are kept.  This tool also allows you to put your own tools into the U3 image, so the posiblities are endless.

Sidux Preview Release

One of my favorite Live CD Linux distros, SIDUX, is putting out a preview release.  Check out the details at this link.  Distrowatch.  If you like to run Live CDs this one is certainly worth checking out.  I have used it for a couple of years now.

Famelix GNU/Linux

Anyone who like the look and feel of Windows Vista, but doesn’t like to actually use Vista as their operating system, should check out this linux distro from Brazil.  I have to say that I suppose that I don’t have anything against MicroSoft per say, but I derive much more enjoyment from using Linux.  I have not personally used this distro, but from the screenshots I have seen the project looks amazing.  Their website says that the reason for making this disto look like Vista is to help people migrate to linux.  I will agree that it is very close to the interface that you get with Vista, but there is something about it that makes it look better.  I am going to download the iso later and give it a whirl some one of these computer laying around here.  I hear that the download takes a while so i will most likely wait and download it overnight.

Permanent Denial-of-Service (PDOS)

I saw this on slashdot.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=154270&WT.svl=news1_1

This is one of those things that could pose a huge problem for users of any type of networking “box”.  Things like routers, wireless routers and APs, firewalls, etc.  Basically anything that is connected to the network and has its own embedded OS.  I have done something similar to this to myself while trying to flash OpenWRT onto a router.  The flash failed and the result was a blue box of crap.  That was fixable though.

The really scary thing would be the flashing of new firmware onto a router (or other device) that allowed an attacker to monitor traffic for passwords, etc.  This could be done without the users knowledge.  You could even make the device appear to not be sending traffic when it actually is communicating with nefarious servers.  If the methodology of phlashing can be perfected we can all expect to be looking for even more problems on the network.

Update on Yubikey

Steve Gibson has an episode of Security Now (SN143) that is dedicated to the Yubikey. This thing sounds better all the time.  The fact is that I think they we a little caught off guard when they met Steve Gibson.  They were unaware of his reach.  It sounds like the people running Yubico were not fully committed to the direction their company would go in, but they are making those choices now.  The stated intent of the company is to sell the device.  The amount paid for the device depends on how many you buy.  You get 1 for $35 or 1,000,000 for about $5 a piece.  So if you want to play around with 1 or 2 you can or if you want to develop a hugh system around them you could also do that.  The nice part is the software to get these things working is open source now.  So people like me who don’t have a clue about implementing a huge authentication system can play around with it and make it work on a small scale.  Of course, making things work on a small scale is the precursor to making things work on a large scale.  I really like open source software for this reason.  So much software is too costly to even attempt to make work on small projects and this really impairs the ability to learn how it works.  At least for honest people.