August 29th, 2008 Anthony Towry
At July's DC405 0hm hit on the need for organizations to repeatedly hit users with terms of service, usage and warnings to further their case in the event of a compromise.
Recently I've been reading through the OS X hardening guide and found this quick little nugget. Here is how it's done in OS X (Tested with Tiger):
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText "By accessing this computer you agree to pay the owner a fee determined by him, not to exceed \$1,000,000 USD."
You get the idea, basically, add some scary stuff in here if you're an organization with OS X installs.
Posted in Operating Systems | 1 Comment »
January 12th, 2008 Anthony Towry
OS X has decided to throw a few nuts into the recipe for working with Ruby.
Ruby itself is part of the developer tools package. However, the issue here is that the version that comes with Tiger is an older one. Unfortunately, you can't build the rubygems package with it either.
The trick is to use fink or macports to get the latest Ruby installed. Then head out to RubyForge for the latest RubyGems package. Unpack this bad boy and build it from source. I experienced problems when trying to get it via the macports package. Building from source worked fine though.
Finally, to use gems without having to specify the -rubygems switch everytime I recommend adding the
export RUBYOPT=rubygems
line to your .bash_profile.
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
December 14th, 2007 Anthony Towry
In an attempt to get at the very least my basic infosec tools running on OS X I've been banging away at getting something loaded to sniff. I've been around the block with the MacPort of ettercap, which works to a point, but unfortunately seems to lock the console once I've got a session going. Well fret no more boys and girls!
Ethereal works right out of the Fink package manager. I love working over the filters in Ethereal/Wireshark, but with Ethereal I don't get the "live" packet captures. It's a capture then analyze hand-off, which I'm probably going to have to go another way with sometime soon. But damn, I'm just glad to have something to help me out.
Posted in Security | 1 Comment »
December 13th, 2007 Anthony Towry
So, I recently took a little trip to the Apple store and grabbed up that MacBook Pro I was talking about getting. I must say, it is a sweet piece of hardware. I'm really enjoying it.
My first step was loading up VMware Fusion and checking out performance on an installation of Windows XP and Visual Studio 2005. No problems so far. I'll need to stress it out with SQL Server 2005 here soon and see if it smokes. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Hardware, Operating Systems, Security | No Comments »
December 1st, 2007 Anthony Towry
So, lately I've been thinking about getting a MacBook Pro to use as my main computing platform. I've been wanting a machine with native *nix support and kicking virtualization options (VMWare Fusion) since I'll be keeping one foot in the .Net world. Of course I risk joining the fanboy cult of Mac, but "what are ya gonna do?" Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Hardware, Operating Systems | No Comments »
