CAPTCHA security Hotmail.com / Live.com bypassed

An article from Websense shows how new bots are able to bypass the CAPTCHA security that prevents spammers from creating large number of accounts.

According to Websense the three main advantages for spammers to target this CAPTCHA are:

the Microsoft domain is unlikely to be blacklisted they are free to sign up it may be hard to keep track of them as there are millions of users worldwide using the service.

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The sameRead more.

mysql error “ERROR 1030: Got error 134 from table handler”

If you try to insert or select data from a table and you get an error message from mysql that says

ERROR 1030: Got error 134 from table handler

then you have repair the table.

FOSDEM 2008

FOSDEM, the free and open source developers’european meeting is taking place in Brussels on 23/24 February.

Their schedule is online and shows that there are going to be some interesting talks :

The virtualization track with talks on Xen. Application virtualization with next-generation Klik Unicoding With PHP 6 OWASP WebScarab-NG

SQLmap

SQLmap is a security tool that can check your site for sql injection vulnerabilities.

Fun with Trams

An article on the site of Bruce Schneier talks about “hacking Trams” via TV remote control.

Why would you need remote controls when most of the control cupboards are only protected with a generic lock for which you can find a key in any decent store? It’s much more fun figuring out what the function of the different buttons are if you’re closer to the “vehicle”.

Flash UPnP attack

An interesting read on gnucitizen.org on the UPnP attack via Flash.

A user visiting a webpage that is hosting a malicious SWF file (Flash) might allow an attacker to remotely take control of UPnP devices (like routers) on the users’ private network. Because of the lack of authentication mechanisms this can happen without any user authentication.

A successful attack would allow an attacker to change the firewall setup or administrative setup of broadband modems. MostRead more.

log system security events to twitter

An article on the blog of Evan Weaver talks about having you logs forwarded to twitter.

It doesn’t sound like such a good idea because you’re relying on the “privacy” protection mechanism of Twitter. This mechanism is acting as a black box so you could as well not be using any protection mechanism.

The idea itself isn’t that bad, having your critical messages (like process xxx not running)- forwarded to twitter might be more usefulRead more.

No icons in OpenOffice.org on Ubuntu

If OpenOffice doesn’t show any icons in the toolbars then you might want to re-install the packages

openoffice.org-style-default openoffice.org-style-human

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Mysql Slice a resultset

Slicing a mysql result is easy with

select from_unixtime(unix_timestamp(timestamp) -unix_timestamp(timestamp) % $slicecount) as slice, count(*) from event group by slice

This will return the mysql statement sliced on the given number of slices.

Networking Monitoring Tools

A list of useful networking monitoring tools. This is not a Top 10 or Top 5 or Top whatever, the usefulness of these applications depends on your environment and what exactly you want to monitor for.

ntop is a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular top Unix command does. ntop is based on libpcap and it has been written in a portable way in order to virtually runRead more.