Lets get Physical

On the way back from a very interesting an informative Microsoft Security Summit the other day and I noticed something that caught my eye.
Too many people concentrate on the hardware and software, and leave gaps. Gaps in the physical security, or gaps in the training of staff.
This photo shows off both.

Seems a cleaner at the train station near me had left the door open to the area that she kept her cleaning supplies, the same area that had a rack with server, fibre switch, ethernet switch, patchpanel and other miscelania. Whats that you spy, yep the rack door is unlocked too. Click click and a bad guy is on the network, just plug in a wireless router and see what traffic you can capture, doesn't matter if this network is firewalled the best in the world, or even airgapped, game over.
Back on the security conference I attended it was very interesting, it was all covered under an NDA, except the bit at the end which I already talked about. I am starting a security group in Sydney, sponsored by Microsoft. So Jeff Alexander let everyone know, I had a heap of business cards handed over for people that wanted to be kept in the loop, it is very exciting that we have this much interest already.
Well Peace out all, and please lock your racks and don't put them in a room with a sink for the cleaner to use.

Sydney IT Security Group

So I had a chat with Jeff about starting up a Security group in Sydney similar to counterparts in Canberra,Melbourne, and Brisbane.
It is really a great opportunity and I have been looking for a security group in Sydney for years now, making do with going to security topics at other groups. I don't think it will detract from these other groups just expand on the security theme, going places other groups may not want to go as they are too focussed.
I'd like to get some comments here on what people would like to see and what night etc, but people rarely comment on my blog. So I will setup a site for the group shortly and we can duke it out there.
Peace out all.

Pretty lights

More on DNS I know. May as well be another person beating a dead horse. But I give you pretty: http://www.doxpara.com/?p=1206
It is a video of the patched and not patched world wide. It intrigues me that there is a blinking light on the map of Australia about 3 hours north of Adelaide, I doubt it is Alice Springs, to south, maybe Coober Peadie if my geography serves.
Onto some more supposition by me (mainly in reply to Dan [the guy who discovered the Researched the DNS flaw] here);
I agree with what has been said, that we need more security on an inherintly in-secure network. But some (percieved) anonymity and some plain text is good, and what the internet is all about.
Could you imagine every site moving to https, for starters what is the point, who needs to read my blog through an encrypted channel? Really why, I don't really have any direct post functionality, and only a handful of readers, it is not like I am directing them to blindly do anything either.
Onto DNS, I was thinking the other day of another way to fix the issue. Deploy a port knocking technique on the reply based on the query, so that ports would have to be knocked in the correct order on the DNS server pre accepting back the lookup. Similar to the way a person gets into a safe, knowing the numbers isn't good enough you need to know the sequence. This would stop NAT being an issue as the DNS server can make the request out on all ports getting an auto map back on these ports. And would be more secure as the attacker would have to guess the right ports to knock on the way back, or read the request and then generate the reply and reply back, but if they can do that they are already in the middle and its game is over.
What do you think?
Peace out all, especially Dan, good job.