bkenny

Stop gap for SQL Injection attacks under IIS - URL Scan

bkenny — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:17:28 +0000

SQL injection attacks are becoming more and more of an issue. The trouble is, some companies may have old systems vulnerable to injection attacks and to apply fixes to that code to ensure its security may take weeks of development.

How do you create a safe guard stop gap between those weeks of development? - URL Scan for IIS seems to do the trick.

Safe guard allows you to apply rules to your IIS server that you previously couldn’t. For example if you were to write a simple rule to stop SQL injection attacks it might look something like this…

[SQL Injection]
AppliesTo=.asp,.aspx
DenyDataSection=SQL Injection Strings
ScanUrl=0
ScanAllRaw=0
ScanQueryString=1
ScanHeaders=

[SQL Injection Strings]
–
%3b ; a semicolon
/*
@ ; also catches @@
char ; also catches nchar and varchar
alter
begin
cast
convert
create
cursor
declare
delete
drop
end
exec ; also catches execute
fetch
insert
kill
open
select
sys ; also catches sysobjects and syscolumns
table
update

You can write many custom rules for URL Scan, but it is a definite tool to research if your administrating large farms of websites.

DNS Issues in Mac OS X

bkenny — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:04:32 +0000

I don’t know if this is a common issue or not. However, for some reason, some websites on my mac will not load. An example is www.mneylon.com.

I have tried in both Safari and Firefox 3, it just seems to hang with the ‘Connecting to www.mneylon.com…’ in the status bar.

It becomes strange, when I fire up my windows XP on parallels, it loads up find on both IE and Firefox 3!

Poisoned DNS

bkenny — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:43:19 +0000

A lot of chatter is on the DNS exploit that is active at the moment. The majority of servers have been patched however I found a great tool created by IANA on the Blacknight Blog.

Should you wish to check to see if your name servers are exploitable - just type in your domain name on this page and the tool will tell you all you need to know.

I’m happy to see our domains are perfectly patched by the guys in blacknight who take care of our NS needs.

Tool: http://recursive.iana.org/

Swap desktops - The Mac way

bkenny — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:31:00 +0000

Since I picked up my new mac, I have always wanted to get the smackbook hack working. Until tonight I havn’t actually bothered.

So - what’s involved ?

I’ve compressed all the files you indeed, which you can download here.

Place both into the same folder. Then change the permissions on the smackleopard.command file to executable. You can do this by opening a terminal and typing ‘chmod +x smackleopard.command’.

Then simply run the file ./smackleopard.command (simple as that).

Note - if you are like me and didn’t have the spaces default setting of Ctrl + direction pad, and use the option key instead, you need to change this little snippet from

`osascript -e ‘tell application \”System Events\” to keystroke (ASCII character 29) using control down’`

} else {

`osascript -e ‘tell application \”System Events\” to keystroke (ASCII character 28) using control down’`

to the following

`osascript -e ‘tell application \”System Events\” to keystroke (ASCII character 28) using option down’`

} else {

`osascript -e ‘tell application \”System Events\” to keystroke (ASCII character 29) using option down’`

Easy as that!

Server move

bkenny — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:26:00 +0000

It finally happened, I’ve been trying to move www.bkenny.com to a new server for quiet some time. The main reason being disk space.

I have quiet alot of photos etc that I am going to be placing on the blog. The previous shared hosting account from blacknight just wasn’t big enough. I had out grown it.

Thus, I have migrated to a VPS from blacknight and boy was it easy. A quick backup for the MySQL DB, restore onto the VPS and migration of the files. A few accounts had to be migrated to.

The only outstanding piece of work is migrating my email. But that should be as simple as moving the MX records and again some account work.

One other thing I will be missing is the statistics on the domain. I don’t think I can migrate them however.

Expect some nice photo galleries soon!

Creative imaginations

bkenny — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:25:39 +0000

I have always been a fan of great creativity. I have been sent this advertisement today and find it to be one of the few that have really caught my eye. Today’s market focuses to much on getting the brand name across and not dwelling to much on the fact that a good, creative ad can sell your product better.

Full Directory Listing in Mac OS X

bkenny — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:21:03 +0000

Ever wonder how to get your full directory tree into a text file in Mac OS X or any unix or linux env for that matter.

Paul from irc.linux.ie came up with a great way of doing it from one simple command:

find / > ~/tree.txt

Birthday Bash

bkenny — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:24:53 +0000

Last Saturday my wonderful and amazing girlfriend organised a brilliant birthday bash for me. It involved, heading up to johnny foxs, meeting all my closest friends. Drinking lovely guinness and chatting and having lovely muscles.

Then into a disco bus, everything getting smashed against windows and drinking champagne etc. Off the disco bus and into club 92 for more drunking dancing. Brilliance!

If I had one video to remember the night by, it definitely would be this one:

[See post to watch Flash video]

The Darkside

bkenny — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:32:57 +0000

After using PC’s all my life, I am very familiar with their habits of breaking and general annoyances etc. So - I finally decided to do something about it and move to the dark side. Last Thursday, I picked up my brand spanking new Macbook Pro. Boy is this thing pretty.

From the moment I took it out of the box to now, I’ve been nothing but completely happy with it. I know I’m starting to sound a little like Steve Jobs here - “We’re really excited about this” - but it’s the truth. It’s completely perfect in every respect.

However, the only one problem I have found with it so far - only 2 USBs. I have alot of external storage and other devices in work that I use via USB. My old dell had 4 USBs. I have managed to overcome this by picking up one of the new keyboards today, and my monitor has an extra 2 ports also.

I have a feeling I won’t be turning away from Mac moving forward

www.menupages.ie becomes IPv6 - again.

bkenny — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:09:24 +0000

I previously brought www.menupages.ie the ability to be served out via IPv6. There was plenty of support for the task from the guys at blacknight. A range was associated to Page 7 Media and now we have www.menupages.ie up and running correctly and full time.

What happened previously?
The answer is not one I’m proud of, but basically, I did not maintain it correctly. There were versions of the website being uploaded to our production environment but not moving across to the new IPv6 server. Apologies for this and I promise to maintain this version correctly.

Whats the next step?
Why stop with www.menupages.ie ? The next step is to move the major websites across to the IPv6 servers. Starting with www.cbg.ie - www.farmandplant.ie - and finally www.indublin.ie Keep looking.

The proof in the pudding
Pinging menupages.ie [2a01:a8:104:1::15] from 2a01:a8:104:1::15 with 32 bytes of
data:
Reply from 2a01:a8:104:1::15: time<1ms
Reply from 2a01:a8:104:1::15: time<1ms
Reply from 2a01:a8:104:1::15: time<1ms
Reply from 2a01:a8:104:1::15: time<1ms

Ping statistics for 2a01:a8:104:1::15:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),