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Balancing safety and versatility

Dave Farquhar security December 2, 2011December 1, 20111980s, android, cyanogenmod, hp, IBM, john c dvorak, linksys, macintosh, networking equipment, proprietary unix, unix, vulnerability, wrt54g

John C Dvorak has a very simple solution to the HP printing problem. Lock down the firmware so it’s not upgradeable. And while we’re at it, do the same thing to routers and other equipment.

This solves the problem of loading rogue firmware on the devices, but there are several problems with such a draconian approach.
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Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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Expect your HP printer to get 0wnz0r3d shortly

Dave Farquhar security November 30, 2011November 29, 2011hp, job description, laserjet, lexmark

Courtesy of Dan Bowman: You may have seen the brief writeup on Slashdot about how to set printers on fire by messing with the fuser, but in Germany next month there’s going to be a security engineer’s nightmare unleashed, courtesy of the HP printer that’s probably sitting a few feet outside your cubicle and mine.

And there’s a whole lot more to it than just messing with the fuser in hopes of killing a printer or (perhaps) starting a fire. There’s a lot more to a printer than toner and a fuser. As the link above says, a printer contains an embedded Linux or Vxworks system that’s trivially easy to install a rootkit on and that nobody’s paying attention to. Seriously, who watches traffic coming from the printer?

The possibilities are endless.
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Dave Farquhar

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How to make a DMZ with two routers

Dave Farquhar security November 21, 2011August 21, 2016d-link, firewall, linksys, lowercase letters, passwords, SSID, WAN, WEP, wrt54g

I’ve alluded in the past to why it’s a good idea to make a DMZ with two routers, but I’ve never gone into depth about how and necessarily why to do it.

If your ISP gave you a combination modem/switch/access point/router and it only supports 100 megabit wired and 54-megabit (802.11g) wireless and you want to upgrade to gigabit wired/150-meg (802.11n) wireless, here’s a great way to make the two devices work together and improve your security.

Dave Farquhar

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How I secured my new wireless router

Dave Farquhar security November 12, 2011December 6, 2015lowercase letters, passwords, RIAA, vulnerability, WEP

For the first time ever, I actually have a wireless router that can cover my whole house. I’ve been interested in wireless security for a long time, but haven’t actually had to do much with it because I wasn’t running any wireless networks at home.

I spent a few minutes securing my network after I got it up and running. I talked at rather long length about that in the past, but on a really practical level, here’s what I did in a mere 10 minutes that will make a big difference.

Dave Farquhar

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Disable USB mass storage to solve the USB drive-in-the-parking-lot problem

Dave Farquhar security October 25, 2011October 11, 2019computerworld, IEEE, usb device

If you’re not concerned yet about the danger of people finding random USB devices in parking lots and plugging them into work PCs, eventually you will be. The answer to the problem is to disable USB mass storage on business PCs. Of course, then there’s the question of how you connect hard drives for legitimate company use.
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Dave Farquhar

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Appremover can remove stubborn antivirus software

Dave Farquhar security October 22, 2011November 22, 2016antivirus, McAfee, symantec

Antivirus software can be among the hardest software to uninstall, because its hooks dig so deeply into the operating system. I’ve seen it fail to uninstall for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it requires a password, which was entered by someone other than you and never written down. Or sometimes something gets corrupted, and the program’s uninstaller fails. If you need to remove stubborn antivirus software, there’s a solution.

Enter Appremover.

Dave Farquhar

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A source of great inspiration evaporates

Dave Farquhar security October 20, 2011October 19, 2011Bing, SEO, trolls

Google announced this week that it’s defaulting to https (secure) searches, and not passing search queries on to the sites its user clicks anymore. It’s the end of an era, I guess, and I’ll miss it.

Yeah, I looked at the search queries that come into this site. I’ve been doing it for years.

Dave Farquhar

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Yesterday was Patch Tuesday again

Dave Farquhar security October 12, 2011October 11, 2011code execution, malware, Patch Tuesday

I’m way too tired to do the kind of Patch Tuesday writeup I did last month, so I’ll just remind you, and hope that suffices. This month we have vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer, Silverlight, and .NET, some of which can cause remote code execution, which is a holy grail for spreading malware. So apply those updates. The Silverlight update applies to Macintoshes as well.

Dave Farquhar

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Don’t use software firewalls: Good advice or bad?

Dave Farquhar security October 10, 2011October 9, 2011amd, extra money, firewall, intel, linksys, malware, netgear, prison, vista, vulnerability, Windows XP, x86

A common piece of good-meaning advice you’ll hear is that you should never use software firewalls. But is that good advice, or bad?

On the surface, it’s good advice. It’s much better to use the firewall built into a cable/DSL router. But the software firewall built into Windows XP, Vista, 7, and (presumably) 8 makes for a good second line of defense, so I don’t recommend disabling it.

I’ll explain further.

Dave Farquhar

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Stop social networking sites from tracking you

Dave Farquhar security October 4, 2011April 17, 2017chrome, firefox, infoworld

I found some tips to help stop social networking sites from tracking you outside of them at a surprising place: Infoworld.

And yes, to one degree or another, social networking sites can track what you’re doing on the rest of the web. If that doesn’t bother you, move along. If it bothers you, read on.

Dave Farquhar

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