The Doctor @drwho@hackers.town

Verifying myself: I am
@drwho in the
Fediverse.
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Do what thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

A little bit of hacker history, for folks who didn't live through it:

https://ia800504.us.archive.org/35/items/thehackercrackdo00101gut/hack12.txt

Back in 1985, LEOs started setting up and running boards to sting hackers. They went to great lengths to make them look 'legit' insofar as the hacker community was concerned, even going so far as to use some of the phone phreaking tricks of the time to make the boards look more like the HPAC/V boards of the time.

The folks who ran those boards never, ever, ever mentioned they were cops, or indeed any kind of official. In point of fact, none of us knew until the raids were over and done with and the defendants went to trial.

That somebody - anybody - in the Fediverse would talk about their professional life and affiliations in any way flies in the face of how law enforcement agencies actually do stuff.

It also shows a profound lack of knowledge of what "information security professional" actually means. It's not code for "mercenary black hat h4x0r," it means that in our day jobs we do information security work. Sometimes it's red team, which many want to think it is. Usually it's blue team, which is not sexy, boring, or counterculture. But, we do it for a reason, which is we want to try to make life in the twenty-first century a little safer. Nobody ever counts the data breaches that don't happen, and that's because we work our asses off to keep them from happening. We read logs, run honeypots, complain on internal IRC servers, and yes, deal with professional organizations, the origins of some tend to make people act without thinking or even doing a Google search.

When you do incident response, you sometimes have to deal with law enforcement. There are times that, regardless of the severity the feds have to be called in, and you have to work with them. And sometimes, really bad things happen and the feds get called in because it's "holy fuck" bad. Like most of the botnets of the last five years.

Those of you who espouse organization and collective action are acting exactly the same way as groups that ostracize and accuse members who actually practice operational and information security, keep tabs on threats and collect intelligence of that which you are organizing against. And ignore their warnings.

Love is the Law, Love under Will.

Do what thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Another bit of hacker history for you, if you didn't live through it:

Remember the Morris worm of 2 November 1988?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

The one that helped inspire one of the movies hackers love to hate, _Hackers_?

The Morris worm used a couple of exploitation techniques that we consider largely obsolete these days, namely, buffer overflows and stack corruption for remote code execution. In 1988.

In 1988, hacking was pretty much "guess lots of passwords until you get lucky." That's it. That's what we had.

rtm (Robert Tappan Morris, Jr.) was writing RCE exploits in 1988. In comparison, _Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit_ by Aleph1 (http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/fa08/papers/stack_smashing.pdf) was published in Phrack issue 49 (8 November 1996). Think about that for a moment. He was about seven years ahead of the state of the art for the hacker community.

RTM's father, Robert Morris senior worked for NSA between 1985 and 1994. He helped write some of the security standards that we take for granted these days, whether or not we realize that they were published in the Rainbow Books. He was also a Chief Scientist while at NSA.

There is an excellent chance (more likely a certainty) that most of the exploitation techniques that the hacker community takes for granted were discovered, perfected, and weaponized years before they were effectively rediscovered by the underground (or the professional infosec community). rtm certainly knew about some of those techniques, though exactly how remains a matter of speculation.

Are you okay with that state of affairs?

Love is the Law, Love under Will.

It's telling when you try to set up FreePBX, and everybody and their backup just downloaded the Raspbian respin. And the devs recommend it, too.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CKUvMkvAW5-/

Got the batphone's ATA online (finally). I had to force a factory reset of the OpenWRT router I was using as a wireless bridge to turn it back into a NATting router, only the wireless NIC is the WAN and eth0 is the LAN interface.

Now the ATA is online but the phone has no dialtone. I know what that's from, it's a NAT issue. So I just have to poke a couple of holes in the OpenWRT bridge's firewall.

TFW you're out of power outlets on your one power strip, and you'd have to rip a bookcase out of the wall to get access to the nearest outlet.

Tried to watch _The Highwayman_, which I haven't seen since I was little.

Nah.

Welp, exposing Huginn's database over Nebula did not go well.

Used Homer (https://github.com/bastienwirtz/homer) to put together a cute little startpage for Windbringer, served over the loopback interface with lighttpd.

My only real complaint is that I'm not really able to add snowstorm.js to the HTML page. Or at least, not yet. I'll have to de-uglify the index.html page and add it at the bottom.

Fixed a couple of things. Or tried to.

Took apart my "start World War III" USB hub to figure out why the LED doesn't light up, or make any noise when you push the big red button. All of the switches work. All of the interconnections inside work. I replaced the LED. Maybe the FX chip is dead (though it still works as an unpowered USB hub).

Tried to flash the firmware on my oscilloscope. It requires, among other things, soldering two jumper pads on the back so the microcontroller will power up and go into boot loader mode (and not firmware mode).

As it turns out, the bootloader this particular microcontroller has does not do serial very well. My TTL-to-USB interface is properly detected but the o-scope doesn't care. I can't even ping it.

Did some research, and found out that just about everybody who ran into the "Failed to init device" problem had to try two or three other interfaces before they found one that worked. I guess buying a cheap-ass TTL-to-USB unit from China was not a good idea. Or maybe I didn't get the right cheap-ass TTL-to-USB interface. I don''t know.

Thinking I'm going to tinker with making Windbringer a proper startpage to organize my most often used links. Not sure if I'm going to go with a packaged startpage or tinkertoy together my own with existing stuff.