Date: 07 October 2011
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Greetings,
Well another week has ended, and this one will be a week that many will remember for a long time. You may know that I am an apple fanboy (if you don't, then I am), so during my reading of various motivational quotes and tributes for Steve Jobs over this week, a couple stuck out as interesting. I thought I would share three of them and then make an attempt to segue back into security news - here goes. (First and third are taken from http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may1998/nf80512d.htm)
"Q: What's the coolest stuff you have coming down the product pipe?
Jobs: We have some pretty cool stuff coming, but we don't talk about it.
Q: Will they be computers?
Jobs: Yes. We're not going off into la-la land."
My iPod, iPhones, and iPad are all thankful he changed his mind.
"We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them."
- Fortune (24th Jan 2000)
Thankfully I have managed to resist the temptation with that one, but my Power Macintosh 9600 (with an unheard-of 12 RAM slots taking up to 1.5GB of RAM) did enjoy OS X 10.2 when finder became multithreaded.
"Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains."
One thing I have come to like about recent Apple products is the "instructions" that they come with. For example, have a look at the iPad instructions: http://www.cultofmac.com/36565/pic-of-the-day-the-ipad-instruction-manual/
Personally, I also like simple when it comes to security. At home I allow SSH and only SSH into my home network. Anything else I want to do I tunnel over SSH. Have you ever attempted to audit a set of firewall rules containing:
- allow SSH
- drop everything else
as the only rules? Of course you can go too simple, but I have found that up-to-date, maintained and monitored beats overly complex.
That leads me on to the next item of news. Starting this week I'd like to welcome a new Information Security Analyst to join the AusCERT coordination centre team: Marco Ostini. Marco has previously worked in an incident response team and as a Windows and UNIX systems administrator. Marco will be a welcome addition to the team.
Lastly, we have a few different bulletins of note this week:
- The Microsoft Pre-release only has two critical bulletins, but with Windows and IE in that critical category it's definitely patch time (ESB-2011.1008)
- Cisco released three bulletins about their firewalls and network control (ESB-2011.0996, ESB-2011.0997, ESB-2011.0998)
- VMWare Workstation, Player and Fusion have been updated correcting a code execution vulnerability in UDF (CD image) file parsing (ESB-2011.0995)
- Chrome has also been updated, but it seems to have a habit of installing the update before I notice one exists (ASB-2011.0084)
Well, that's it for another week. I'm off home to play with my HyperCard stack on my PowerBook 540c.
Richard
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