Tag Archives: cyberwar

Dmitri and the Wallet

14 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by in cyber war, Novel

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DmitriHow big is your wallet?  Look at the objects on this tabletop.  I bet your wallet is not as big as Dmitri’s is.  I don’t really know his name.  Like any other guy, I was minding my own business in the hotel lobby when I was engulfed by a gaggle of techies attending some international conference for the betterment of humanity.  This guy sits in front of me, blocking my view of equally attractive people, and proceeds to pull out his wallet. Seemingly to make room for, not just one, but two smart phones.

To his credit, he used both mobiles at the same time.  Possibly dueling the same issue that was so important to him that he worked it while his comrades drank voraciously nearby.  Sounded more to me though that he was working some tech issue with skilled subject matter experts on the one phone, to the point he could set it down occasionally, while he yelled at the Help Desk on the other.  The wallet, despite serving as a focal point to at least me, was lost in all this performance art.

If you think it’s bad how I’m making fun of this guy, you should consider how much worse it is for me to take a photo of a complete, non-celebrity stranger, and post it online.  I don’t care.  This guy has earned a role as a European hacker in my pending novel.

The Sands Casino

23 Sunday Jul 2017

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iranian_hackers_in_every_server

BlackHat is in Vegas this week.  That’s the big cyber security conference for my tribe.  I’m not going, I actually leave for vacation mid-week, but it draws my attention to my novel, Cyber War I.  Allow me to explain part of my story.  I often tell people I didn’t make much up, and it’s true.  I called the casino in my story, the Arabian Nights.  Think about it.

The Sands isn’t actually a casino anymore.  It used to be.  Now it’s the name of the corporation that owns some of the largest casinos in Las Vegas and Macau – the Venetian perhaps being the most famous.  The Sands Corporation is majority owned by billionaire Sheldon Adelson.  You might know him as a prominent GOP contributor.  His elimination of financial support lead to Bush having to withdraw from the 2016 primaries.  His pro-Isreali speech at Yeshiva University in 2013 lead to his casino empire experiencing a major cyber attack by Iran in 2014.

The details are a little fuzzy to me now, but what I recall was he gave a speech where he proposed that the US should detonate a nuclear bomb in the Iranian desert.  So that they would know what a nuclear attack looks like.  Sheldon’s idea of a deterrent.  Iran didn’t find it amusing.  A few months later, Iran attacked Sheldon’s casino in Bethlehem PA, where they obtained privileged user credentials that allowed them to proceed with a major cyber attack against the Sand’s casinos in Vegas.  The week-long attack cost Sheldon well over $40M.  Inadvertently, Iran took down the Active Directory services which stopped them from gaining access to the Macau casino network.  That would have pushed the cost over $100M.

If you read my book, which only an exclusive 100 people in the world have, you’d know this is all fairly transparent.  Sheldon is Sam Sumner.  The Sands is the Arabian Nights.  The larger story of course is based on Iran responding to the US Stuxnet attack against their centrifuges.  And the climax ends at the BlackHat conference.  Even though it took me a couple of years to start my book, I knew I was going to base it off this Sheldon storyline after reading about how his speech at Yeshiva University led to his casino attack by Iran.  Why bother making stuff up?

 

Spacing

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

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I promised earlier to provide useful content as I report on the progress of my novel.  Useful I guess to anyone else writing a novel.  I’m currently in a final read-through of my manuscript and have discovered a nice editing tip to share.

I have a spacing issue with some sentences.  Initially, before I fixed it, one or two sentences per page.  And I have nearly 500 pages.  Spacing is the term ascribed to when a line of text doesn’t complete the row as expected before beginning on the next row.  The carriage return is off.  My first reaction was to place the cursor at the start of the next row and hit backspace, expecting one to three words to move back up to the previous row.  But this didn’t work, the words joined without a space.  So it’s a spacing issue.

I’ve known about this issue for months.  It occurred when I stopped using Apple Pages for my editor and began using Microsoft Word.  I preferred Pages because it had better export functions to ebook formats and whatnot.  I was eventually forced into using Word because that’s the file format the industry prefers.  Everyone is too stupid to use their preferred tool unless given the proper format, so we have to all agree on a single format.  I suspect the spacing issue resulted from some bug when exporting from Pages to Word.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to fix it without retyping most of the split sentence.  Given the massive number of spacing issues, fixing this was tedious.  I kept putting it off until I could figure out the root cause and an easy fix.  I then noticed a pattern.  This typically occurred when the next line contained the start of a new sentence.  I wondered if it wasn’t the result of my double spaces between sentences.  This requires a tangential explanation.

I type two spaces between sentences.  Some people will tell you I do this because I’m over 40.  I’ll tell you I do this because I took a typing class in high school and was taught to do this.  The modern convention is to type only a single space.  I’m staunchly in the camp that two spaces is better and refuse to change.  As if my muscle memory will even allow me to change.  Long story short, I backspaced a sentence down to a single space, and the spacing issue corrected itself.  It was truly magical.  So I performed this simple edit for a while, but even this shortcut to retyping partial sentences became tedious after a 100 pages.

I then had this thought that maybe I could leverage the search and replace function.  But search on what?  It occurred to me that, as far as the computer knows, a space is a character as much as any letter.  I typed two spaces in the search function to test this out.  I couldn’t exactly see the spaces, but I knew they were there.  Before I could tab down to the replace with line, the number of found instances of two spaces began to populate to the right of the search bar.  This gave me confidence.  I typed a single space into the replace function and hit enter.  Viola, hundreds of double spaces were replaced by a single space, essentially all the inter-sentence spaces were fixed.

More importantly, nearly all my spacing issues were fixed.  I’m finding a handful of additional spacing issues as I perform my final read-through.  They don’t have a sentence starting on the next line, so it’s a variation of the bug that caused this.  I’m fixing these by retyping part of the sentence.  Not so many to make this tedious.  I’m finding very few typos.  I’m fixing some other things like italicizing words when I switch from third person to first person.  Stuff like that.  I expect to be done by the weekend.

Next step will be designing my page layout and publishing.  My brother-in-law is researching the best font to use for my title.  Right now I’m looking at stencil.  I need a war theme.  I welcome your suggestions.  For all my beta readers, give your feedback quick.  I’m still targeting Black Friday.

Web Security

12 Saturday Feb 2011

Posted by in cyber war, Geek Horror

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This was annoying.  I received an abuse letter (email) from Comcast, my ISP, last night.  For copyright infringement related to the illegal file sharing of some inane Kanye West song.  I’ve appended their email to the end of this blog.  The first thought that ran through my mind was, “Really, I have a Kanye West song?”  So my first action was to query my iTunes library of over 5000 songs and sure enough, I have exactly one Kanye West song – Gold Digger featuring Jamie Foxx.

I immediately suspected my tenants since they’re fairly young.  Although I knew it could also have been from Brittany – she always brings her MacBook whenever she comes home from college.  I doubt I could prove the source of the Gnutella file sharing.  I turned off my web filtering half a year ago when I was trying to install Lo-Jack on Brittany’s new laptop.  It required some call home function that my firewall was blocking.  Unless I’m specifically blocking something, my firewall won’t log the traffic.  It can, but I didn’t have it configured to do that either.  So the Kanye West download could have been from any computer in my house – or carriage house which I rent out.  The Comcast abuse letter only lists the IP address of my cable modem and it doesn’t provide the DHCP address from my home network(s).

My second action, after reviewing my iTunes, was to turn web filtering back on.  I have an old IBM Proventia FW that I have setup between my cable modem and my home LANs.  One network is for my tenants, and they have their own WiFi server.  I allow that LAN access to the Internet but not to my home office LAN (network 2) or my home LAN (network 3).  My home office network has access to all three networks in order to manage the WiFi servers.  With the web filtering running, I setup two FW rules to block traffic to the Gnutella service.  One rule for TCP ports 6346 to 6347 and another for UDP ports 6346-6347 – both at 202.0.0.0 with a 28 bit mask.  Then I asked my tenant if he was using Gnutella and informed him about the abuse letter and my new web filters.  He was pretty humble about it and apologized.

I’m relating this in my blog, and probably FaceBook, because it occurs to me many of my friends could use some advice on computer security.  I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and I just got in trouble from my ISP.  Maybe I should be embarrassed – I’m not.  I do appreciate the irony.  But I know that many of my friends have kids – with their own computers – whom run these illicit and dangerous file sharing applications.  The last link above shows you how to block some of the more nefarious sites.  Understand that I’m not judging.  I support some copyleft arguments as they juxtapose certain tenets of innovation against the precepts of copyright protection.  But these applications put your computer and home network at extreme risk of being compromised.  These apps are favorites of hackers and are as likely as visiting free porn sites to result in your machine becoming pwned into a botnet.  Forget fears of Comcast cutting off your access – be afraid of being pwned.

I’m serious.  I’d rather blog on my running themes, but you need to know this stuff.  My YouTube instructions on protecting your texting privacy was originally intended in jest when Tiger Woods got clubbed by his wife after she saw his text history.  I was just having fun, but it’s turned into one of my most watched YouTube episodes.  Likewise, my commentary on the Google vs China cyber story last year continues to receive 4 or 5 views a day based on people searching on the terms cyberwar and cyber warfare.  So I figure this is good information.  I hope so.  Or if not, I hope you get a chuckle from knowing that Comcast is on to me.

————————————————————————

Notice of Action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Abuse Incident Number:      Not Applicable
Report Date/Time:           Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:31:02 -0600

ED MAHONEY
1805 S COFFMAN ST
LONGMONT, CO  805047568

Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Subscriber:

Comcast has received a notification by a copyright owner, or its authorized agent, reporting an alleged infringement of one or more copyrighted works made on or over Comcast’s High-Speed Internet service (the ‘Service’).  The copyright owner has identified the Internet Protocol (‘IP’) address associated with your Service account at the time as the source of the infringing works.  The works identified by the copyright owner in its notification are listed below.  Comcast reminds you that use of the Service (or any part of the Service) in any manner that constitutes an infringement of any copyrighted work is a violation of Comcast’s Acceptable Use Policy and may result in the suspension or termination of your Service account.

If you have any questions regarding this notice, you may direct them to Comcast in writing by sending a letter or e-mail to:

Comcast Customer Security Assurance
Comcast Cable Communications, LLC
1800 Bishops Gate Blvd., 3rd Floor East Wing
Mount Laurel, NJ 08054 U.S.A.
Phone: (888) 565-4329
Fax: (856) 324-2940

For more information regarding Comcast’s copyright infringement policy, procedures, and contact information, please read our Acceptable Use Policy by clicking on the Terms of Service link at http://www.comcast.net.

Sincerely,
Comcast Customer Security Assurance

Copyright work(s) identified in the notification of claimed infringement:

Infringing Work : Graduation
Filename : Kanye West – Graduation – Stronger.mp3=20
Filename : Kanye West – Graduation – Stronger.mp3=20
First found (UTC): 2011-02-10T12:21:17.61Z
Last found (UTC): 2011-02-10T12:21:17.61Z
Filesize  : 7583872 bytes=20
IP Address: 76.25.159.42
IP Port: 17677
Network: Gnutella
Protocol: Gnutella    =20