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Showing posts from April, 2017

Cancer

Looking at a picture of my mother laying in her hospital chair taking her chemo medication makes me think about cyber. Our bodies are a network of connected computers. Blood and lymph are the communication channels that relay information between these computers. The mainframe, of course, is your brain, which is another highly connected network of computers. When cancer invades it starts by infiltrating a system. The system is homomophic usually, which makes it easier for the cancer (cyber infiltrator) to gain its foothold. Sometimes the infiltrator moves fast and runs through multiple systems wrecking havoc. Yet there are those infiltrators who move slow, learning each system as it goes slowly through the entire system. Nonhodgkins Lymphoma is that slow hacker. That's what my mother has. She's had this for a very long time. Mostly ignored by her "doctors" 8, 12, maybe 30 years ago, finally they see the infiltration and recognize the need to respond. Once the cance...

EzLynx Splunk regex

Looking to extract the EzLynx app and quote IDs from those referrer URLs in splunk? Use this regex: ^.+(app\.ezlynx\.com).+[qQ]uote[dD]etails\.aspx\?[aA]pp[qQ]uote[iI]d=(?P \d+)(&[aA]pp[iI]d=(?P \d+))?\".*$ I still take coffee as payment.

Password Insecurity

I tried to change my password today on a contractors portal. My password is 20 characters long. It's pretty strong as far as I am concerned. So I enter a new one and what do I get? The password does not meet the minimum requirements: password length cannot be less than 15 characters and greater than 50 characters and password must have 1 character of each of the following character types: upper case letter, lower case letter, number, symbol. In addition, your new password must be different than the previous 10 passwords, must have at least 4 characters different than your most recent password and cannot be changed more than once in 24 hour period. That's a long message saying my password is not secure. What is particularly interesting? must have at least 4 characters different than your most recent password  Yup, that's the fun statement that says all passwords on this system are reversible. Maybe they use CryptDB [1]? I don't really know, but I highly do...