Axiomatic Breakfast

Ubuntu Unleashed: has a good collection of useful security tools available for linux. Lots of standard items there and an few new ones I haven’t used before. Good for reference. Ubuntu Unleashed: The Top Security Tools in the Ubuntu Repositories you may not know about with 1 click Installation

Here is a collection of security tools that you should look through to add to your arsenal to help keep the peace on your pc/network or unleash war on others for whatever reason.

From Boing Boing, The Airport Security Follies - Jet Lagged - Air Travel - Opinion - New York Times Blog

Excerpt:

Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The changes put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless.

CIO Magazine has a good article about the evolving state of computer forensics.
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Corey from BoingBoing has posted a very interesting essay and open letter about his recent flight from the UK to the US. I’m sure that if this were on the news we’d see the obligatory “If it means we’re safer then I’m all for it” person but there is no justifiable reason for collecting this type of information.

Excerpt:

Last week on a trip from London to the US, American Airlines demanded that I write out a list of the names and addresses of all the friends I would be staying with in the USA. They claimed that this was due to a TSA regulation, but refused to state which regulation required them to gather this information, nor what they would do with it once they’d gathered it.

Noted computer security expert Bruce Schneier has a good article up on his blog regarding the problem with Electronic Voting Machines. It’s a very good essay on what voting machines need to do to be successful.

Excerpt:

In the aftermath of the U.S.’s 2004 election, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerized machines lost votes, subtracted votes instead of adding them, and doubled votes. Because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted. And while it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of the presidential election, the Internet is buzzing with rumors and allegations of fraud in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual elections. Over the next several weeks we’ll see whether any of the information crystallizes into something significant.

Tech Dirt has an article describing how US Airforce bases are having to open up all incoming Coke cases to look for the new winning cans that contain GPS-enabled cell phones!

This is kind of interesting. Ever want to know how to pick locks? Take a look at Greg Miller’s Guide to Lock Picking for Beginners

“SecurityFocus”:http://www.securityfocus.com has a good “security checklist for home computer users”:http://www.securityfocus.com/printable/columnists/220

Security Focus has a good article about “some of the interesting things you can find using google”:http://www.securityfocus.com/printable/columnists/224. Very interesting reading.

Many pieces of computer software and hardware come with a default username and password. Somewtimes this was intended to let technicians get in and fix things in the field. Other times someone just forgot to turn it off. Either way it’s not a good thing. Here’s a “list of several hundred default usernames/passwords”:http://www.phenoelit.de/dpl/dpl.html to help with penetration testing and security evaluations.

Here’s an interesting tidbit. “Spywarenfo”:http://www.spywareinfo.com has some information about the supposed “ZoneAlarm ‘flaw’”:http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/zonelabs/exploit_hoax.php that was widely reported recently.

More from Slashdot! They have an article about “Detecting NAT Gateways”:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/24/0119209. It sounds like this is an interesting way to help secure internal networks and make sure the interanal computers follow the rules.

In Bruce Schneier’s “latest”:http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0302.html “Crypto-Gram newsletter”:http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram.html , he has an excilent essay tearing apart the reports of an ‘Unbreakable’ Cryptography system.
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Yep. The lock on the door at work, or in tha apt. The researcher applied cryptanalysis techniques to locks to discover a way to make a master key. Interesting reading.

Master Key Copying Revealed (Free registration required)

SecurityFocus has a good article about using a Honeypot to help learn about security and computer forensics.

SecurityFocus HOME Infocus: Intelligence Gathering: Watching a Honeypot at Wo