Earlier, when Locals had just started I had a series called "tools of the trade", in which I displayed a bunch of tools that could help with security questions and solutions. I wrote that over on RR, and it was read okay.
But with this audience, that knows there is a Security Saturday to be had every month, I can look a little more closely. So let us look at an, in my opinion essential, set of tools for anyone working on a computer. Some of these ship with your computer, others you would have to install.
These programs help to understand what is going wrong (or what is going well) in your network. Knowing is half the battle when working with these tools, both in knowing what these tools help with, as well as knowing what a network is.
The first program is "ping". To ping something means to politely ask if it can send a message back. it is not a true ping, since the system on the receiving end can choose to ignore the request. Ping can be used to check if some server is up and running, or if your network is stable.
If you want to check your connectivity just open Windows Powershell, Command Prompt, Linux Bash, or another shell and type "ping www.google.com" to check connectivity and stability from your system to Google and back. Alternatively use "ping 8.8.8.8" to check connectivity to a certain IP address (in this case Google DNS).
Ping clearly works at the level of connectivity, it is a very simple program in that sense, but very powerful.
Knowing is half the battle, so knowing the IP address of your own router or WiFi access point you could ping your local access point and then google. If the ping to the former works, but the latter does not, you have lost internet connectivity to the outside which you can then notify your provider of.
In tandem with ping, to get a little closer to specialized security tools, you can get "nmap" to scan your local network, or a target network to see what lives in your network, what is connected and what not. This way you could probe to find out the local IP addresses of machines you might want to pinbg (WiFi, router, printer, NAS, etc...)
Knowing this makes you a little less lost when something does not work, but it is not for everyone. But the more you know, the better prepared you are and the less issues you will have.
Nmap is definitely a program that falls into network infrastructure management/discovery and it requires you to know a little bit about how computers see a network (with ports that can be open and closed, and routes that can be traversed).
my personal favorite tool in Wireshark. Wireshark can listen in on what is going on in your network connection and react to it. It shows you every individual message that enters, leaves (or if you ask it to pay attention, passes by) your computer.
To decipher it you need to know something about protocols, and packets (that are send over infrastructure to and from ports).
These three tools together are worth learning a litttle bit about when you have time.
I would lie if I said I had a lot of time for this Security Saturday, I should have more time after three of my tutoring students have graduated next month. Let me know what deeper topics you want to see discussed :D
There is so much more to this one chapter, but it is so good already!
I had to cut it short because guests arrived, but this should get you started on your own study :)
@calvinrempel Thank you once again for the Theology Tuesday you did, I refer back to it in this one :)
@JamesDerian Congratulations with your Marriage :)
Next time there might (almost certainly) not be a Theology Tuesday, so the official next one will be February 22nd! I have a marriage to attend. As the groom. Our home is still half a project.
Fun times!
Alc and I talk about my book that is now officially finished. This is part 1 of 2. Parts have not been neatly cut. Part two will air 5 minutes after part 1 for coninuity!
Hope you enjoy :)
This is the third corner to have persistent discussions and talks in. I love tech, but especially once it transcends hardware a little. I have two degrees; a bachelor's in Software Engineering and a master's in Information Security Technology. My graduation thesis focused on assembly-level optimizations (that is, one level above the hardware level) and my free subjects were in formal verification. This is why I love programming in the security corner, or maybe it is the other way around.
I started going down the Security path because I early on saw that the world around us would become a dangerous cesspool of badly-implemented and hostile tech. Now I am one of the people that understands the field around that mess :)
So in here you can discuss secure phones, weird programming languages, sad truths about internet-connected fridges. Also about malware, adblockers, and so on and so fort!
A lot of tech talk I do over at the @Lunduke community, where a lot of nerds hang out and it is ...
Much like the reading corner, let's have a music corner! A few rules for this one, since some music can be provocative. I don't mind much but let's keep youtube links with risque thumbnails out of here.
Other music I might also mind. "Do you find that offensive?" might someone ask. Yes, there is some music I choose not to listen on principle, and I walk a thin line there sometimes. But do not worry, I have a wide taste otherwise so feel free to share almost anything :)
Either way, here is the music corner!
Many times when we talk about security, we mean to say "Digital security". In essence we mean to say that our hardware and software that we use stays safe no matter what we do. And even though the ISO27001 standard (and by extension, for example, the NEN7510 standard) make it abundantly clear that security is a people-domain problem, we usually take that as a process-like truth. Meaning, we think that being secure is a matter of regulating people.
The truth is very different. For example, while writing this I am pretty shot. I slept five hours and I an under influence of a bunch of painkillers and some alcohol. Before you ask what I was thinking, let me mention that I have a genetic defect in my spine that I am dealing with right now by taking measured doses of all three (and yes, to get the Bible into this conversation, there is even a biblical ground for the inebriation with alcohol - see proverbs and the letters to Timothy - , although I did not use red wine. But hey, I am still on top of ...
