Cox Crow

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

If you are blocking the MSSQL ports on your firewalls, block both inbound and outbound traffic. Just as you do not want the worms to enter your corral, you do not want your worms to escape.

Consider also the vectors of attack. Do the infected hosts have both internal and external NICs, exposing both sides of the fence? If they only face one side of your network, how did the worm get inside the fence? Did it tunnel through a trusted relationship with a vendor? Did an unwitting staff member bring the infection to work on his laptop? Through dial-in or the VPN?

5:34:11 PM # Google It!
categories: Security

Some Great Reward

Speaking of AllConsuming, I left April 1865 at the office last week, and so took Albion's Seed with me to Virginia. I've been in the midst of "East Anglia to Massachusetts: the Exodus of the English Puritans, 1629 - 1641" for about a year now. In part of this chapter, Fischer discusses the Puritans' reverence of the elderly in relation to their view that advanced age is as good an indicator of being Elect as anything.

I realized I'm familiar with thinking derivative of Calvin's, but not with Calvin himself. The idea that some, the Saints, are pre-determined to enter Heaven, and that the Grace of God may not be for all, leads me immediately to ask "why?" If nothing in our actions will alter our final rest, why do anything?

4:15:28 PM # Google It!

As if there weren't already too much to read

DJ Adams is exploring the intersection of Amazon wishlists and AllConsuming. Half of this is not unlike something I started — I start a lot of things I never finish — to check out what items on my wishlist are available at the local library.

3:18:01 PM # Google It!

Chomp()

She's been eyeing our meals for weeks now, so my wife held a Cheerio to the Little Sister's tongue so she could taste it. She lunged, and it disappeared. We take this as a sign that, at four and a half months, she is eager for something more solid than breast milk. Yesterday she devoured a bowl of rice cereal.

11:26:04 AM # Google It!
categories: Family

Back at Keys

BAK, I find some interesting developments on the VoIP and security fronts. One, the ILECs don't like way Vonage et al are using telephone numbers. The other, a large enough number of system administrators failed to patch their Microsoft SQL Server installations, and so created a fertile ground for worms.

I wonder how the VoIP-only services dealt with the resulting traffic loads. I noticed a serious quality degradation in traffic nominally originating on the POTS network in the long-distance calls I received on Sunday.

11:20:01 AM # Google It!
categories: Security, System Administration