The usual Developer's dilemma here, I went on a hunt to try and find a decent open source cross platform C++ library that offered a good logging system. One that would write proper text logs on mac/linux and write either to the event viewer/text file on windows machines. Well all the systems I found out there worked really good on one platform but seriously lack in other areas. So in typical open source fashion I figured I would write my own that would be generic and fit my current needs.

So I got into the beta for the star trek online (STO) mmorpg game and well not very impressed with what they got going. I understand that it is a beta and as such there are bound to be bugs, glitches or other anomalies with the system. Except that by todays standards when a game is only about a week from release then maybe the vast majority of the bugs should be fixed before the game goes live and well they likely won't be. Bugs aside the game wasn't very fun either and had a real feeling of just being slapped together.

Microsoft Security Essentials

Why would a network admin, security admin or a network developer be concerned with packet tracing software like Wireshark or Snort? To some that answer might be extremely clear, but others maybe not so much. The basic premises is that a packet tracing program like Wireshark or my own sniff is that it can read all the traffic that is coming in on the network adapter.

So I have seen this problem come up a couple of times now and really it is totally a lame issue. It involves norton internet security suite and vista, maybe XP (not positive on xp). Basically the none techno speak version of this issue is that when norton either can not update and is seriously out of date or has expired it disables the PC's entire internet access on all devices (wireless/cables etc).

Passgen is a random password generator using strong random functions and it can not have the same type of digit more than once in a row (can’t have a uppercase Alpha followed by another uppercase letter). I didn’t take out the ability to generate I,1,l, or O, 0 as those represent 5 distinct possibilities that would have to be cracked to get the password anyways.

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Sniff was written shortly after I was introduced to C#. It is a network packet sniffer for windows. Sniff doesn't rely on winpcap but instead puts the network adapter into promiscuous mode. Also uses threading, one thread listens for traffic off the network adapter the other thread maintains the gui. .net 2.0 is required to run. The only thing with the program is that even though it is capturing data off the network adapter it won't actually read any data that doesn't have an ip address, so it won't pick up some traffic on the network.

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Windows is the greatest thing since sliced bread, no wait Apple's OSX is, no wait what about all the different *nix versions out there. The battle of battles that has been going on for some years now I think, which Operating System is the best. Usually when this debate gets started on some forum it usually turns into an impressive flame war that degenerates into a series of personal attacks. Any ways I wanted to take a little different look at it than my previous post about games leading the way even though I still think that is applicable.

Figured I could share the C# code that I used to listen on a network adapter in promiscuous mode for the packet sniffing program. Really not a whole lot to it, but it does have a flaw in the form that it can not read any packet off the network adapter that isn't an IP Packet. So really it is an IP packet sniffer instead of a general network sniffer (last time I checked). The code was written for .Net 2.0 and I haven't really updated or ran the program with any version of .net later than 2.0 or on windows 7.

A while back Vinoo Thomas over at mcafee labs found a really interesting hole in windows that has a variety of potential. I am going a bit off the original post with some added information. It seems though that a lot more people out there don't see this as anything let alone a security vulnerability. Even so there are plenty of other ways of elevating ones privileges on a windows box like resetting the admin password with nordahl disk.