Is the Software Industry Incompetent?

If you ever wondered what a blonde, a brunette, lemon juice and a bank robber had to do with software development and the psychology of programming you have to watch Ron Burk’s presentation…

… and if you think you are a competent programmer, please don’t flame at me and listen to Ron’s last sentence! 😀

Enjoy and happy Friday!

 

Delivering training on Incident Response and Computer Forensics

I’m writing this post while seated on a train going from Birmingham’s International Airport to Banbury, a small town located in the heart of Oxfordshire. It’s only a 40 minutes trip but I really enjoy it, especially if I have a good album to listen to (like that of The Script I’m listening now), some coffee and the nice view of the English countryside I can see through the window right now.

I come to Banbury very often, like once every two or three months, most of the times to hold meetings with my team colleagues, to support ISO 27001 audits or to conduct onsite assessments. None of those are the main purpose of my visit this time. After delivering a new one-day session on Incident Response and Computer Forensics at my employer’s European offices in Leiden (the Netherlands), Bochum (Germany) and Warrington (UK), it’s now Banbury’s turn.

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Detecting Conficker: run this check now!

If you’re reading this blog I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what MS08-67 or Conficker is about (despite the fact we keep seeing many unpatched machines, but that’s a different story).

Besides that, there are plenty of rumours about a possible Conficker attack on 1st April. I know you may think it’s all hype or scaremongering, and it might well be. But, if you run a large corporate network I’m sure you don’t want to sit down and wait until 1st April to find out.

If that’s the case, you have to know that the Honeynet Project has been working on a way to detect Conficker-infected machines and that they have just released a scanner for this task. The scanner is available as a python script and as a windows .exe executable, and can be used to scan a single host or a whole network range.

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