Author: Ian

US-Visit computers failed due to a virus.

To me this is crazy that computers could be affected so badly by a virus. Lets assume that you haven’t installed the patch because you are testing it. That is a reasonable enough situation, but in security you don’t just rely on just one layer of protection instead you use multiple layers. For a moment lets assume that these machines are not used for reading email, surfing the web and only have the software needed to perform the US-visit program.

1) Virus software.
Any reasonable virus software will protect computers from known viruses. Some vendors will also give you the ability to block buffer over attacks and perform some behavioral blocking. All the machines should be managed from a central location that allows the machines to all be updated to the latest virus definition files.

2) physical or logical separation.
In this example they are running machines that have a single purpose, to collect and valid passports. This allows you to put the computers on a firewalled segment that only allow the specific traffic needed to run the us-visit machines. If they they are connected to an untrusted network then tie them back to a central secured network using a vpn connection.

3) Hostbased Firewall
Windows XP includes a very simple firewall that allows you to block traffic going to the machine. When dealing with a machine that is there to serve a single purpose it should be a fairly simple to create a set of firewall rules that blocks most traffic to the machines.

3) Hostbased application control
Again since these are single purpose machines you can install a security application that controls which applications are allowed to run and what types of network connections those applications are allowed to make.

What is even more amazing is that wired has published a copy of there Network Architecture

And this is reported on a UPI feed
A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Baghdad diplomatically told The Mirror that the pair’s sleeping arrangements were “a private matter which I couldn’t comment on.”

And the head line from the Daily Record “FINAL STRAW WAS JUMPING INTO CONDI’S BED”

New Immigration proposal. This is seems like a good compromise. It splits the illegals into three groups based on how long they have been here. If you have been here less than two years then you need to leave and get back in line for a legal visa. If you have been here 2-5 years you can get a temporary visa at the border. If you have been here more than 5 years then you don’t have to leave. If you are applying to for citizenship then you will need to provide evidence that you have paid all the taxes owed. This still bed the question how to do you prove how much they earned but that is something the US Tax system deals with on a daily basis. It also forces people to report how many years they have been in the country so that solves the problem of someone saying they have only been here a year in order to avoid more taxes.

The next problem is how to do this with out screwing all the people who have been here legally and applying for a green card. Few few of the reports mention anything about the people who have spent thousands of dollars in order to stay in the US legally.

Geek night last night. I installed the Adaptec ANA-62044 4 port ethernet card I bought on ebay in my firewall. The intention is to split up the dmz and wireless traffic into separate zones. This also gives me an excuse to by a gigabit switch.

I also decided to try resolving my issues with my EPIA M motherboard. The machine has been sitting on a shelf unused for year or more because the box hangs after a period of time. The variables of the problem, bad motherboard, bad OS, bad memory, bad hard disk, bad power supply. At the top of my list was a bad power supply/overheating. The board sat in a small form factor box so I thought that was a real possibility. I have a spare case that isn’t being used. I was happy to find out that a mini itx board fits perfectly in the box after moving a couple mounting points. So the motherboard now has a proper 200W power supply to run on and a large amount of air to cool in. It has an old 6 gig hard disk that appears to be fine and a 256 Meg sick of ram.

I got up this morning and the box was frozen so it seems it is not related to the powersupply/case.

The next thing to try is disabling the longhaul (cpu freq throttling) module in linux. It is currently running and has been for 2 hours.

I think this machine is going to be call fugly while i testing it. Since it looks F… Ugly