Linux Basement Presents: Chad’s Blog

More Training and a Supercomputer

Today was pretty awesome. We learned about malware, viruses and botnets. The teacher, was Johannas Ullrich, who is the father of the Internet Storm Center. He was a very animated teacher and did a very good time. The class was completely linux friendly, and actually I had an advantage to those running windows, as most of the tools we used could be easily installed using apt-get. Some notable programs I learned about today:
Netdude
iftop
honeywall
graphiz
LaBrea
Honeyd

I am friends with couple of guys that work IT here at Virginia Tech. I met them last year and they’ve been kind enough to lead me around for lunch and show me the ins and outs of the town. Today, I got to tour where one of them works, in the supercomputer center. 1100 G5s. It was pretty incredible. The are currently migrating from mac os, over to Yellow Dog Linux, mainly due to flexibility. Yellow Dog is the same operating system used on the PS3, noted for its tweaked configuration for powerPC architecture. It was an amazing feat to see so many computers working on crunching numbers. They utilize almost all of the processing power, and the sight of all those processor monitors glowing is something that will stay with me. It was a geeky dreamland.

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Day 1 - Training

Today was every so slightly frustrating. While the training was good, the VMs for the class were created on windows. Not only that, but somehow the paths were hard coded, so one of the VMs was referencing C:\blahblah and would not open. After about an hour of hacking away, I could not get it to run. This ticks me off, because VMs should be agnostic, which is the whole point, so you can only take the error so many times on linux before you want to throw a brick at the windows users in the room.
It is very apparent that my skills in security have greatly increased over the past year, mainly due to running Linux full time, and having to concentrate on server side operations. I like being in the top 25% of the class as far as understanding the content.
A couple notes. I need to keep up my documentation for open ports on servers. Documentation seems to be where I need to focus, even though I have been over the past year, I need to step it up.

owasp.org for web vulnerabilities, a nice little site I need to investigate more.

More to come…

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