Daily Cup of Tech

B.C. police warn drivers to secure belongings after woman killed by laptop

SURREY, B.C. - Mounties in Surrey, B.C., say a woman who died in a car accident last month appears to have been killed by her laptop computer.

Heather Storey, 25, was driving to work March 16 when her vehicle was hit by a tow truck. Storey’s laptop was sitting unsecured in her back seat and RCMP spokesman Sgt. Roger Morrow says the vehicle’s abrupt stop sent the computer flying into the back of Storey’s head. The force of the blow was so severe that it shattered the computer’s screen and bent the frame.

The coroner determined that Storey died as a result of blunt force trauma.

Morrow says investigators believe the accident was survivable and that police are warning the public to secure their belongings while driving.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/04/16/laptop-kills-woman/trackback/

Recently found How to Firewall Your WordPress Blog to be useful. From the website:

You already know to use a decent password for your blog, but brute-force or dictionary attacks aren’t the only attacks used against bloggers. It’s much cheaper and faster to exploit software flaws, and that the hackers do. A programmer’s oversight may allow a hacker to gain access to your blog to insert spyware, adware, or links to various pharmaceuticals you’d prefer not to speak about in front of your mother.

And it’s not just WordPress proper. WordPress has caught some major criticism for its security holes — but lately it’s been a bunch of insecure plugins, not WordPress itself. Matt Mullenweg counters the argument that WordPress is insecure over here. I think he’s totally right — WordPress has a rich “plugin ecosystem” that no other blogging platform can touch.

However, the problem remains. WordPress has some great plugins that are written by people with the best of intentions — but who may not understand the importance of sanitizing data provided by untrusted users, and its relationship with security. Upgrading often, setting permissions, using good passwords, etc. — that all helps a lot — but unless you have the time and ability to painstakingly audit all program code for security vulnerabilities, you’d be best off running one of the WordPress firewalls —

Great!  Yet something else that needs to be done!  But would be well worth tackling!

[How to Firewall Your WordPress Blog]

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/04/12/halt-hackers-with-a-wordpress-firewall/trackback/

A very useful trick from What’s My Pass? if you can’t access your Vista box:

Using BackTrack Live CD which can be found ::here::

For those of you who forgot your spiffy new Vista Logon password. Here’s a quick and dirty way to make a new user account. BTW, this has been around since XP but still useful.

Boot into Backtrack and open a shell prompt:

cd /mnt (change directory to mounted drives)
ls (get the list of mounted drives)
cd sda1 (sda1 is the main hard drive)
cd Windows/ (change to the windows directory)
cd System32/ (change to the system directory)
mv Utilman.exe Utilman.old (backup original file)
cp cmd.exe Utilman.exe (copy cmd.exe as utilman.exe)
reboot

once rebooted, at vista logon screen, Press Windows key + U
To invoke Utility Manager ( A.K.A. CMD.exe)
Cmd.exe will spawn with ‘System’ privileges.
c:\>net user S00perAdmin mypassword /add
c:\>net localgroup administrators S00perAdmin /add
Reboot and log in with your newly added Admin account

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/07/22/reset-your-vista-password/trackback/

mrc:

MANDIANT Red Curtain is software for Incident Responders that assists with the analysis of malware. MRC examines executable files (e.g., .exe, .dll, and so on) to determine how suspicious they are based on a set of criteria. It examines multiple aspects of an executable, looking at things such as the entropy (in other words, randomness), indications of packing, compiler and packing signatures, the presence of digital signatures, and other characteristics to generate a threat “score.” This score can be used to identify whether a set of files is worthy of further investigation.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/08/09/free-malware-analysis-software/trackback/

Google as predicted in 1964:

I do enjoy looking at old predictions of the future. Eventually, the future arrives and we can compare it with the predictions. Sometimes, the predictions are better than the reality. Sometimes, reality outpaces not only the predictions but even the dreams of the past. And sometimes, the predictions end up being pretty-much spot on. That’s the case with a piece about the “answer machine” of the future, which appeared in the book Childcraft Volume 6: How Things Change, published by Field Enterprises Educational Corporation in 1964.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/08/06/google-described-in-1964/trackback/