Right, so Kevin (one of my staff) had the savvy to take a few tcpdump traces on both the client and the server side of a failed PPtP VPN connection over the weekend. The result? It seems the great firewall of Vodacom has yet again taken another victem. Read the rest of this entry »
The Great Wall of Vodacom – FAIL
May 25th, 2010Vodacom – still messing with TCP/IP?
May 24th, 2010Some of you may recall that a whilst back I wrote a blog entry (two actually) regarding Vodacom messing with (and breaking) TCP/IP. Specifically they adjust (present tense seeing that it’s still happening) the ISN from the TCP connection initiator (client) to the server, and they hold up RFC 1948 (here) to substantiate why they do this. As explained in my previous entry regarding this issue their reason is bogus and invalid. I additionally proceeded to explain why their inherent disregard for the TCP/IP standards by which the rest of the world abides in fact creates additional exposure for exploiting such vulnerabilities. Whilst my response at the time was quite harshly phrased it remains valid. Read the rest of this entry »
We should be glad Darth Vader isn’t a spammer
April 22nd, 2010Right, so we’re busy doing some top secret email stuff in the office relating to client support and generally being more efficient when it comes to queries and stuff. And part of this testing involves the transmission of emails that needs to comply with RFC specifications, and generally having the correct headers and content in it, blah blah blah. All good fun. And then this gem landed in my inbox (tracing the Received headers reveals it was Stephen – perfectly spoofed in every other way from Darth.Vader.This.is.legit@gmail.com, quite a mean feat seeing that I haven’t yet received spam from professional fraudsters that managed this):
Read the rest of this entry »
The Story of a Mugging
April 16th, 2010So I’ve got a weird, non-tech one today.
Monday afternoon one of my technicians got mugged, they took his cellphone and his company issued laptop. Yesterday I get a weird phone call. The technician. Informing me he found the laptop in a pawn shop, being sold for R4000. Apparently nobody managed to get the ULS sticker off so it was still stuck on the laptop for easy recognition. He got hold of the cops and even had the laptop returned to him yesterday. The cops are busy following the sales trail in an attempt to locate the perpetrator (They sound positive … apparently threatening to arrest people and throw them in jail until they co-operate is still effective). Total damage? Laptop bag and hard drive needs to be replaced. The hard drive because they replaced it for whatever reason (Amongst others probably because having Linux on a notebook is bad for saleability). The bag because it’s, well, gone.
