This is the personal blog of Chris Grant. I'm an Information Security professional that loves the work I do. I'm somewhat technology agnostic, although I have a fondness for both Microsoft and FreeBSD (and other Unix'es). Its just techology, not a religion. If you find the tool for the job in a Windows toolbox, then use it, otherwise use he tools you find in a Linux toolbox. They are all just tools, get over it. Given that, all vendors have security to think about, but many don't, so all vendors have security issues. That's why we're here, to guide all areas of the planet that use information technology and the public toward secure solutions that can be sustained. This includes financial services (like banks, credit card companies and the like), health care (hospitals, clinics, etc) and governments (who get very involved in the information security business for various purposes, both as a creator and a customer of the technology). I try to post things that are of interest to the world of computer, network and general information security. Thanks for coming to the site and feel free to sign up and contribute! -Chris
Wednesday 30 April 2008
Update on Windows XP SP3 install
Update - 9:16pm 2008/March/28 -- Updated a random laptop around the house with Windows XP SP3 and everything seems to be running just fine. Speed improvements, maybe. I noticed one thing that disturbed me a little. After the reboot, I saw a Command Prompt window do post-reboot, post-install steps, but the problem is that the window had the error "Error: the parameter is incorrect." over and over again. I'm wondering if there was a regsvr32 set of operations that didn't happen correctly.
Posted by
cgrant
on
Wednesday 30 April 2008 - 00:19:58
Yes, yes, in the tradition of Windows NT's 6 Service Packs, we're up to 3 on XP. Go install now and keep your old XP box running smoothly and hopefully with less bugs. XP is starting to feel like Windows 98 SE...runs great, is just getting a little long in the tooth...
Chris
Posted by
cgrant
on
Tuesday 29 April 2008 - 12:51:28
Whole drive encryption is a relatively new method of protection for systems. TrueCrypt 5.1a is out, and while I'm late given that most of the excitement is around the 5.0 release, the news isn't any less important.
TrueCrypt is the Open Source encryption product that has, in the past, been limited to creating encrypted volumes from files on your file system. TrueCrypt 5.x now provides the capability to encrypt your entire Windows drive. This is known as whole-drive encryption, as opposed to encrypting single files at a time. By encrypting the entire drive, you now are protecting not only the data files in known places on the system, but those temp files that get randomly placed all over the Windows file system too. This means that if you take a drive out of a laptop, the most you're going to get is a piece of hardware. Confidential data for your organization, and/or the people you serve (customers or patients, for example) will not be compromised and sold on the black market to the highest bidder.
The other major benefit to whole drive encryption with boot authentication is that it won't boot and expose any potential remote exploitable holes in the system. Your OS and applications won't be exposed to unknown network traffic, nor will they be able to be sniffed while starting up with the Operating System. So, pre-boot authentication also prevents this type of attack, albiet rare.
AND...according to the SecurityNow podcast, encrypting the whole drive could even speed up your system.
Its good, go get it.
Posted by
cgrant
on
Monday 24 March 2008 - 03:08:12
All trademarks are copyright their respective owners, all other content is copyright Chris Grant, 2001-2007. e107 is copyright e107.org 2006 and is released under the GNU GPL license.
