The Art of Disappearing

Some info on disappearing in the USA is making its way around the web. I read a blog today about how people are ripping off the info. Well I am not going to cut and paste anything. I will share what I have learned.

One thing to do is to slow down your pursuers. If they got a car, kill it. Put long grain rice in the radiator fluid. An urban legend says you should also put a pound of sugar in their gas tank.

Get rid of everything you have. That includes pictures. Cut up any kind of credit or bank card you got. Destroy your clothes. Ditch your car as well.

Now the movies say you should run your car into a river. Forget that. There are two nice techniques to lose a car cleanly. One is to park it in an area where it will be chopped. The other is to drive it over the boarder and leave it there.

On the getaway, skip the us of taxis. They always keep a record of where they go. Keep a low profile by always wearing a hat. Do this indoors as well. It will hide your face from security cameras. It will also help you avoid losing hairs that can be traced.

Now how can you avoid being tracked. Try not to make any movements when they are in hot pursuit. Also cover your body in mud to evade the heat sensors. This sounds like advice right out of the movie Predator, huh?

Here is one final bit of advice. If you are going to rough it in the wild, make sure you get a copy of the Boy Scout Handbook. There is all kinds of good info in there.

SonicWALL NSA 420

I heard about an interesting product about a year and a half ago. Initially I wanted to write about it but got distracted. I figure it is better late than never. The product is the NSA 420 by SonicWALL. It is in the category of security appliances. The goals of the app are to protect the network and manage your VPN. One example of the protection it provides is its network firewall.

The NSA420 does packet inspection. It has a database of signatures that are known viruses. The antivirus and antispyware can operate at the gateway level. It filters and inspects traffic like HTTP, SMTP, FTP, and SMTP.

This is a hardware based solution. The box has 256MB of RAM, as well as 32MB of flash memory. It is a multicore processor. I wonder whether this thing is just a beefed up version of a normal router like the Linksys WRT54g.

The specs for the product state that it can handle up to 25k simultaneous connections. Its throughput is 2k connections per second. The app is set to block many types of denial of service attacks, as well as scanning attacks. The VPN runs at 150Mbps for 3DES encryption. It supports many authentication encryption algorithms like DES, 3DES, AES, MD5, and SHA-1.

There are many competitors in the security appliance market. These include boxes designed by Fortinet, Juniper Networks, and Cisco. I would like to get my hands on one of these boxes and test it out. Hopefully the cost is not too high.

Penetration Testing

Have you heard the term “penetration testing” before? It kind of makes you smile. The politically correct name is ethical hacking. You get a team to try to break into your systems. The team works for you.

I recently read some guidance that you should do all your quality assurance first. Only then should you turn to penetration tests. You should also not think that these tests are a comprehensive method to achieve quality.

The normal mode of penetration testing is to subject a system to common attack vectors. You can do this cold, which is called the black box variety of testing. Or you can use some information you already know about the system and subject it to white box testing.

Beware the penetration test. It can be a never ending task. You got to do good project management to schedule it, bound the scope, and complete the tests. I wonder if this is a fun job to do?