OWASP

I have been reading about the OWASP Top 10. Apparently they are a list of common web security breaches. There seems to be a new list each year. Figure I had better know what they are, to lock down my site and maybe open up others.

OWASP stands for the Open Web Application Security Project. They are a non-profit. They focus on software security. But back to the Top 10. Last year they focused on things like SQL injection (or general injection). Of course cross site scripting was up there. So was miconfigured security.

Good stuff. I wonder what will be on the list for 2014?

Game King Video Poker Hacked

I read a great Wired article on two dudes who exploited a hack in the casinos to win a lot of cash. It was only one of the guys who actually discovered the bug in the video poker machines. He shared the info with his friend to extract the most cash from casinos. Unfortunately, things grew sour between the friends. Then a casino got wise and had the guys arrested.

Turns out these guys found a scenario where they could change their bets after the game was played. They used this to rack up big money when their hands won. It required a certain option switch for mega-money to be enabled on the machine. In the end, their cash was confiscated. And the IRS still wants to tax these dudes.

What was the moral of the story? There were a few. It is possible to hack even the seemingly locked down world of video slot machines. You should not enlist an accomplice. Don't get greedy when milking a cash cow. And so on.

Trouble on the LAN

I got a wireless network running at home. Got a lot of devices on it including a few printers. Recently I found that I could not print to any of our printers. Then I dug further and found I could not access any computers on the network. WTF?

The really weird thing was that I could access the Internet fine. What happened recently? Got a new wireless router that I plugged directly into to configure. Also took my computer to another location and tried to connect to the wireless network there. These things should not have messed me up.

I could not for the life of me figure out what the hell was going on. I contemplated restoring my system back to the factory settings and moving on from there. But I got all kinds of programs installed. So I took a chance to restore the system back to a recent restore point.

I recalled when I last knew the machine was working. Restored Windows back to that point. Bamn. The printing is working now. Got to check any other system changes I made. But I should be good to go. I still rely on printing out stuff. Did not know how much so until I could no longer print.