Crash Recovery of an OSX Lion FileVault disk
Sunday, December 18th, 2011 Posted in security, technology | No Comments »My Apple iMac started to behave weird, with some Kernel Panics, grey screens and general crashes. While I was going through this I was pretty sure it wouldn't hurt me as I had a TimeMachine for continuous backups. How wrong ...
Security is not about Technology, but Habits
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 Posted in security, technology, work | No Comments »At the IBM conference in Berlin I realized that I have been preaching some ideas about (internet) security for a while. The gist of this idea is that security in the ‘world of computers’ (also referenced as the internet, on-line ...
Remembering unlimited passwords
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011 Posted in security, technology, work | No Comments »You probably hate all your passwords, just like me. I have tons of them and I use tools like 1Password and KeePass to store them relatively safe with a masterpassword. I also have a few strong passwords I reuse a ...
Decoding WebSphere passwords
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011 Posted in security, technology, websphere, work | 6 Comments »Older versions of IBM WebSphere encodes its passwords with a simple algorithm. These passwords are not encrypted and it has been known for long that decoding them is fairly simple. So far the presented methods did not always suit my ...
SSH login with a certificate (Windows)
Monday, May 2nd, 2011 Posted in security, technology, work | 1 Comment »One of the most convenient ways to login to a server with SSH, is with certificates. Although the principle is pretty well documented all over the internet, I still found some issues setting it up myself from my Windows laptop, ...
SSH login with a certificate (OSX)
Sunday, May 1st, 2011 Posted in security, technology, work | 1 Comment »One of the most convenient ways to login to a server with SSH, is with certificates. Although the principle is pretty well documented all over the internet, I still found some issues setting it up myself from my Mac, hence ...
No root, please!
Sunday, March 6th, 2011 Posted in security, technology, work | No Comments »When you are dealing with system security, you need to create a secure system from the ground up. This is why you should never need root access to perform your job, even installing software. The principle of security lies in separation ...
How to handle a security incident
Saturday, March 5th, 2011 Posted in security, technology, work | No Comments »Or: Coping with the Human Bug If you work in IT, just like me, every now and then you stumble into something, you shouldn't have. Most of the times this happens because someone has given you temporary access with too many ...
A secure blanket
Thursday, August 27th, 2009 Posted in security, technology, work | No Comments »You shouldn't trust the Internet. It is dangerous and because most people do not fully comprehend the technology and inner workings, it is hard to understand how and when you are in danger. And yet, as we become more and ...
unstash in Java
Sunday, March 8th, 2009 Posted in security, technology, websphere, work | 11 Comments »It has been ten years ago - 1999 - since the (in)famous unstash-script came out. It was a cryptic PERL script, which could read IBM's stash files and deliver you the 'encrypted' password. I was in need of the script, as ...
