Spy vs Spy

(This is an interesting post I wrote approximately 8 months after I’d graduated from University, during the time I was working for a resource company doing IT Security/Admin work. I just found this in my drafts and I think that the points I discussed are still valid… on with the post)

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that there are so many different ways to look at a single problem. In my field, especially with the people I’m involved with, I’ve found that you can have a “business” approach or you can have an “academic” approach, and sometimes, but only occasionally, you can have the most “realistic” approach.

Over the last 8 months I’ve found the way I look at issues or problems has slowly changed from one end of the business/academic spectrum to the other, and not until recently had I felt an internal conflict with my new found methods. Not to say that I would dismiss one approach over another, or that one was necessarily better then another, but it certainly was interesting to take a look at a standard security issue and then flip the switch in your head to look at it differently.

Of course this problem exists in other fields as well, not just security. For example, those poor buggers doing Software Engineering or Architecture or anyone else who has the unfortunate problem of working/studying in a field big enough to make a lot of cash but also to spawn journals and papers and academics. You can spend years studying a subject, refining your perception of that subject and its methods only to find that the way it’s actually being done out there in the “wild” is totally different. I think in the security realm this is definitely the case.

What makes this is worse is that it’s also not uncommon to find the population of one spectrum snickering at the population of the other. “What would they know about real-world security problems?”

I wonder if it’s possible to effectively bridge the gap.

Posted by Christian Posted in: Security, University and Studies No Comments » 11 November 2007

Feeds, Crackers and a Screenshot

So uni has started to look a bit more promising, but not by too much. For the first time in about 3 or 4 weeks, the end doesn’t seem to be an impossible peak to reach, i mean - how hard can it be to write 30 to 40 top-quality, 1st-class-esque pages of thesis? Not that hard Surely!

In other good news related to my studies my john the ripper stuff is looking quite good on the small Opteron cluster we have running. After my first initial failure at getting the MPI mod of JTR to compile on the Opteron’s (as x86-64) i was a bit dismayed, but my second attempt seems to be working fine. I’ve let it run on 3 of the Opteron nodes (being dual that’s 6 CPU’s) and for the last 4-5 days it seems to be crunching passwords nicely.

In news that’s related to here, i’ve done up a syndication page fairly similar to how Jina does it (teehehe u motivator you!) - so yeah, get those news-readers a cracking. If you’ve made the switch to Thunderbird lately you should check out Forumzilla - a simple and conveniant way to get your feeds directly into your email client :D

Anyway, i leave you with a link to my screenshot - which i will have to put into the “Christian” page when i get that going - because - you know.. everyone loves this stuff right?

Posted by Christian Posted in: General, University and Studies, Web Development 1 Comment » 8 September 2004