When Your Bank Phishes Its Own Customers

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Brad

I recently got a bank account with a local credit union. This week they sent me what I can only describe as what amounts to a very good phishing email for their own online banking service. I had to stop in my tracks as I looked at it, as I couldn’t quite believe it. I’m anonymizing the details of the credit union and domains in question as I’ve already sent them some comments as to why this is a bad idea and gotten some positive feedback from their VP of remote services. Try getting that kind of response (or any response) from a larger bank! One of the reasons why credit unions are better than larger banks.

Let’s take a closer look at this “phish”.

Excerpt of the suspicious email

Continue reading →

VMware VCAP5-DCA Exam Experience

Posted on August 2, 2014 by Brad

vmware certified advanced professional data center administrator I’ve read a lot of blog posts from others sharing their experience taking the VCAP5-DCA exams and I thought I’d join in on the fun and give back my advice to someone who may also be preparing to take the exam. I sat for exam VDCA550 which is the newer exam focused on the vSphere 5.5-based objectives. This exam is tough. Probably the most rigorous cert exam I’ve sat so far. Here are my thoughts about the exam. Continue reading →

Mario Marathon 7

Posted on June 21, 2014 by Brad

It’s that time again folks. Yes, that’s right, it’s the 7th annual Mario Marathon for Child’s Play Charity. These great group of folks have been playing Mario games for the past 26 hours straight and will continue until you guys stop donating money to Child’s Play. So far together we’ve raised over $25,000! Let’s keep it going. Please donate what you can and tell your friends to check it out too! Together we can help Child’s Play touch the lives of lots of sick kids in hospitals all over the place and have a lot of fun doing it. There’s contests, prizes, and lots of zany fun.

Head on over to mariomarathon.com to join in!

UPDATE 6/25/14 – Amazing! Mario Marathon 7 raised over $85,000 for Child’s Play Charity this year. Not only that but this brings the marathon’s total life time donations to over half a million dollars! Congrats to the Mario Marathon team and thanks for all their dedication and hard work.

Help Bring Back Reading Rainbow

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Brad

LeVar Burton is trying to bring back Reading Rainbow for FREE to classrooms across the world. When I was a child I loved to watch Reading Rainbow at school. The Reading Rainbow program, my teachers, and my parents all helped me discover the wonderful world inside books. Unfortunately this great program has been off the air since 2009. Please consider helping us bring back Reading Rainbow to improve the literacy rate of the next generation and inspire the imagination of kids everywhere through reading.

Click here to go to the Kickstarter project

Click here to check out the iPad app available now

EDIT: Amazing! We hit our $1,000,000 goal in less than one day!

You all are INCREDIBLE! Together we are 22K strong & hit our 1st goal in less than 12 hrs – it's just the beginning! http://t.co/DCJI7TTisu

— Reading Rainbow (@readingrainbow) May 28, 2014

Heartbleed Bug – Serious OpenSSL Vulnerability

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Brad

Just a heads up to all readers. A serious vulnerability in OpenSSL was just announced and patched a few hours ago. Vulnerable versions of OpenSSL could potentially leak private keys from memory to an unauthenticated remote attacker. You will need to immediately patch all affected systems and revoke any potentially exposed keys and associated certificates.

Seems like some organizations got advanced notice due to the co-ordination of some of the researchers and NCSC-FI but before they finished their pre notifications someone else discovered the vulnerability and went public with it.

Read more about the vulnerability at the researcher’s website: Heartbleed Bug

Micro Center, we need to talk

Posted on November 29, 2013 by Brad

I enjoyed the great value and good service I received from my recent Micro Center purchase. Ordering online and picking up in the store the same day was a breeze, even if my new credit card without raised numbering threw off the employee who wanted to run it through an old timey credit card imprinter for some reason even though I had already paid and been charged online (he ended up writing my full credit card details down on his paper work…I’m just sure that’s PCI compliant).

However, there’s one thing I didn’t enjoy at all: The Micro Center Preference Center.

Continue reading →

Mario Marathon 6

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Brad

I don’t post here very often, but I wanted to let you all know that the sixth annual Mario Marathon for Child’s Play charity is going on right now. This is a really fun annual event where a great group of people play a bunch of Mario games nonstop, unlocking more and more levels to play as people donate to the cause. So far, the marathon has raised over $16,000! The charity that the marathon benefits is Child’s Play, which helps get games and toys into the hands of sick kids in hospitals across the US and Canada as well as parts of the rest of the world. We were all kids once, and you know how scary having to stay in a hospital can be. So head on over and watch the marathon, donate some money to unlock more levels for them to play, and help benefit a great cause!

Edit:

Holy cow everyone! Mario Marathon 6 raised $67,344.75 for Child’s Play! Thanks to everyone who participated this year and thanks to the Mario Marathon team for so graciously devoting all the time, money, and effort making Mario Marathon awesome.

VMware Cert Get!

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Brad

VMware VCP5 Logo I’ve been neglecting this poor little blog for awhile and I feel bad about that. But in my defense I’ve been busy with a move, school work, getting an awesome new job, etc. Anyway, you may recall that back in April I took a VMware course on installing, configuring, and managing vSphere 5. Well, after a few months of preparation and working with the product, I’m pleased to announce I’ve passed VCP510 with flying colors and am now a VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 5 (VCP5…or VCP5-DV which is the new moniker they are using since they are introducing a new VCP-level exam relating to the “cloud” and vCloud Director). I continue to find virtualization technology exciting and look forward to opportunities to apply virtualized solutions to problems in my personal and professional lives.

RIPE NCC has Approximately Four Million IPv4 Addresses Before Reaching Last /8 — RIPE Network Coordination Centre

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Brad

Looks like next month we will possibly see RIPE start tapping into the last /8 IPv4 addresses. When that happens they’ll only hand out a /22 (1,024 addresses) even if you can legitimately request more. Also, you’ll have to already have an IPv6 allocation before they’ll give you that /22.

Future Internet growth depends on IPv6 deployment.

Full Story – RIPE NCC has Approximately Four Million IPv4 Addresses Before Reaching Last /8.

Salting Not Enough?

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Brad

Troy Hunt has an interesting post about the current state of cracking salted SHA1 hashed passwords using GPU acceleration. Hint: it’s pretty wicked fast, even with the salt.