The Labyrinth (of th3 Malfunction3d Droi3d)

Introduction Today, we are going to discuss a list of U.S federal laws, that you should probably be familiar with if you want to become a Information Security "pro" or a Security Administrator here in the U.S. I am going to reference the SANS document below [1] as your primary resource, but I am briefly going to summarize and bullet-list each U.S federal law. You may also need to know any of these laws, if you have to work with local law enforcement or other federal investigators such as the F.B.I and D.H.S CISA, if your company has suffered some sort of major data breach. Even if you ARE NOT a lawyer it does help to have a firm grasp of these laws in context and an understanding of what they mean. Let's begin: U.S Federal Computer Laws: Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - This law is used for charging Black Hat Hackers with crimes, which include DDoS attacks, data breaches, and using malicious code to damage computer networks. If the damage is more then $5,000 dollars t

Introduction I am back with a a new topic for this week! a couple of months ago, I was playing around with and testing out MySQL database here in Fedora, so that I can learn the ropes for it if I need to configure and use it someday! I decided to create a simple security "checklist" for the first blog entry this week, to help get you moving in the right direction, after reading some suggestions from the manual. Instead of going into a detailed fashion, about what exact steps you need to take to secure the database in the best possible fashion exactly, I am going to list some "general" purpose steps that you can take if you are building a LAMP stack for instance in Linux. Here is the list (It's not exhaustive), but I may or may not add more resources to it in the future! [1] Common Security tips for securing MySQL/MariaDB databases: Make sure that only certain individuals have "root" access to the database (see below) Always put root passwords into

Introduction Hello everyone, I FINALLY have a "somewhat" new topic to discuss in this weeks entry. I noticed a lot of professors who attempt to teach Network Security to their students either in a Computer Science or I.T setting do a very poor job of actually teaching the concepts and instead focus on a lot of "jargony" high-level Number Theory, that is truly not necessary if you plan on implementing cryptographic algorithms! This might be fine for an advanced subject of Cryptography in general, but often leads students confused and quite frankly puts most of them to sleep. Today instead I am going to be focusing in on "tools" one could potentially use in order to implement Network Security on computers in a way that makes sense in their school projects or in their day to day I.T job. I am briefly going to cover an number of of pieces of software that can be used for hard-disk encryption. Without further ado, we can begin to break everything down and le

Introduction Hello avid blog readers! After months of enjoying the summer and basking in the warm weather, I am finally back with an entry for the month of September. Today I am going to look at something that is a little more on the technical side and something that mostly only software developers would care about. If you aren't interested in the inner workings of recursive algorithms and how one can implement them in C, feel free to skip this entry. I will be back with another one for the month of October, that might be more accustomed to the usual entries and topics that I am discussing in this blog. Let's begin and start with the basics (Note: This blog entry assumes you have never taken a Computing I or II course before in college and have no prior knowledge writing algorithms in C. It DOES ASSUME you are familiar with the C programming language though) What is recursion? Recursion according to a simple definition in [1] is a circular definition. When something is d

Introduction Hello, everyone. I am back this week after taking a long month off. In this month's entry, I am going to be switching gears back to the topic of music. No one can and should underestimate the value that music has on society and it's cultural significance. Today, I am briefly going to be looking at three of what I would argue are three of Thin Lizzy's "best" albums from the late 1970's and the significant impact they have had on Rock N' Roll over the last fourty or so years. I am going to rate them and then try to convince you the listener, why you should listen to them or at least "consider" listening to these albums if you are a fan of Vintage Rock. Like always, it will be up to you determine whether or not they have any intrinsic value. Now that I have got that out of the way, I can begin to describe my favorite Thin Lizzy albums from the 1970's: Three of my top favorite Thin Lizzy albums Bad Reputation (1977) - Phil Lyno

Introduction I first want to apologize for my month long absence, if you are a monthly reader to my blog. Many events has transpired over the last month or so. I was finally able to complete two out of three courses that I started back in January. One of them was collectively referred to as "Legal Aspects of Cyberspace". I took this course in a effort to increase my "legal knowledge" for this blog, and so that I could consult with an expert or someone with a J.D in aspect of the legal field, be it Intellectual Property all the way up to Criminal law! Having this knowledge helps me to help you the reader, better understand legal concepts and how exactly the law works on a case by case basis. In any event, I was happy to complete that course successfully with an A. The other reason I have not had time to update is simply, because my city has come under a domestic terrorist attack as of late. Unless you live under a rock you can see from every "news" media o