A Purple Team Pentest should be thought of as a dynamic amalgamation of Red Team and Blue Team members with the purpose of overcoming communication hurdles, facilitating knowledge transfer, and generally arming the Blue Team with newly practiced skills against a more sophisticated attacker or series of attack scenarios.http://technicalinfodotnet.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-purple-team-pentest.html This article claims that Purple Teams should make it…
Archives for November 2016
When Logic Only Comes from Extremists, Expect Bad Things to Happen
Liberals are the reason Trump is our next president. Some of that was racism and sexism, to be sure, but the biggest reason is arguably that people were tired of the disconnect between what they’re hearing from liberals and what they see in the real world. Liberals create safe spaces on university campuses when they hear things they…
U.S. Manufacturing is as Strong as Ever: We Just Need Way Fewer People to Do It
Although we frequently hear claims that the US manufacturing sector is dying or in a state of decline, manufacturing output in the US, except during and following periods of economic contraction like the Great Recession, has continued to increase over time, and reached the highest level of output ever recorded in 2014.What has been in a steady state…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 55
This week’s topics: Biowarfare defenses, AI advances, mergers and acquisitions, Facebook and censorship, IoT definitions, the philosophy of Westworld, and more… This is Episode No. 55 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I collect my favorite stories and ideas in infosec, technology, and humanity, and talk about why they matter. The show is released as a Podcast on…
A Merged Pothole Model of Consciousness
I was just listening to a Sam Harris podcast on AI and had an interesting idea for a model of consciousness. Imagine a series of 12 potholes in a large paved parking lot. They’re separated by a few feet a piece, in a random way, and each looks completely different from each other. Over time they start to…
An IoT Definition Based on Computer / Functionality Transition
I like looking for great definitions for concepts that people have a lot of confusion or disagreement on. The Internet of Things is definitely one of those terms that qualifies. I like this definition based on the switching role of the computer and the functionality. The Internet of Things The transition from things with functionality having computers in…
My Analysis of the Philosophy in Westworld
I think Westworld is fantastic. It’s fundamentally about the center of meaning. It’s asking questions like: There are tons of spoilers in here. Don’t read this unless you are fully caught up and/or you don’t care about seeing/knowing things that might happen later. What is true meaning? What makes meaning real vs. fake? What meaning could we expect…
Predicting Possible Trump Administration Outcomes
As we just learned from this election, it’s hard to predict things with lots of variables. I like making predictions not for the fun of being able to say I was right, but because I enjoy capturing and reviewing errors in my models. When you just make random predictions about things and tell your friends about them, all…
Mangling the Evolution Arguments
Now let’s talk evolution. The issue is this: Darwinism has been set up as some sort of competing religion against belief in God(s). High-schools teach children to believe in Darwinism, but not to understand Darwinism. Few kids graduate understanding Darwinism, which is why it’s invariably misrepresented in mass-media (X-Men, Planet of the Apes, Waterworld, Godzilla, Jurassic Park, etc.).…
Four Thoughts on Making Good Metrics
I was just asked to give some insight on metrics and came up with these four observations. I thought I’d share them here. The key thing to realize is that metrics have to be connected to two things in order to have value—on one side they’re connected to your goals, and on the other side they’re connected to…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 54
Topics: Britain’s new surveillance law, CRISPR biotech, the Army’s new Phaser, NIST’s new IoT Security guidelines, ML-based facial recognition, and more… This is Episode No. 54 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I collect my favorite stories and ideas in infosec, technology, and humans, and talk about why they matter. The show is released in two forms: Via…
Expect Musical Chairs in Trump’s Cabinet
This seems like a prediction that’s too easy to make, but I just realized that Trump’s cabinet is going to be in constant flux for as long as he’s in office. Here’s the way it’ll happen: The person will get exposed to scrutiny in some form, and they’ll make a decision. Or they’ll be asked to comment on…
Visualizing Cognitive Biases
This is easily the best visualization of cognitive biases I’ve ever seen, and it’s on the best page of cognitive bias descriptions I’ve ever read. What I like most about this page is that it breaks them into categories, and that those categories are then represented visually in the image. I love how they give their own description…
Inbound Filtering as an ISP Defense Against IoT Attacks
You’re not supposed to host services on consumer internet connections, but many people do. As long as you’re not serving too much traffic, and you don’t mind your IP changing every once in a while (for those who don’t have static IPs), it generally works. This applies to common ports like 22, 23, 80, 443, all the Windows…
Defining my Passion
I realized the other day the core structure of what I enjoy about pursuing an intellectual life. It collapses cleanly into three things. Learning interesting things about how the world works, capturing them, articulating them, and documenting them. Solving real-world problems using this organized knowledge. Sharing and discussing with others both the models and how they can be…
People are More Creative When Thinking Abstractly
Recent research reveals that people are more capable of mental novelty when thinking on behalf of others than for themselves. This has far-reaching practical implications at every level of business. ~ Daniel H. Pink This is fascinating research to me because it, like the recent Evolution kick I’ve been on, unifies a number of different ideas I’ve had…
Hillary Clinton as a Faustian Case in Point
Like many others I’ve been trying to extract lessons from November 8th. I think one of them is that it doesn’t matter how good you are, or how much you want to improve the world, you don’t deal with the devil. I don’t know Hillary’s soul, but let’s assume it was pure and good when she was a…
The Only Way to Fix MailChimp Formatting Issues
I spent a lot of time on the phone with MailChimp support this evening trying to figure out why their editor is so bad. I told them that when I selected a block of text and formatted it as Lato 14, it kind of did something, but it didn’t format it as Lato 14. She explained that if…
Seeing the Election as a Rejection of Change
As the initial shock is wearing off (or at least changing) I am starting to think of other models for understanding what happened in this election. The one I keep coming back to is the understanding and acceptance of change. Here are some ways the United States has changed, and will be changing in the near future: This…
Examples of Design vs. Evolution Thinking in Various Industries
I wrote recently about Design vs. Evolution based thinking. In that piece I outlined the basic concepts and made an attempt to capture some examples. Here I’m going to expand on those examples in a cleaner format. Design vs. Evolution Thinking Examples Hiring: In Design-based hiring there a few people who have the magic information about what the…
Getting Visual XML Output from nmap
We all love nmap. Despite the entry and rise of many other scanners, nmap is always my first choice. Most people just use its default output option, which is to the console. But my favorite (and default) output option is all three, using -oA. # Double-verbose, increased speed, output to standard/greppable/XML nmap -vv -T4 -oA SESSIONNAME TARGET The…
My Attempt to Explain Why People Voted for Trump
Let me start by saying that this is going to be an empathic exploration. I didn’t vote for Trump and didn’t think many people would. But now, days later, I think I’m starting to assemble the pieces for an explanation. I believe that there are lots of reasons that people voted for Trump. That may seem obvious, but…
Rhetoric as an Epigenetic Belief Activator
In biology there’s a concept called Epigenetics, which basically says that exposure to an environmental factor can activate genes and trigger changes. Examples include things like stress or poor diet activating genes associated with personality or cancer. The recent elections got me thinking about an analog with rhetoric and political beliefs. Let’s say that an American voted for…
A Collection of Initial Thoughts on Trump Winning
This is a scratchpad for my current thoughts. This is why you don't build secretive, all-powerful surveillance tools. You never know who's going to get keys.— Daniel Miessler (@DanielMiessler) November 9, 2016 Hindsight makes obvious what now explains everything: this wasn't about Hilary or Trump at all. America simply voted for a tableflip.— Daniel Miessler (@DanielMiessler) November 9,…
The Best Christians are Extremists
And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with on eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched… Jesus of Nazareth I have a couple of close friends who are…
My Thoughts on External Forces Affecting the Election
There is some information out there around if and how Election Day might be tampered with by various actors. I think it’s important to not go too tinfoil hat on things. Here’s what I’d say we know with a decent amount of certainty, followed by a few speculative thoughts. There’s significant industry consensus that there’s a high-level Russian…
Whose Responsibility is it to Provide Jobs to People?
One of the most central ideas to human civilization is the concept of work. You work for a company that is profitable, you put in a day of effort, and you are paid for your time and contribution. It’s a system that’s been working for thousands of years, and I think we’ve come to think of it as…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 52
Subscribe to Unsupervised Learning via: iTunes | Android | Newsletter This is Episode No. 52 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I collect my favorite stories in infosec, technology, and humans, and talk about why they matter. The show is released in two forms: the Podcast, which you can subscribe to via iTunes, Android, Blog, or RSS the…
Adobe Just Broke Voice Authentication
So it looks like Adobe just broke existing voice authentication. Project VoCo, unveiled at the annual IMAX event, takes an audio sample and generates a transcript you can easily edit to make the speaker say whatever you want simply by cutting, pasting, and adding words. As The Next Web notes, it’s “basically Photoshop for audio.”“The algorithm does the…
PortSwigger’s James Kettle Just Significantly Advanced Automated Web Testing
Existing web scanners search for server-side injection vulnerabilities by throwing a canned list of technology-specific payloads at a target and looking for signatures – almost like an anti-virus. In this document, I’ll share the conception and development of an alternative approach, capable of finding and confirming both known and unknown classes of injection vulnerabilities. Source: PortSwigger Web Security…
Why You Should Hire Using Evolution vs. Design Thinking
Design Thinking, regardless of arena, has one or few people at the top dispensing special knowledge that could not possibly be created by the masses. The underlying concept is that the special one or few know better than everyone else, and that it’s best if the group simply adopts the wisdom, for their own good. Evolution Thinking takes…
Emoticons, Emoji, Stickers and GIFs Represent Accelerated Language and Vocabulary Evolution
Many mistakenly think that this new type of online communication (texting, emoticons, emoji, GIFs, and stickers) are not REAL communication. They’re tricks. They’re gimmicks. They’re kid stuff. Language is evolved, not designed. It is what it becomes. The concept of “correctness” is a temporally treacherous thing. It changes constantly, but not much within one lifetime. The rise of…
Maybe If You Don’t Vote You Shouldn’t Be Taken Seriously
I just finished voting, and as I was left with the idea above. Basically: If you don’t care enough about the country to spend an hour every couple of years to vote, then why should anyone take anything you say about the state of the civilization seriously? I think you’ve basically forfeited the right to an opinion by…