The handlers are a more international group than some of our
readers often realize. Many of us never met in
real life but we keep close electronically. In the background of
saving the Internet, we joke and cry
together like any group of friends. Today was rather low on the
joking part as one of the handlers -our friend- needs
our moral support for his daughter Erin as she has undergone major surgery today.
UPDATE Erin, is out of surgery and has been released from ICU.


Get well soon!

Port 533 spike

A kind reader pointed out there was a spike in scanning: many targets, few sources. We're looking for what they were scanning for as well as some packet captures, should anybody happen to have them.

Port 533 (both TCP and UDP) have been assigned by IANA for "netwall" (emergency broadcast) but our suspicion is that they might be scanning for something different.

Planned maintenance completed

I was informed that the planned maintenance of the servers has been completed. If you see any further issues, please do let us know so that we can fix them.

Java WebStart Cross Platform Vulnerability, cont.

Yesterday's diary didn't explicitly mention that versions 1.5.0 of J2SE (a.k.a. J2SE 5.0) aren't vulnerable. So I'll make it clear: they're supposed not to be vulnerable. Unfortunately it isn't all that simple to upgrade between major java versions in real life.

The issues with third party software demanding certain versions of the java environment often make the lives of system administrators miserable. That's to be expected. But even for in-house code it unfortunately just isn't easy to change these things as and when one would want or need to.



--

Swa Frantzen