Googling

Since today was a pretty quiet day, I'm going to take the opportunity to share a few random thoughts. I saw a presentation the other day on some uses of Google for, shall we say, nefarious purposes. While the search engines are very useful, they can be useful to the "bad guys", too. The recent worms that took advantage of various search engines are only the tip of the iceberg. One of the things that this did remind me of, though, was to be careful about what information about you appears on web sites that can be indexed by the various search engines.

A new book

Second, I've just started reading a new book, _The Tao of Network Security Monitoring_ by Richard Bejtlich, a computer security professional who is well-known to many of the handlers (I had the pleasure of attending SANS 2000 and SANSFIRE 2001 with him, though I'm sure he doesn't remember me). So far, it looks pretty interesting, I may include more of a report on it when I finish.

Logs

We, the handlers at the Internet Storm Center, could not do what we do without the continued support of the thousands of you out there who submit your logs to Dshield. As always, if you haven't been contributing, we urge you to consider it. See

http://www.dshield.org/howto.php .

SANS NS2004

The next major SANS conference is NS2004 in Las Vegas 29 Sept-4 Oct. The early bird discount deadline is 18 August. There will be 17 tracks and a number of evening, one- and two-day classes all led by some of the best SANS faculty including a number of handlers and some of the rest of us will be there as participants. I look forward to seeing some of you there.


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Jim Clausing, jim.clausing/at/acm.org