To revitalise a blog you need something good to say.

It is fair to say that since 2008 my blog has gone stale. In a sense Twitter subverted a lot of the potential blog traffic, a phenomenon not just limited to myself. Whereas in the past you had no other outlet you can now quickly blast out small messages to a core audience on Twitter, which is great if you do not have time to properly develop content for your blog.

The blog still has its place. Monologuing, quality - well developed - posts, and other article-length tirades. It is fair to say that I find blogging to be very daunting, first off it’s a permanent record. I cringe when I look back at some of my early posts. Secondly it requires proper writing skills, which I suspect I do not have (I have no way of telling). Thirdly, you need something good to say.

When I look at my traffic stats I can quickly pick out posts that were hits, and posts that were misses. Based on that I can see that there is definitely a demand for Enterprise-Level articles related to the Mac. My most popular post, by a large margin, is one that dealt with configuring LDAP in your OS X Address Book (see Apple Address Book and Microsoft Exchange (LDAP) ). This brings me back to “having something to say”.

As I try to pick this blog back up by it’s bootstraps I am going to try and focus on the things I understand and know, expect to see some posts related to OS X, Information Security, Open Source.

If you are still listening, I hope to get to know you - drop me a comment - let me know what you are interested in, and lets see where this road takes us.

OpenSource Project of the day

Over the last couple of weeks I have tried to regularly send a tweet with my choice of Open Source or Free Software security project of the day.

For those that missed some, here they are:

• FreeIPA http://www.freeipa.org/
  
• Lynis http://www.rootkit.nl/projects/lynis.html
  
• Kismet https://www.kismetwireless.net/
  
• MailWatch http://mailwatch.sourceforge.net
  
• SOMAP.org : http://www.somap.org/
  
• OpenSC http://www.opensc.org/
  
• SiLK http://tools.netsa.cert.org/silk/index.html
  
• Snare http://www.intersectalliance.com/
  
• Ettercap http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/
• RTIR http://www.bestpractical.com/rtir/
• IPCop http://www.ipcop.org/
• EJBCA http://ejbca.sourceforge.net/
• FreeRadius http://freeradius.org/
• ClamAV http://www.clamav.net/
• OpenVPN http://openvpn.net/
• Osiris http://osiris.shmoo.com/index.html
• NTOP http://www.ntop.org/
• Nikto http://www.cirt.net/nikto2
• OSVDB http://www.osvdb.org/
• p0f http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/p0f.shtml
• Bastille-Unix http://www.bastille-unix.org/
• WireShark http://www.wireshark.org/
• OpenVAS http://www.openvas.org/
• Metasploit http://metasploit.com/
• OSSEC http://www.ossec.net/
• Snort http://www.snort.org
• OSSIM http://www.ossim.net/

Enjoy!

m0n0wall plugin for OSSIM

Just released a OSSIM plugin for m0n0wall. Just point your m0n0wall logging to an OSSIM sensor (via syslog) and have fun.

Find it here: m0n0wall plugin 

ipfw and OSSIM

Saw in the CVS update mailing list that my ipfw plugin for OSSIM is now generally available. 

OpenVAS released

I just read that OpenVAS (http://www.openvas.org), a well-organised fork of Nessus has been released to the world. What really warms my heart is that I see familiar names from the Kolab (http://www.kolab.org) are behind the fork.

This is combination with Alienvault's (http://www.alienvault.com) sponsored development of free (announcement) OpenVAS/Nessus plugins makes the whole arena quite exciting to watch again.

Is FOSS secure by default?

Unfortunately a lot of people equate a lack of software vulnerabilities with security. Here in South Africa we are trying to help institutions to make good choices around FOSS (Fee and Open Source Software) and security looking at policies, procedures, standards and guidelines and how they apply to FOSS.

If you think tha FOSS is secure by default please read the following article which highlights one reason why we cannot just trust without knowing and understanding:

Attacks on Package Managers

Mac OSX Hints double whammy

Good day for me today :-)
Mac OSX Hints have published two of my Mac hints! Quite pleased with that!

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080427091554310
and
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080427091327509