First practice test down

I took my first practice test this morning, and passed. The exam seemed pretty straight forward and the questions are what I would have expected; there were not any surprises. The class did an excellent job of preparing me for the exam. Now, on to schedule the real thing.

In other news....a friend of mine suggested I look into governmental contracting. So, I'm looking into what's available and what's looked for.

Honeypot tips?

Exam update: I'm looking to take my first practice exam in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, I'm looking into building a honeypot. Do you have any tips? Any good lessons learned to pass on?

866-201-4573 and 315-207-4761: What's the point?

These two numbers have been calling my home land line incessantly. Literally, the callerid has four or five calls from these numbers each day. Also, the callerid shows up as "Unknown Caller." Typically, I don't pick up when it says "Unknown Caller" or any of the derivatives. However, after a couple of days of this nonsense, I figured it was about time I found out who it was and what they wanted. I've answered a couple of times now, and each time the caller asks for "John." (There's no John here.) When I've inquired about a last name, I get a different last name, or something un-intelligent.

I google searched the numbers and got a hit for each number. The results are a message board with similar complaints. When I last checked the message board, there was no real answer to the problem. Were they just verifying that my number was a legitimate number? A residential number? I'm never asked anything else, no name, no address, nothing.

After my searches, and with what I (don't) know; I've just started filing a complaint with the Do Not Call list. I figure, if I add the number each time I get a call, something will get done.

If I had the time, and I thought I could pull it off as well, I'd try this.

Running Cheops-ng in Ubuntu

One piece of software I never ran in the class was Cheops-ng. I decided to give it a whirl today, so that I could get familiar with mapping a network. Well, I couldn't get it to run. I was able to install it through apt-get. But, on running it, I was only able to map hosts when I was physically plugged into the network with a network cable. I was unable to scan using the wireless card.

Further, when I mapped the network, I received the following types of errors when I checked the operating system:

File gui-handlers.c, Line 552 (do_os_scan): Unable to send OS-scan event

It took me a while to figure out that mapping was only working using a cable. I'll have to see if there is a setting I can toggle to use the wireless card.

AVG Antivirus - upgrade to version 8

I knew it was coming, I just didn't know when. However, this morning was greeted to a pop-up from AVG that I would not be getting updates to the 7.5 version of the software after May 31st. And, I would need to update to version 8.

I just spent a few minutes updating. I encountered no (perceivable) issues as of yet. The only thing I noticed during the upgrade was a note...should version 8 not work properly, you would need to uninstall 8, and re-install version 7.5. So, far, it looks good. In doing a google search, I noticed little icons next to sites. When I mouse over them, the icons tell me if the site is "safe". And, by safe, I believe it means that there is no malicious code on the site. This will bear further investigation.

Hello World (part 2)

I thought this humorous.....
A collection of Hello World programs, in many languages.

Enjoy.