Radical Development | Computer Security

October 17, 2012
by Steven Swafford
Comments Off

Free Security Magazines, White Papers, and Downloads Of October 2012

Takes One to Know One: Think Like a Hacker for Better Security Awareness 52% of businesses experienced more malware infections as a result of employees on social media. Security awareness is mostly about common sense, and thinking like the hackers to understand what security weaknesses they look for. But like other security precautions, it’s easy to let down your guard. Security awareness education can arm your staff with the skills to practice safe Internet usage – to reduce malware and other cyber threats. In this paper, find out: Best ways to deliver a security awareness program What you should teach …

Continue reading →

October 10, 2012
by Steven Swafford
Comments Off

Damaging Corporate Computer Crime

One of the countless cyber threats today to corporations is organized crime. The reality is organized crime no longer marches into a business and demands so called “protection money” or executes a “smash and grab”; rather these groups are sophisticated and leverage technology heavily for criminal activities. Also it is important to note that when you consider this type of threat, you must also understand that it could possibly include the insider threat. I am always amazed when I speak with others about security that do not fully comprehend threats from “trusted” sources which included employees that more often than …

Continue reading →

October 10, 2012
by Steven Swafford
Comments Off

Data Recovery The Easy Way With TestDisk

There are many solutions on the market that are free, open source, and commercial. While many may argue that commericial solutions provide both ease of use and work well, I present to you that open source solutions are often a better solution. This being said, I wanted to share my experiences with TestDisk from CGSecurity, which is primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy …

Continue reading →

September 25, 2012
by Steven Swafford
Comments Off

Sysinternals PsInfo

In the area of digital forensics information gathering and documentation is critical. While there are a number of available tools available I want to focus on PsInfo which is a command-line tool that gathers key information about the local or remote Windows NT/2000 system, including the type of installation, kernel build, registered organization and owner, number of processors and their type, amount of physical memory, the install date of the system, and if its a trial version, the expiration date. General Use psinfo [[\\computer[,computer[,..] | @file [-u user [-p psswd]]] [-h] [-s] [-d] [-c [-t delimiter]] [filter] \\computer Perform the …

Continue reading →

September 23, 2012
by Steven Swafford
Comments Off

Security+ Acronyms Cheat Sheet

Security+ is a certification dealing with computer security topics such as cryptography and access control, as well as business-related topics such as disaster recovery and risk management. It was developed in 2002 to address the rise of security issues. A new and updated version, SY0-301, was released in 2011. According to CompTIA, there are currently more than 45,000 people around the world who have earned this certification. It is recommended that candidates have two years of security-related work experience (although not a requirement) and pass the 100 question multiple choice exam. The Security+ exam can be applied as an elective …

Continue reading →

September 22, 2012
by Steven Swafford
Comments Off

Nmap Cheat Sheet

Nmap (Network Mapper) is a security scanner originally written by Gordon Lyon used to discover hosts and services on a computer network, thus creating a “map” of the network. To accomplish its goal, Nmap sends specially crafted packets to the target host and then analyzes the responses. Unlike many simple port scanners that just send packets at a predefined constant rate, Nmap accounts for the network conditions (latency fluctuations, network congestion, the target interference with the scan) during the run. Also, owing to the large and active user community providing feedback and contributing to its features, Nmap has been able …

Continue reading →