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HOW TO : Enable wildcard domains in Squid

We were trying to modify some ACL (access control lists) in squid to allow traffic to certain websites. Instead of adding each individual hostnames in a domain, we wanted to add all traffic to a certain domain.

Document on the interwebs is old or not clear on how to achieve this.

After some trial and error, here is what works

say you want to allow all traffic to the google.com domain, you create a access list using dstdomain like below

acl name_of_acl dstdomain .google.com

The “.” before the domain name acts as a wildcard

Then you use the acl to allow http access to it like below

http_access allow name_of_acl
December 15, 2015 by HOWTO Networking Technology Uncategorized 0

HOW TO : pipe results between commands when using sudo

Let’s say you are running a command as sudo and need to pass the output to a different command using pipe, you would run

sudo command1 | command 2

this usually results in the following error

-bash: /command2: Permission denied

The trick to fix is to run sudo with -c and enclose the commands in ” like below

sudo -c 'command1 | command 2'

essentially you are opening a shell with sudo and running the commands

December 13, 2015 by HOWTO Linux Technology Uncategorized 0

HOW TO : Capture network traffic on a Solaris server

If you don’t have tcpdump installed on your solaris server, you can use the “snoop” system command to capture network traffic.

Here is the command line option to capture 1000 packets of network traffic from IP 192.168.10.10 on a solaris server using inteface e1000g1 and write the output to /tmp/capture.pcap

snoop -d e1000g1 -c 10000 -o /tmp/capture.pcap host 192.168.10.10

Details of the command options

  • -d : Name of the interface you want to capture traffic on
  • -c : Number of packets you want to capture
  • -o : Path to the output file
  • host : IP address of the host you want to capture traffic from and to

More details at https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-1453/gexkw.html

PS : You have to have root privileges to run this command.

November 23, 2015 by HOWTO Technology Uncategorized 0

HOW TO : Use awk to print values larger than certain number

Quick how to on using awk to filter results if a certain value (column) is larger than a set value.

For example, if you have a file (servers.txt) with lines in this format

a_datacenter, servers 20
 error, servers xyz
 b_datacenter, servers 21
 c_datacenter, servers 50

and you want to show only the lines that have server value larger than 20, you can do this in awk by running

grep datacenter servers.txt | awk '$3 > 20  {print ;}' | more

breaking down the commands

grep – parsing down the output to just show the lines containing datacenter

awk – $3 > 20 : Get the third variable (awk seperates text using spaces by default) and check if it is greater than 20

print – print the entire line

August 24, 2015 by HOWTO Linux Technology Uncategorized 0

HOW TO : Parse IP Address in Windows Batch File

We had a recent challenge at work which required us to execute different actions based on which office a particular workstation was located in. Since we have unique network ranges per office, I thought this would be a good variable to use. Just for future reference, here is how we accomplished this in a batch file. The workstations were running Windows 7

[code]

@ECHO OFF

FOR /f "tokens=3" %%I IN (
‘netsh interface ip show address "Local Area Connection" ^| findstr "IP Address"’
) DO SET ipAddress=%%I

REM "Office 1"
IF NOT x%ipAddress:10.130=%==x%ipAddress% (
ECHO "Office 1" + %ipAddress%
ECHO "do_something_else" )

REM "Office 2"
IF NOT x%ipAddress:10.140=%==x%ipAddress% (
ECHO "Office 2" + %ipAddress%
ECHO "do_something_else" )

[/code]

Details of function used

  • netsh interface ip show address “Local Area Connection” : With this command we are extracting the IP information of just the LAN port
  • findstr “IP Address” : returns the line containing “IP Address”
  • IF NOT x%ipAddress:10.130=%==x%ipAddress% : We are using the substitution function and returning false if the new string doesnt match the original
  • FOR /f “tokens=3” : Using the functions in the FOR loop to extract the third variable in the matching line
June 16, 2014 by Programming Technology Uncategorized Windows 0

Update 1 : Application Development : domainScan

Following up from my post earlier this month regarding building a security application that scans publicly available data (Google) and report on potential information leakage from a hostname.

I created a repo on github if anyone is interested in contributing. First thing any good developer does is to check code in early and often :). The repo is at https://github.com/kudithipudi/security-domainscan

Here’s the sudo code I put together as a framework to build on

[code]

functions
read_file(file)
open file;
for each line
process_line(hostname)

process_line(hostname)
search_google(hostname)
write to log

search_google (hostname)
connect to google api
get results for hostname
return number of results

main
read_file(input)

[/code]

 

February 14, 2014 by Programming security Technology Uncategorized 1

HOW TO : Search for a record in MongoDB based on length

Quick entry for my own records.

MongoDB is one of the popular open source document database that is part of the nosql movement. One of the applications we deployed at work uses MongoDB as an internal storage engine. We ran into an issue where MongoDB was trying to replicate data to MySQL and the replication stopped because of a size mismatch for an object between MongoDB and MySQL. Essentially MongoDB was trying to insert a record into MySQL that was larger than the defined length.

Here is the query we used to find the culprit objects. We used the awesome Robomongo client to connect to the MongoDB instance.

[code]db.some_table_to_search.find({$where:"this.some_column_to_search.length > 40"})[/code]

Breaking down the command

db -> Specifies the database you are trying to search

some_table_to_search -> Specifie the table you are trying to search

some_column_to_search -> Specified the particular column you are trying to search.

In this specific example, we were looking for entries longer than 40 characters for this column.

If you come from the traditional RDBMS world, here is a link from MongoDB comparing terminology between RDBMS and MongoDB.

http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/sql-comparison/

February 13, 2014 by Databases HOWTO Technology Uncategorized 0

Idea for a security application

I think the best way to learn a new (programming) language is to address a real world problem :). So here is one, I want to solve in the next few months.

One of the things I like to do as part of a evaluation security process is to check the amount of public information available for a website. I frequently find that people find information leakage from websites they thought were secure or not publicly accessible.

The idea is to create a python script to do the following

  • Must have
    • Inject list of hostnames and do the following
      • Check whether they resolve to a public IP or not
      • If resolving to public IP, check the amount of data being exposed by this site by doing a quick google search
      • Report on the amount of information available sorted by amount
  • Nice to have
    • take domain name instead of hostnames and try to do a domain transfer and capture all hostnames in the domain
    • leverage Google API instead of web scraping
    • web interface to allow input and show output

Why python? Well, I have been trying to learn it for sometime now and I think it is time to put all that learning to use :).

Anyone interested in joining the fun?

February 3, 2014 by Programming Technology Uncategorized 1

Lessons of the trade : Handling CVV numbers

Just for my notes.. Even though the CVV numbers on a credit card, look like numbers :), don’t treat them as integers in your code. Some of the numbers start with a 0.. so 059 might become 59 by the time you try to process it if you capture the CVV field as an integer.

Just treat them like a string.

And obviously you are not storing them anywhere in your application/network :). Or you might end up in the headlines like some of our retailers.

January 28, 2014 by Programming security Technology Uncategorized 0