Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Serious security research with a bit of comedic spice

You know, some of the best geek humor comes across in the musings and observations on mailing lists. Frank Knobbe sent this missive tonight to the DShield general discussion mailing list. It warms my heart to see that geek humor is alive and well. Thanks for the smiles, Frank. :-)


Frank wrote:

Frank Knobbe frank at knobbe.us
Tue Jul 19 23:38:58 GMT 2005

Earlier today, Dan Kaminsky was conducting a version.bind scan from his
servers at the doxpara.com domain. The probes are being sent from
infrastructure-audit-1.see-port-80.doxpara.com. The web page there
explains what is being probed.

However, at the moment I'm picking up packets that contain data in TCP
Syn packets during his Web server probe runs. The data reads:

"Hello, this packet is a being sent as part of research project being
conducted by Cisco Systems' Critical Infrastructure Assurance Group.
This is NOT malicious activity. For more information, please contact
Mike Schiffman: mschiffm at cisco.com..."

Maybe others don't find this is funny, but I think this is hilarious. I
always enjoy probes that introduce themselves in such a friendly
manner :)

Dan, if you are reading this, perhaps the next series of probes could
contain some packet-monkey jokes or perhaps some tidbit of wisdom? How
about including some RSS feeds in your probes or something else to
brighten up the day?

Cheers,
Frank

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