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Topics
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Intro
ITW Conference
NEbraskaCERT October CSF
One Security Tool
One Security Website
One Book Review
One Quick Question & Answer
End Of Line

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Intro
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This is the Second of our Monthly newsletters from NEbraskaCERT.  With 
this issue the format is getting a bit more worked out and it will
hopefully give us an idea of what the format will look like for the
next couple of issues.

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ITW Conference
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October 23, 2008 is the 10th Annual Information Technology
in the Workplace (ITW) conference.

Their theme this year is "IT Security: An Imperative for 
Organizations".

For more information about the conference hit their website

http://www.itconference.org

I've been to the conference in the past and it is a nice event
so going to it is definitely worthwhile.

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NEbraskaCERT October CSF
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NEbraskaCERT will be holding our October CSF on the 15th down
at the Bellevue Lifelong Learning Center from 7:30am to 9:00am.  
Bill Hayes will be talking about Incident Response, what to do
after you've been hacked.  Should be an excellent talk.

For more information please hit our website at 
http://www.NEbraskacert.org/CSF or better yet sign up for
our CSF announce list at 
mailto: csf-announce-subscribe@nebraskacert.org

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One Security Tool
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Our Security Tool for this month is the Untangle Gateway at 
http://www.untangle.com/  It is a truly unique tool in that
it uses ARP poisoning in a constructive way, so you don't have
to reconfigure your network.  It runs on Microsoft Windows XP
boxes and has take a unique approach to how to be a gateway
for your network.  One thing to keep in mind this is not designed
for an enterprise, but for the SOHO environment this is a very
cool product.

Untangle is available for free with various fee-based support 
packages available for it.

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One Security Website
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Our Security Website for this month is packetstorm.  Packetstorm
http://www.packetstorm.org is a site that believes in full disclosure.
It hosts links to many publicly available exploits and other 
documentation.  Note: Packetstorm is a White hat site and has a
variety of tools available on it.

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One Book Review
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The book I am just finishing up is called "Little Brother" by Cory
Doctorow.  Some reviews describe it is 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 for
a post 9/11 DMCA world.  After reading it I can only say it is one
of the best books I've read in the last five years.

It is available for free in a variety of formats at Cory's website

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

Most of the bookstores in town also have it for sale.  I got my
copy at Borders.  One note it is in the young adult section, which 
can be embarrassing when you ask for it.

So yes, it is a "Kiddies Book", but it managed to explain TOR in
half a page, better than I can in half an hour.  It is a bit
political, so it might spark some discussion as well if you give
it to your children, so I recommend reading it first.

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One Quick Question & Answer
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One of the questions I get asked most often is "What is a CVE and 
why should I care?"

CVE stands for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures.  Mitre created
this as a way of standardizing the naming of security vulnerabilities.
Almost every major vendor will use their naming convention AND use
CVEs as well.

E.g.  RHSA-2007:0108-4 : was issued by Red Hat because of problems
with the Thunderbird e-mail client.  It refers to about a dozen
CVE numbers that were handled by the one Red Hat Security Advisory.
Debian issued security advisory DSA-1336-1 addressed this CVE.  

CVEs are maintained by the MITRE corporation.  It is funded by
the United States Department of Homeland Security.  Many scanning 
tools will refer to explicit CVEs when doing scans and for doing 
remediation.

For more information hit the MITRE website http://cve.mitre.org

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End Of Line
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This is it for the second newsletter.  If you have any 
feedback/questions please let me know at 
aaron.grothe < at > nebraskacert.org or ajgrothe@gmail.com.

If anyone has any corrections to the newsletter please let 
me know and I'll include them in the next newsletter.

Regards,

Aaron
0-0-0
NEbraskaCERT
www.nebraskacert.org