I have been looking for sometime to get a few security cameras setup around my house. I have thought about the dropcam and oco options but they were both fairly expensive and didn’t have the options that I wanted.
What I did have was a raspberry pi 2, two old web cameras and a 6 year old who likes to build stuff. We spent some time this weekend working with a project called MotionPie based off of MotionEye this weekend and we really like it.
It does take a fair amount of computer, network and linux knowledge but if you have a raspberry pi and google I am sure you could figure out.
I hope to see added (and help since it is an open source project): Dropbox support. Ability to select motion detection area. Ability to change the theme colors.
People ask me all time what the one thing they should do to “stay safe” on the internet is. If I had to pick one it would be to use a VPN when you are on a network you dont own or trust.
It has always taken a little bit of technical skill to setup a private VPN but my friends at WebDigi have done an amazing job of making setting up a free (if you dont use it too much) private VPN on AWS easy.
My mentor asked me that question this week as we were talking about what “true success” looks like. In the end you will never feel truly successful if you are not doing what you are passionate bout. There are people who are passionate about being amazing help desk technicians who feel (and are) more successful than the CIO who would really rather be the CFO.
As a reminder to do everything I do with passion I now have this as the lock screen on my phone:
Since it is that time of the year for all good security professionals to get ready to fly to Vegas I decided to put together my own “Surviving Blackhat” blog post.
Make a Friend. Being in security is sometimes a thankless job. You are going to a place with 30,000 other professionals who do the same thing you do and know the struggle is real.
Sure, someone may try to social engineer you into you telling them your mothers maiden name but you might find a friend who does forensics that you can call at 0200 when you think you are 10 minutes away from being fired.
Have A Meal With An Important Security Partner. The companies that help you secure your company are at blackhat and want to hang out with you. Take advantage of it.
Have A Meal With Some Friends (That You Pay For). Pick a night (I suggest Tuesday) and make plans with a group of friends to have an amazing meal somewhere in Vegas without a vendor (unless you are really friends with a vendor).
Dress Like An Adult (for meetings). Save the Black T-shirts and Flip-Flops for DEFCON. To quote Jay-Z:
I don’t wear jersey’s. I’m 30 plus gimmie a crisp pair of jeans and a button up.
Get Swag And Give It Away. Pick up way more swag then you need. You have co-workers that are covering for you. Nothing says “Thank you” like showing up on the 10th with a book bag of T-Shirts from companies you never heard of.
Get Smart! 90% of the smartest people in the industry are going to be within 4 miles of each other for 168 hours. LEARN.AS.MUCH.AS.YOU.CAN.
Have Fun! Part of the reason you are in Vegas is to recharge your batteries and have fun. Do that.
I spend a lot of time working in the starbucks near my office. It is a great place to slip away from the office for an hour when I need to do some heads down work but dont want to be completely anti-social.
Even though I always use a VPN one thing that always bothered my was that Starbucks was grabbing my MAC address every-time I logged in:
I am not a big fan of being tracked like this so this weekend I wrote randomMAC for OSX to quickly change my MAC address.
So now when I log in at Starbucks I am passing it a random MAC:
I have been using the iOS 9 Public Beta 2 and one of the things that I do not like (and has really been freaking me out) is the Frequent Location Tracking.
I was getting alerts like this:
This made me have the following thoughts:
I am not going to Columbia right now.
Am I going to Columbia right now?
Why does my phone think I am going to Columbia right now?
Wait… why does my phone think I am going to Columbia?
The answer to this is a new-ish feature in iOS 9 called “Frequent Locations” and it does a stalker quality job of keeping track of you:
You can and should turn this and Location-Based Alerts and Location-Based iAds off in: Settings > Privacy > Location Services:
At work this week I needed to compare two files to see if they had the same MD5 or SHA256 hash. After spending way too long trying to get hashdeep and md5deep to work correctly and not finding anything else to easily do this I wrote compare.py today.
This script is the definition of utilitarian but I hope it can help you also.
They are written by *security experts* and they say effective security is as easy as:
Running su -c ‘yum update’ every week.
Picking a good password.
Blocking everything from China.
The only way to respond to these articles is:
The truth is SECURITY.IS.HARD!
When an *expert* writes an article based on the premise that effective security is achievable by following a canned security framework they devalue the whole security industry. Implementing security in any organization is about performing the unique risk analysis and that cant be achieved through a checklist.
So the next time you see one of these listicles just say…
“Mr.Gamblin this is your sixth year in the role of my father. How do you think this year has gone?” – My son during my imaginary yearly performance review.
Most holidays are set aside to celebrate an event that happened in the past while father’s day is mostly a day to celebrate what was accomplished in the past year.
It is impossible for me to celebrate without stopping and thinking about the past year. The easiest way to do this is to go straight to some classic performance review questions and apply them to my parenting skills. So here are the five questions I asked myself this morning:
“What went well this year and what might have gone better?”
“What can I do differently next year?”
“What are the most important goals for the coming year?”
“What knowledge or skills do I need to develop to meet my goals in this job?”
“In the past year, what achievement am I most proud of?”
Overall I think I did a good job this year but being a dad is one of the few roles in my life where I do not mind and actually expect to get a few “needs improvement” and no “exceeds expectations” because I am the one setting the expectations and I can never do enough for my son.
