33% is the first I've heard of that, and I know a lot of people who have xboxes and have yet to hear of any one I personally know with one that was problematic. As for waranty, I'd like to know where you got that considering MS just extended the waranty to 3 years covering their red ring of death.
Every first gen Sony playstation had the same problems, as do most first gen items. Know anyone who had a first gen Ipod? Give the PS3 some time, it will be on that list.
Porn and Price cause VHS to win. Length and reliability had little to do with it, and both were overcome. Based on that, most BR players will be considered failures since most lusers won't have the brains to update their firmware, killing their ability to play movies that come out after October.
Most the news that goes one way or another, Blockbuster's stores that account for 1% of their revenue, number of players out there(can you guarantee all PS3 owners are buying movies), Amazon pushing Indie HD-DVD releases, Blu Ray rot(1 batch of disks, CDs went through the same thing, tell me a new one), etc. haven't made had much effect. Supposedly there were a lot of HD-DVD player cancelations with the BB news, but if true did those cancelers buy a BR or get back on the fence? All of the news for both sides is so soap operay, no one is tuning in to The Young and the Blurayless.
With only 33% of the people out there owning hi-def sets, and most thinking players upconverting to 1080p will look as good as a 1080p movie, or not being able to tell the difference without being a videophile like myself, and 90% of the movies being re-released not getting remastered to look significantly better then a DVD, why would anyone buy? Also, think of the price of a good TV set prior to the HD explosion to now? Many common buyers would need a loan to get one, which is probably why 33% own them. These are the people who drive the economy. Prices are dropping and becoming more affordable, but prices on everything need to come down before they get on board.
Right now, no one is winnning, and it will be a while until we see winner. Those who think, get a dual player are only kidding themselves, as when their dual player breaks, and the winner has been picked, good luck finding another cheap dual player.
It isn't even that good. I was in Compusa and they had a 1080p TV set up with BR and a 1080i TV with HD DVD playing the same movie, and the 1080i looked significantly better.
Of course, it is all personal prefference, but get either of them home and have them in your house for a while, you probably won't notice or care about the difference.
At one point Betamax had 100 times the players then VHS. Many times they claimed Betamax won. Now, the only place you see Betamax is on the Simpsons, and you can bet whoever looses is the one they adopt.
It is too early to claim victory. To be honest, I'm no longer sure there will be a clear cut winnner by the Holidays.
The other problem you have is those tests may show latency/lack of bandwith, they just don't show where, and there are a lot of hops between your ISP and your detination server. If you run a traceroute simultaneously and see latency near the backbone, you might be able to blame your ISP. Even that may not be accurate since it is only a snap shot.
This is so who came first, the chicken or the egg. You can argue which is more secure, and it's like arguing whether Christmas or Chanukah is the correct holiday to celebrate.
For everything you can say is secure/insecure about closed/open source, you can say something negative/positive about the other. For instance, as you say likely hood of back doors, someone could argue MS is not likely to have backdoors because of the potential for financial repercussions/litigation as a result. Is that true, maybe in some cases, maybe in some not(Sony Root kit wahoo).
Like the argument of religion, it all comes down to faith in your method. The government has faith in closed source because sales of close source help drive the economy. They just fail to mention that most close source items are now based on open source products.
Ah yes, there are more jobs availible now then were at the first dotcom bust. The first bust made people fear getting into IT because of job stability, and less and less are studying computer science/information systems as a result.
Exactly. As much as I don't like Sony for their Rootkit, all I have to say about this is, don't waste my time until they find something. This there may be (insert problem/benefit) is getting real old.
Lets recap things we've heard, most from reliable news sources, that have not yet come true:
China is making cheap (choose your format) players for Walmart - Wake me up when it is finalized for the 12th time.
HDDVD uses a (choose your color from the rainbow) laser - ever read the tech specs before reporting?
HDDVD will have a 51 gig 3 layer disk - Where's the beef?
BR will have a 4 million layer disk in year 2112 - A passage to Bankok/Where's the more beef?
Bluray rot is disks - CD/DVD had the same problems, and it was one batch. If anything, bitch that it isn't a proven technology due to its age you ninnies.
Size is most important - where's that spam mail to increase girth that I just deleted
Sony, Toshiba, and Fisher Price are going to do a product Ménage à trois and create a Toshonistrux, a great HD media that you can add wheels and a cockpit and run around your living room with it making airplane noises while watching Transformer reruns.
DRM to prevent illegal copies and DRM to enforce market release dates are two entirely different beasts, and enforcement/avioding of each have entirely different effects. No matter how you look at it, DRM causes problems in most situations, because it is used w/o regard for consumers.
I much prefer Unix systems, for reasons not worth beating a dead horse over, however I cannot say MS is evil. All the other talented programmers and solid software companies are for not writing something better and selling it to the public(not one or the other). Gates wrote a crappy piece of software, got in the door, kept expanding on it, and has more money then any of us can imagine. I can't fault the guy for living the true american dream.
If you could sell an educated person a bag of shite for $200 dollars, would you say no?
Don't forget the other stellar Sony formats we all use today:
Betamax failed due to expense and lack of pr0n
Mini Disc failed due to proprietary compression, the same thing that killed UMD
Sony Dynamic Digital Sound ousted by Dolby Digital 5.1
HiFD was spanked by the Zip Drive
Stick Memory got gang raped by Compact Flash and SD memory
Music Clip failed because Sony revisited their proprietary compression on the mini disc
DAT and SACD both bit the big one cause too few cared
Multi-Media Compact Disc was dying until it was merged with Toshiba's super density disk format to create DVDs(see what happens when we work together)
Am I forgetting any? Bueller? Bueller? Sony think big, not what consumers want, and as a result, they don't get adopted. With all the news, they may win, but it won't be what is best for the consumer.
Don't forget, they use region encoding, HD-DVD doesn't. Most of Europe buys movies from the US because they are cheaper. This makes it harder, more expensive for them to do this, causing less money thrown to the US. If only consumers were in tune to capitalism, rather then the radio station up their arse.....
Let's look at the lesser of 2 evils here: The Microsoft hater says: They write insecure code. The Sony hater says: They unleashed a horrible trojan on the world inorder to monitor me
The Microsoft Hater has a choice of using different software, finding a new job, etc. The Sony hater has no choice for music, if they want to purchase a legal physical copy.
Evil of Sony > Evil of Microsoft
You won't win if/when Sony wins. You will want to get some astro glide for your bum though.
Right on. 2/3s of what you hear from both sides is propaganda and the othe 1/3 is bull caca. If I had a nickel for every rumor I heard about both that ended up not being true, I'd own a BR player and a HDDVD player, as well as every title under the sun, and be at my vacation home in Bora Bora, and my wife would be ok with my extra curricular activities with Jenna Jameson, so long as she still gets to go shopping on Rodeo Drive.
Other things to keep in mind, Xbox 360 sales are still doubling what PS3 sales are. And of all the add-ons for all game systems, one of the most popular is the HD-DVD play, so PS3 comment winning the war is nullified. Hardware superiority sure hasn't helped stop Sony from loosing 43mil this year in their gaming division. The PS2 is outselling the PS3, and the Wii is outselling the Xbox 360. Go HD graphics.
This cheap bluray player follows a month after I heard cost of BR laser production was dropping from $125 a laser to $8 dollars. Why the cost drop? It was a supply issue and I have heard nothing about the supply improving. Why hasn't this been picked up by any major new source? Who cares?
Not the average Joe Schmoe. Most people do not own a HD TV, and there for don't see the need for the technology. So try as either side might, it's going to be tough to sway people to any side when half the people can't tell the difference between a VHS tape and a DVD when viewed on their 32 inch 4x3 crt TV. It's like trying to get a faithfully married couple to care about a Genital Herpes commercial. Watch out for those public toilets.
BR is technically superior if size matters. However, if seek time matters, it isn't. Half of the BR games use duplicate data to speed up load time nullifying their benefit.
Production of HD DVDs cost 1/4 of what it costs to produce the same yield of blu ray. Call me crazy 4*30 = 120 > 50 seems a lot more superior to me. I guess size does matter, and maybe that is why most XXX companies are solely going with HD DVD.
Lack of standards. BR standards were poorly defined, and as a result, we have the Java debacle. Ah, yes, but people can just update the firmware in many instances. AV people are not geeks. The average AV user couldn't understand throwing a cd in to update the firmware, and since BR didn't mandate an Ethernet port, makes it even tougher, not that it would help.
Sony has never won a format war as they always shoot for the moon, and not what their customers need. The last format they had that was prevalent had no competition and was a Sony/Philips combination which birthed Compaq Discs. Amazing how well a format does when companies put their heads together. Ah, John Nash, I see why you won the Nobel Prize.
Toshiba is doing a lousy job promoting their product and pointing out the many follies Sony has made. They had enough to make people pay attention to them like a beer commercial during the Super bowl, but instead have gotten the back seat like a Masengil commercial during a soap opera. Call me crazy, people would pay more attention if Toshiba advertised flavors like filet mignon instead of country flower.
No one side is winning despite the BS they claim, and no one is going to win anytime soon. Both sides have made catastrophic blunders, and will continue to make more. Though you could claim HD DVD will be the winner solely on the fact they are the only format featuring Army of Darkness. Gimme some sugar baby.......
Why stop there? Everything you see in most of Apple's Operating systems over the years has in some way been linked back to Xerox PARC. The first Apple gui was even written with the help of the Xerox PARC team. MS has already paid it's dues for ripping off Xerox in 88. It just payed them to Apple instead of Xerox.
Interesting. My point, unplugging the systen may not be the best option IF you need a forensic investigatuion, is completely irrelevant and has nothing to do with yours.
Aside from losing what is stored in physical memory
I can't imagine a system that would actually preserve that without truly obscene cost.
Many programs keep temporary files during the course of execution, files which frequently are never written to disk, but still accessible, or will be overwritten when the service stops, and anything being run at the console give the option to save the current sessions to a disk(we don't know where the hacker was doing their dirty work from). Much of this can easily be collected and written to removable media, so the cost is negligible.
Also unless finding the source of attack is much more important than recovery
Hence why I prefaced it with, things to keep in mind.;)
No. Nothing should ever be run by an admin on a compromised system, period.
If you have unplugged the network connection(including disabling wireless cards), what does it matter? Any data you enter is going to go no where, except for the fireproof vault where you store the evidence, or back into production, which, provided you do a good job of blowing away contents before you rebuild it, no one would be able to get without physically removing the drive, if you're lucky enough to have a system that contains no sensitive information and can be simply rebuilt.
By the logic of never do anything with a running system, our Antivirus research groups wouldn't make it very far, and in many cases, neither would many forensic teams.
Bottom line, to do accurate forensics, if needed, you need to grab as much information about the system without ruining integrity of what is on the drive before you shut it down.
Couple things to keep in mind when shutting your system down: Aside from losing what is stored in physical memory and chancing your swap file being over written/purged, many root kits will remove themselves when the system is rebooted to avoid detection(why stay and leave evidence if I know I can hack it anytime I want). You are better off unplugging the network cable and making a exact duplicate of the file system/dumping memory if you can, and running some known good system binaries, such as process viewers to get a snap shot of what is running(screen captures are good to get, when applicable). If you can, have known good linked libraries available just incase it is corrupted on the current system.
Even still the output may or may not be 100% trustable, but it can still provide useful information. If you make duplicates and manage to dump pertinent data, I would still store the hard drive in a safe place after making duplicates for forensic reasons once shut down. Aside from that information being the most trust worthy, comparing it to changes or missing information of the running computer may help you determine what is on there.
P.S. Of course, if I were a h4x0r writing code, rather then just waiting for the system to shut down, I would test for a continual network connection and exit as soon as I lost access, I would clean the system evidence and exit. But I'm not, and I didn't even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Basically, you need to evaluate what you want to do and why assembly is or is not relevant, and decide, is ease of understanding and reuse not as important as efficiency. I have a degree in Computer Science and work in Computer Security. I have found the Assembly/Operating Systems classes to be unbelievably useful in understanding exploit concepts and code, despite the fact that I rarely code in it. Could I still do my job without it? Certainly. Would I be as good at what I do? Probably. Does it make me a more efficient programmer? Yes. Will any one notice a difference with the latest billion core processor? Probably not. Is it easier to write a bug that goes unnoticed? Certainly. Does efficiency equal good programming? No.
Certain things will always require assembly knowledge: Gaming and Graphics that require speed; reverse engineering malware and AV/ad ware detection software to detect malware, avoiding system library calls that may be corrupted to prevent detection, portions of operating system kernels, device drivers/firmware, and devices that have simple circuitry for specialized, time sensitive functions like a robot programmed to quickly get me a beer from the fridge so I dont miss what Im watching on TV.
If you are writing a guidance program for a missile, a few less instructions could be the difference between life and death, where as if you are writing a heart monitor, readability and ease to debug problems may be more critical. The brain can live without blood for 4 6 minutes, a few less instructions will buy you nothing, and if it did, youd probably end up being a vegetable anyway. Maybe they should write that kind of stuff in Cobol to bring down health care costs.
Assembly will not make you a better programmer, like being versed in Impressionism will not make you a better artist. Like programming, you are either good at painting, or you arent, unless it is non-objective, which always sucks.
Bingo! Why not put the blame where it belongs, on the parents. Not the parents of the psycho 19 year old, but on the 13 year olds parents for not making sure she knew the dangers of my space and or not knowing where she was.
It's sad these days that wire cutters are taking the place of a good ole shot gun.
Security Best Practices are a defacto standard regardless of what your risk assessment is. Go to sans top 20 and it tells you what are best practices without knowing your organization, whether it is a home network or a fortune 500 company.
Your risk assessment allows you to evaluate how much, if any of a standard best practice you should apply, and if you need to go above an beyond.
Now we are jumping to conclusions. If 10 feet of cable means a 10 foot crossover cable, have fun. If your 10 ft cable consists of computers hooked up to a switch with the only users being to stupid to comprehend what dsniff is, let alone use it, have fun.
It sounds like it is a test network/box, that likely doesn't have anything relevant, probably and probably isn't NAT'd. Then who cares. Yeah, I know, if their client gets popped with a layer 3/4 sniffer their network is toast. Well, if it isn't natted and the password isn't anywhere else important, who cares. The only way you could get me to care is if you wanted me to assess the network, assets, policies, acceptable use and physical layout of the room for a substantial fee.
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BWAH HAH HA!!!! Trogdor Strikes again!!!!!!!
33% is the first I've heard of that, and I know a lot of people who have xboxes and have yet to hear of any one I personally know with one that was problematic. As for waranty, I'd like to know where you got that considering MS just extended the waranty to 3 years covering their red ring of death.
Every first gen Sony playstation had the same problems, as do most first gen items. Know anyone who had a first gen Ipod? Give the PS3 some time, it will be on that list.
Porn and Price cause VHS to win. Length and reliability had little to do with it, and both were overcome. Based on that, most BR players will be considered failures since most lusers won't have the brains to update their firmware, killing their ability to play movies that come out after October.
Most the news that goes one way or another, Blockbuster's stores that account for 1% of their revenue, number of players out there(can you guarantee all PS3 owners are buying movies), Amazon pushing Indie HD-DVD releases, Blu Ray rot(1 batch of disks, CDs went through the same thing, tell me a new one), etc. haven't made had much effect. Supposedly there were a lot of HD-DVD player cancelations with the BB news, but if true did those cancelers buy a BR or get back on the fence? All of the news for both sides is so soap operay, no one is tuning in to The Young and the Blurayless.
With only 33% of the people out there owning hi-def sets, and most thinking players upconverting to 1080p will look as good as a 1080p movie, or not being able to tell the difference without being a videophile like myself, and 90% of the movies being re-released not getting remastered to look significantly better then a DVD, why would anyone buy? Also, think of the price of a good TV set prior to the HD explosion to now? Many common buyers would need a loan to get one, which is probably why 33% own them. These are the people who drive the economy. Prices are dropping and becoming more affordable, but prices on everything need to come down before they get on board.
Right now, no one is winnning, and it will be a while until we see winner. Those who think, get a dual player are only kidding themselves, as when their dual player breaks, and the winner has been picked, good luck finding another cheap dual player.
It isn't even that good. I was in Compusa and they had a 1080p TV set up with BR and a 1080i TV with HD DVD playing the same movie, and the 1080i looked significantly better.
Of course, it is all personal prefference, but get either of them home and have them in your house for a while, you probably won't notice or care about the difference.
At one point Betamax had 100 times the players then VHS. Many times they claimed Betamax won. Now, the only place you see Betamax is on the Simpsons, and you can bet whoever looses is the one they adopt.
It is too early to claim victory. To be honest, I'm no longer sure there will be a clear cut winnner by the Holidays.
The other problem you have is those tests may show latency/lack of bandwith, they just don't show where, and there are a lot of hops between your ISP and your detination server. If you run a traceroute simultaneously and see latency near the backbone, you might be able to blame your ISP. Even that may not be accurate since it is only a snap shot.
This is so who came first, the chicken or the egg. You can argue which is more secure, and it's like arguing whether Christmas or Chanukah is the correct holiday to celebrate.
For everything you can say is secure/insecure about closed/open source, you can say something negative/positive about the other. For instance, as you say likely hood of back doors, someone could argue MS is not likely to have backdoors because of the potential for financial repercussions/litigation as a result. Is that true, maybe in some cases, maybe in some not(Sony Root kit wahoo).
Like the argument of religion, it all comes down to faith in your method. The government has faith in closed source because sales of close source help drive the economy. They just fail to mention that most close source items are now based on open source products.
as an escaped mental patient.
Ah yes, there are more jobs availible now then were at the first dotcom bust. The first bust made people fear getting into IT because of job stability, and less and less are studying computer science/information systems as a result.
Enter Cash Cow 2.0.........
Exactly. As much as I don't like Sony for their Rootkit, all I have to say about this is, don't waste my time until they find something. This there may be (insert problem/benefit) is getting real old.
Lets recap things we've heard, most from reliable news sources, that have not yet come true:
China is making cheap (choose your format) players for Walmart - Wake me up when it is finalized for the 12th time.
HDDVD uses a (choose your color from the rainbow) laser - ever read the tech specs before reporting?
HDDVD will have a 51 gig 3 layer disk - Where's the beef?
BR will have a 4 million layer disk in year 2112 - A passage to Bankok/Where's the more beef?
Bluray rot is disks - CD/DVD had the same problems, and it was one batch. If anything, bitch that it isn't a proven technology due to its age you ninnies.
Size is most important - where's that spam mail to increase girth that I just deleted
Sony, Toshiba, and Fisher Price are going to do a product Ménage à trois and create a Toshonistrux, a great HD media that you can add wheels and a cockpit and run around your living room with it making airplane noises while watching Transformer reruns.
Ok, I made the last one up, but you get my point.
DRM to prevent illegal copies and DRM to enforce market release dates are two entirely different beasts, and enforcement/avioding of each have entirely different effects. No matter how you look at it, DRM causes problems in most situations, because it is used w/o regard for consumers.
I'm not sure this news is enough to negate the major positive HD DVD has going for it: Army of Darkness....
I much prefer Unix systems, for reasons not worth beating a dead horse over, however I cannot say MS is evil. All the other talented programmers and solid software companies are for not writing something better and selling it to the public(not one or the other). Gates wrote a crappy piece of software, got in the door, kept expanding on it, and has more money then any of us can imagine. I can't fault the guy for living the true american dream.
If you could sell an educated person a bag of shite for $200 dollars, would you say no?
Don't forget the other stellar Sony formats we all use today:
Betamax failed due to expense and lack of pr0n
Mini Disc failed due to proprietary compression, the same thing that killed UMD
Sony Dynamic Digital Sound ousted by Dolby Digital 5.1
HiFD was spanked by the Zip Drive
Stick Memory got gang raped by Compact Flash and SD memory
Music Clip failed because Sony revisited their proprietary compression on the mini disc
DAT and SACD both bit the big one cause too few cared
Multi-Media Compact Disc was dying until it was merged with Toshiba's super density disk format to create DVDs(see what happens when we work together)
Am I forgetting any? Bueller? Bueller? Sony think big, not what consumers want, and as a result, they don't get adopted. With all the news, they may win, but it won't be what is best for the consumer.
Don't forget, they use region encoding, HD-DVD doesn't. Most of Europe buys movies from the US because they are cheaper. This makes it harder, more expensive for them to do this, causing less money thrown to the US. If only consumers were in tune to capitalism, rather then the radio station up their arse.....
Let's look at the lesser of 2 evils here:
The Microsoft hater says: They write insecure code.
The Sony hater says: They unleashed a horrible trojan on the world inorder to monitor me
The Microsoft Hater has a choice of using different software, finding a new job, etc.
The Sony hater has no choice for music, if they want to purchase a legal physical copy.
Evil of Sony > Evil of Microsoft
You won't win if/when Sony wins. You will want to get some astro glide for your bum though.
Right on. 2/3s of what you hear from both sides is propaganda and the othe 1/3 is bull caca. If I had a nickel for every rumor I heard about both that ended up not being true, I'd own a BR player and a HDDVD player, as well as every title under the sun, and be at my vacation home in Bora Bora, and my wife would be ok with my extra curricular activities with Jenna Jameson, so long as she still gets to go shopping on Rodeo Drive.
Other things to keep in mind, Xbox 360 sales are still doubling what PS3 sales are. And of all the add-ons for all game systems, one of the most popular is the HD-DVD play, so PS3 comment winning the war is nullified. Hardware superiority sure hasn't helped stop Sony from loosing 43mil this year in their gaming division. The PS2 is outselling the PS3, and the Wii is outselling the Xbox 360. Go HD graphics.
This cheap bluray player follows a month after I heard cost of BR laser production was dropping from $125 a laser to $8 dollars. Why the cost drop? It was a supply issue and I have heard nothing about the supply improving. Why hasn't this been picked up by any major new source? Who cares?
Not the average Joe Schmoe. Most people do not own a HD TV, and there for don't see the need for the technology. So try as either side might, it's going to be tough to sway people to any side when half the people can't tell the difference between a VHS tape and a DVD when viewed on their 32 inch 4x3 crt TV. It's like trying to get a faithfully married couple to care about a Genital Herpes commercial. Watch out for those public toilets.
BR is technically superior if size matters. However, if seek time matters, it isn't. Half of the BR games use duplicate data to speed up load time nullifying their benefit.
Production of HD DVDs cost 1/4 of what it costs to produce the same yield of blu ray. Call me crazy 4*30 = 120 > 50 seems a lot more superior to me. I guess size does matter, and maybe that is why most XXX companies are solely going with HD DVD.
Lack of standards. BR standards were poorly defined, and as a result, we have the Java debacle. Ah, yes, but people can just update the firmware in many instances. AV people are not geeks. The average AV user couldn't understand throwing a cd in to update the firmware, and since BR didn't mandate an Ethernet port, makes it even tougher, not that it would help.
Sony has never won a format war as they always shoot for the moon, and not what their customers need. The last format they had that was prevalent had no competition and was a Sony/Philips combination which birthed Compaq Discs. Amazing how well a format does when companies put their heads together. Ah, John Nash, I see why you won the Nobel Prize.
Toshiba is doing a lousy job promoting their product and pointing out the many follies Sony has made. They had enough to make people pay attention to them like a beer commercial during the Super bowl, but instead have gotten the back seat like a Masengil commercial during a soap opera. Call me crazy, people would pay more attention if Toshiba advertised flavors like filet mignon instead of country flower.
No one side is winning despite the BS they claim, and no one is going to win anytime soon. Both sides have made catastrophic blunders, and will continue to make more. Though you could claim HD DVD will be the winner solely on the fact they are the only format featuring Army of Darkness. Gimme some sugar baby.......
Why stop there? Everything you see in most of Apple's Operating systems over the years has in some way been linked back to Xerox PARC. The first Apple gui was even written with the help of the Xerox PARC team. MS has already paid it's dues for ripping off Xerox in 88. It just payed them to Apple instead of Xerox.
The big question is, why now?
Interesting. My point, unplugging the systen may not be the best option IF you need a forensic investigatuion, is completely irrelevant and has nothing to do with yours.
Pass me a beer.
I now understand how Galileo felt.....
Aside from losing what is stored in physical memory
;)
I can't imagine a system that would actually preserve that without truly obscene cost.
Many programs keep temporary files during the course of execution, files which frequently are never written to disk, but still accessible, or will be overwritten when the service stops, and anything being run at the console give the option to save the current sessions to a disk(we don't know where the hacker was doing their dirty work from). Much of this can easily be collected and written to removable media, so the cost is negligible.
Also unless finding the source of attack is much more important than recovery
Hence why I prefaced it with, things to keep in mind.
No. Nothing should ever be run by an admin on a compromised system, period.
If you have unplugged the network connection(including disabling wireless cards), what does it matter? Any data you enter is going to go no where, except for the fireproof vault where you store the evidence, or back into production, which, provided you do a good job of blowing away contents before you rebuild it, no one would be able to get without physically removing the drive, if you're lucky enough to have a system that contains no sensitive information and can be simply rebuilt.
By the logic of never do anything with a running system, our Antivirus research groups wouldn't make it very far, and in many cases, neither would many forensic teams.
Bottom line, to do accurate forensics, if needed, you need to grab as much information about the system without ruining integrity of what is on the drive before you shut it down.
Couple things to keep in mind when shutting your system down:
Aside from losing what is stored in physical memory and chancing your swap file being over written/purged, many root kits will remove themselves when the system is rebooted to avoid detection(why stay and leave evidence if I know I can hack it anytime I want). You are better off unplugging the network cable and making a exact duplicate of the file system/dumping memory if you can, and running some known good system binaries, such as process viewers to get a snap shot of what is running(screen captures are good to get, when applicable). If you can, have known good linked libraries available just incase it is corrupted on the current system.
Even still the output may or may not be 100% trustable, but it can still provide useful information. If you make duplicates and manage to dump pertinent data, I would still store the hard drive in a safe place after making duplicates for forensic reasons once shut down. Aside from that information being the most trust worthy, comparing it to changes or missing information of the running computer may help you determine what is on there.
P.S. Of course, if I were a h4x0r writing code, rather then just waiting for the system to shut down, I would test for a continual network connection and exit as soon as I lost access, I would clean the system evidence and exit. But I'm not, and I didn't even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Would writing it in assembly make it more reliable, considering how much easier it is to make a mistake that goes unnoticed?
Good post.
Basically, you need to evaluate what you want to do and why assembly is or is not relevant, and decide, is ease of understanding and reuse not as important as efficiency. I have a degree in Computer Science and work in Computer Security. I have found the Assembly/Operating Systems classes to be unbelievably useful in understanding exploit concepts and code, despite the fact that I rarely code in it. Could I still do my job without it? Certainly. Would I be as good at what I do? Probably. Does it make me a more efficient programmer? Yes. Will any one notice a difference with the latest billion core processor? Probably not. Is it easier to write a bug that goes unnoticed? Certainly. Does efficiency equal good programming? No.
Certain things will always require assembly knowledge: Gaming and Graphics that require speed; reverse engineering malware and AV/ad ware detection software to detect malware, avoiding system library calls that may be corrupted to prevent detection, portions of operating system kernels, device drivers/firmware, and devices that have simple circuitry for specialized, time sensitive functions like a robot programmed to quickly get me a beer from the fridge so I dont miss what Im watching on TV.
If you are writing a guidance program for a missile, a few less instructions could be the difference between life and death, where as if you are writing a heart monitor, readability and ease to debug problems may be more critical. The brain can live without blood for 4 6 minutes, a few less instructions will buy you nothing, and if it did, youd probably end up being a vegetable anyway. Maybe they should write that kind of stuff in Cobol to bring down health care costs.
Assembly will not make you a better programmer, like being versed in Impressionism will not make you a better artist. Like programming, you are either good at painting, or you arent, unless it is non-objective, which always sucks.
Provided you live in India.
Bingo! Why not put the blame where it belongs, on the parents. Not the parents of the psycho 19 year old, but on the 13 year olds parents for not making sure she knew the dangers of my space and or not knowing where she was.
It's sad these days that wire cutters are taking the place of a good ole shot gun.
Security Best Practices are a defacto standard regardless of what your risk assessment is. Go to sans top 20 and it tells you what are best practices without knowing your organization, whether it is a home network or a fortune 500 company. Your risk assessment allows you to evaluate how much, if any of a standard best practice you should apply, and if you need to go above an beyond. Now we are jumping to conclusions. If 10 feet of cable means a 10 foot crossover cable, have fun. If your 10 ft cable consists of computers hooked up to a switch with the only users being to stupid to comprehend what dsniff is, let alone use it, have fun. It sounds like it is a test network/box, that likely doesn't have anything relevant, probably and probably isn't NAT'd. Then who cares. Yeah, I know, if their client gets popped with a layer 3/4 sniffer their network is toast. Well, if it isn't natted and the password isn't anywhere else important, who cares. The only way you could get me to care is if you wanted me to assess the network, assets, policies, acceptable use and physical layout of the room for a substantial fee.