Hacking: As American as Apple Cider

[Dave Aitel <dave () immunitysec com>]

Everyone's in a tizzy over this Ranum posting where he explains that 
hacking is not cool. But hacking is clearly cool. So I don't get it. I 
think if you take a strong enough position in any one direction on 
hacking you will be both profound and idiotic and I'm not sure where 
this posting lies.
http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb

Recently Immunity hired a top notch system administrator so we can 
afford to take a few more risks. I really do want to get our XML-RPC 
over Jabber server up. I'm going to put an OpenOffice server on one end 
of it and CANVAS will be able to connect to it and generate 
documentation automated by pyOpenOffice. That'll be the first step in 
having the CANVAS World Server where I build an open marketplace for 
exploit professionals to sell their time and enable them to remote help 
out wherever they want, without exposing their code itself to CANVAS. 
Theoretically you can drive a CANVAS connected to the CANVAS World 
Server from any language that can speak XML-RPC. You could write your 
exploits in Ruby, offer them over the CANVAS World Server, collect fifty 
bucks every time they get used by a client, and never have the client 
have to install anything. Or you could install your own CANVAS World 
Server and have your own documentation generator that does specific 
things just for you, and gets updated all in one place.

My Mac is supposed to arrive today. I get hundreds of people asking for 
CANVAS on the Mac every day. One thing about theoretically knowing about 
bugs before they go public is that you get a better feeling for how 
secure in general a system is. I call it "Noirtime". I.E. How much of 
Sinan Eren's time is finding a remote on this thing going to take. I 
think Mac OS X is around the level of Windows 2000. That's just my gut 
feeling.
http://zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Mac_community_must_wake_up_to_security/0,2000061744,39210762,00.htm

-dave
Obligatory RealityBas
02:34PM <bas> today i learned about algorithms, and sub algorithms, and how
         this relates to baking an apple pie/
02:40PM <bas> the PROBLEM was 'we need to produce an apple pie'
02:40PM <bas> for this we had PRIMITIVES
02:41PM <bas> such as: pour, bake, put in, etc.
02:41PM <bas> then from our PRIMITIVES
02:41PM <bas> we made an ALGORITHM
02:41PM <bas> that described the STEPS, in SEQUENCE and REPETITION
<dave> bas - how is our shellcode encryptor coming?