Interesting links for 11/25/2009

With all the busy-ness that this holiday weekend entails, I’m just going to leave you all with a bunch of links:

• TaoSecurity has a really interesting writeup about the ethics of Shodan, a “computer search engine” which provides some very interesting tools for people trying to secure their systems or launch attacks on arbitrary ones. At the very least, it’s interesting seeing how many Nortel switches, Checkpoint firewalls and other devices people are actually running with telnet open to the Internet at large.
• WWLTV in New Orleans ran a segment on how eastern European hackers are increasingly targeting American small businesses and stealing online banking credentials with malware. It’s nothing that you haven’t heard before, but it’s nice to see information security starting to get some mainstream attention, and people finally beginning to become aware of the real financial threat posed by bad information security. Hopefully banks will get the hint and start relying on multi-factor authentication for all business accounts.
• Last In – First Out has a nice post on cargo cult system administration. Matt from Standalone Sysadmin has an amusing anecdote about it from Tom Limoncelli in the comments.
• Icinga, the fork of Nagios, has finally released a demo of their new web interface. It’s snazzy in a “wow, some neat technology” way, but I don’t really see it being an improvement at all in the “this makes it easier to do my job” way. Ultimately, I’m not sure how to approach the project — the real fundamental problem with Nagios is that it’s, well, Nagios. I’m not sure how to fork it and make it better without utterly destroying compatibility. (This might not be a bad thing.)