In 17 days, we fly from South Africa to our new home in Napier, New Zealand. As we’ve been going through the process of packing up, closing up, and saying goodbye, I’ve been reflecting that emigrating is a bit like how I’ve always imagined dying would be…
We can’t take our possessions with us, so we give them away to loved ones
We’ve elected not to ship our remaining possessions (those which escaped the fire in March ’07) across the world, but rather to give the majority of our “stuff” away. We’re traveling with just what we can fit in our suitcases. Like dying, there’s a whole bunch of “stuff” which we simply can’t take with us, so we’ve been able to give it away to friends and family – appliances, utensils, equipment, etc. We hope that when use this “stuff”, they’ll think of us and remember us. Read the rest of this entry »
I didn’t realize that some of my friends hadn’t heard about the fire which destroyed our boarding house (and our personal flat) in March 2007. Here are the photos. They’re also on my Facebook profile.
Let me highlight a few choice ones…
Our insurance did pay out, which is one of the reasons it’s quite easy to immigrate to New Zealand now.. we don’t have many of the personal possessions which might have kept us back.
Thanks to all the folks I met at the DunLUG meeting last night.. especially to Jack for the pizzas, Stewart for the beer, and Katinka for the fresh eggs for breakfast this morning ! You’re a sociable, rowdy, fun bunch, and it was a very enjoyable, geeky evening.
We did some wireless hacking, cracking a WEP key in 2 minutes and 11 seconds, as well as exploring how to annoy your colleagues with multiple deauthentication attacks, and why not to upgrade your router via wireless. I’ve put the presentation slides online here.
I also showed off twitter and twittervision, since twitterific kept popping up in the middle of my presentation 
Jack and Tim, here’s the post we discussed about Dune2 for Linux. The original Dune2 is also available for free now.
As I mentioned, we’re planning to immigrate to New Zealand to start a family, and I’m exploring employment options in the Linux / Open Source IT sector.. if you’re aware of any opportunities, I’d appreciate you assisting in my “kiwification”, by distributing my CV far and wide
Finally, thanks most of all to Bob Brown, his wife Linda, and their adorable 18-month old guru Linus, for hosting us overnight. It was a treat!
Thank you to all you Aucklanders who turned up for my humble presentation last night. I presented a few slides on the theory of wireless cracking, and then we jumped right into a practical demonstration. We failed to crack a WEP key with 400,000 IVs the traditional way (I suspect the firmware outsmarted us), but succeeded using PTW to crack WEP ARP data with 45,000 packets.
We moved onto a wordlist attack on a WPA network, which worked exactly as expected, kicking clients off the network with deauthentication injections, and snagging their WPA handshakes. It took less than a second to wordlist the WPA password, but the wordlist was rigged with only about 8 entries, one of which was correct 
We finished off the evening by exploring OpenWRT, and flashing my WRT54GL back to Linksys firmware, and then back to OpenWRT again.
It was great to meet you all, and it’s my observation that Linux communities around the world share common traits – friendliness, geekiness (the good kind), and an excitement for technology
I’ve put the slides for last night’s presentation here
Below is a list of links for some of the software we discussed last night:
- OpenWRT (Alternative Open Source Router Firmware)
- BackTrack2 (Forensic Analysis Live CD)
- Aircrack-ng (Suite of wireless hacking tools)
- HostAP (Run a software access point with your Prism2 card)
- IPTables “Recent” (Glen Ogilvie introduced us to this – implements some “temporary blacklisting” functions in iptables rules without any additional software)
I’m excited to be attending the WellyLUG ([[Wellington]] [[Linux Users Group]]) meeting on 20 Aug 2007. As discussed this morning on the LUG, I’ll be giving a presentation on penetrating WEP / WPA wireless networks, how to avoid said penetration with an open source, flashed, [[WRT54GL]], and how to integrate your [[Squid Cache]] with [[Active Directory]] to provide detailed user activity logs.
Please post any comments or requests here
