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The Vibrance Of The Internet Would Wither Away Starting With SOPA Passes As Law; The Day The Internet Ceases To Exist Is When More Countries Begin To Form Their Own National Intranets

Jan 9, 12 1:42 PM
Turkey internet ban protest 2011

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I’ve a feeling that when SOPA becomes law, it encourages not only the United States but many other countries to eventually form each own national Intranet.  Consequently, the Internet that we know so well at this point in time will cease to exist.  Say what?

Wait, let me backtrack a bit to clarify something so you can see where I’m going with this.  So, how come SOPA will encourage the United States and other countries to form each own national Intranet?  SOPA is a bill which disrespects the vibrance of the Internet.  It encourages the breaking up of the Internet since it implies the United States would easily overlook mistakes on shutting down websites of the world by doing it fast and effective at the DNS level.  Nonetheless, we know that even though United Sates can shut down websites of the world through DNS under SOPA, the websites that are being targeted by SOPA can still easily adopt DNS servers outside of the United States and effectively avoid SOPA effect altogether.  Instead of solving problems of piracy, SOPA encourages nations of the world to form their own SOPA.  By forming their own SOPA, each nation of the world will be able to disrupt foreign websites that are doing business within their nation.  As SOPA leads the way to disrespect the vibrance of the Internet, I think more rules and regulations might follow and lead to a point where each nation of the world will have their own national Intranet.

The day the Internet ceases to exist is when more countries begin to form their own national Intranets.  When the Internet ceases to exist, each nation with their own Intranet can be more effective in regulating, tracking, filtering, firewall-ing, and managing the networks within a nation.  What Intranet does is to prevent people from being able to surf for information, knowledge, educational materials, shopping online, and communicating with others from foreign countries other than the nation itself.  E-commerce of today would cease to be the same.  Intranet would only encourage the exchanges of businesses and consumers within a nation only (i.e., preventing the exchanges of businesses and consumers outside the Intranet), because it will not be effective in firewall-ing people if it cannot prevent people from surfing for whatever that are beyond the scope of the Intranet.  I think it’s critical for SOPA to be stopped at all cost, or else the vibrance of the Internet would wither away starting with SOPA passes as law.

What worse is that only the innocent computer users might be affected by a national Intranet.  Technological savvy users might be able to use alternative technology or hack the national Intranet so they can circumvent the restrictions of a national Intranet.  This might prove the point that an Intranet is anti-business, anti-consumer, anti-innovation, and anti-knowledge-exchange (i.e., educational materials to be limitedly shared only within a nation, consequently preventing the people of the world to exchange educational materials with each other.)  I do feel the openness of the Internet must be protected at all cost, or else the vibrance of the Internet would cease to exist and might be too hard to be revived by then!

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Pragmatic Security Tips To Protect Routers And Networks In 2012 And Beyond

Jan 4, 12 5:43 PM

Some rights reserved by gcg2009 (Creative Commons License - Attribution 2.0 Generic) from Flickr.com

Tips to how to secure your router and network in 2012 and beyond.  These tips are pragmatic, and so it’s most likely that you may be able to apply these tips onto most routers and network setups.  Unfortunately, even though these tips are pragmatic in details, sometimes the tips here won’t be any useful for you if you have older routers or your network setups are too unique and special.  Let us get on with the tips.

In no particular order, the tips to secure your routers and networks are:

  • Change router’s default password for the administrator username/login.  Make sure the new password is a lot harder than the default password.
  • Change router’s default passphrase for your wireless network.  Make sure the passphrase is strong enough.  It’s best to throw in at least 50 plus characters string.  Also, don’t forget to include capitalization letters, numbers, and special characters (i.e. signs) in your 50 plus characters string passphrase.
  • Make sure to disable UPnP feature within your router.  I’ve heard hackers can exploit this feature.  To be safe than sorry, I guess you should turn this feature off if you don’t have the need for it.
  • Make sure your router’s firewall is turning on and filtering inbound and outbound traffics.
  • Make sure your router has MAC address filtering turns on and allowing only Mac addresses of machines on the list to access network.  Of course, you have to know hackers can still spoof MAC addresses easily, therefore this is not 100% hacker proof.
  • Disable DHCP feature or limit the DHCP IP address range to amount to how many physical machines you have and want to connect to your network using DHCP protocol (DHCP IP addresses).  This way, if an undesirable person wants to use your network, he or she might not be able to get a lease of DHCP IP address from DHCP server which runs on your router, therefore he or she cannot use DHCP IP address to access your network.  Keep in mind that he or she can just assign himself or herself a local static IP address and connect to your network anyway.  Nonetheless, this method might prevent script kiddies from acquiring DHCP IP address from using hacker tools.  Still, there is no guaranteed DHCP might prevent hackers from just running another script which automatically demands a static local IP address.  If you turn off DHCP, you might prevent hackers to exploit DHCP weakness/exploits, and so you can disregard DHCP exploits for your router.  Turning off DHCP also encourages you to enter a local static IP address for each computer’s network configuration, therefore you might prevent a specific computer from automatically connect to your router; in a way this method helps preventing a specific computer of yours from automatically connecting to a fake access point, because hackers can use a special router which can emit an even more powerful wireless signal, overwhelming your wireless router’s signal and encouraging a computer to connect to the wrong/rouge access point which hackers have controlled of (i.e., man in the middle attacks).
  • Disable Wi-Fi Protected Setup feature, because this feature is weak against hackers’ brute force attack which exploits a weak secure PIN authentication process (i.e., this feature reveals too much information on PIN authentication algorithm while authenticating a device).  Nonetheless, this feature might be patched by the routers’ makers in the near future, but to be safe than sorry it’s best to disable it until you really have the need to use it and it has been patched.
  • Enable WLAN Partition if you are paranoid about your network security.  This feature prevents wireless devices to communicate with each other.  Why is this feature useful in securing your network?  Imagine if a hacker can insert himself in your network with a wireless device, he or she might not be able to hack another wireless device of yours if the network disallows the communication between wireless devices.  Unfortunately, this feature might prevent you from sharing files and data between your wireless devices.  One example is iTunes home sharing might not work on wireless mac laptops.  Therefore, if you need to have your wireless devices to talk to each other, then you should not enable this feature.  Otherwise, it’s an awesome feature for enhancing your network security.  Let not forget, if an elite hacker has hacked into your network, he or she might also have control of your router, therefore this feature in the end might be useless if a hacker can change the router’s settings at will.
  • Turning on several log features within your router.  Logs will help you trace back to strange network traffics, requests and errors.  Perhaps, logs can even tell you that you’re getting hacked.  Of course, elite hackers might have way to not trigger your router to log their hacking activities.  Therefore, this feature is just one more layer/tool for you to protect yourself against hackers.  This feature might slow down your router though, because it’s logging network traffics.  So, if your router isn’t equipped to log heavy network traffics, then you should turn this feature off.  It’s all depend on a network situation and the capability of your router really.
  • Enable Access Control.  This feature is useful only if your router is able to allow you to add two types of rules that matter most, and these two types of rules should be made available at the same time, so one rule is enhancing the other rule in security measures.  First rule should be disallowing all other machines to connect to your network.  Second rule should be allowing only the machines with the IP addresses listed in Access Control’s IP table to connect to your router/network.  Of course, you should note that this feature will enable a default blocking feature which might prevent your machines to access dangerous websites and so on, therefore some websites you might want to access will not be accessible.  Also, your router may allow you to add additional websites to be blocked, consequently enhancing the security measure for Access Control feature.  Some routers even go as far as allowing Access Control feature to block certain network ports, but I don’t think this feature is necessary.  After all, your router’s firewall should be blocking all incoming requests and ports.
  • If your router isn’t connecting to your ISP through DHCP protocol, then you should add a trusted but more secure DNS IP addresses of third-party/trusted/secure DNS providers.  One good example would be DNS IP addresses of Google Public DNS service.  Another good example would be DNS IP addresses of OpenDNS.
  • Update your router’s firmware to the latest firmware.  This way you can prevent hackers from using known firmware exploitations that specifically target your router’s firmware.
  • Reboot your router sometimes or add a schedule reboot for your router if your router has this capability.  This way you can actually clear up the router cache and might prevent your router from storing what hackers have uploaded to your router.  I don’t think that it’s yet possible for hackers to be able to permanently make change to your router in regarding to what the router could store and so on.  Therefore, when you reboot your router, your router clears up the cache in its memory and so everything within your router should work as how it was.  Reboot a router can be done in two way.  One is to do a soft reboot which requires you to log into your router’s administration panel and reboot it this way.  The other way is just to pull the electrical adapter which powers your router off the electrical outlet, forcing the router to reboot and reconnect to your ISP.
  • You might also want to disable the SSID broadcast.  When you disable this feature, your machines might not be able to connect to your router using DHCP protocol.  Nonetheless, as long you know how to connect to your router manually using static local IP addresses, then you should be fine.  Of course, you have to remember your router’s SSID name and enter the router SSID onto your machines correctly before your machines can talk to your router.
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Cannot Install Guest Additions For VirtualBox 4.1.2? Having d3d9.dll Error? What’s The Deal With Virtualizing Windows 7 Inside VirtualBox On Linux?

Dec 9, 11 6:34 AM
English: Original source file of the “About Vi...

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Some of us love to virtualize Windows 7 inside a host, because we think we need the host to be as secure as it could be and the virtualization would be a sort of sandbox to add one extra layer of security for the virtual machine.  Of course, the security of the sandbox would give a false sense of security for whoever runs it if he or she isn’t keen on securing the virtual machine also.  Some hackers could be so smart and create a hack which allows him or her to leap from the virtual environment into the host environment.  Plus, what the use for a virtual machine if it isn’t secure enough to be used, right?  I think you get the gist.

Anyhow, the idea for those who want to virtualize Windows 7 inside VirtualBox 4.1.2 could hit a snag if they also want to run Guest Additions for Windows 7 virtual machine.  How do I know this?  I tried to install Guest Additions the normal way by clicking on Device > Install Guest Additions, but this method failed me as it could not find Guest Additions anywhere.  I guess for an unknown reason, VirtualBox 4.1.2 failed to include Guest Additions somehow.  Of course, this might not happen to everyone, but it might be just me.  Nonetheless, if you are one of those people who experiences this exact situation, don’t sweat.  Just go to download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.1.2/, and then you need to download VBoxGuestAdditions_4.1.2.iso.  Get back to VirtualBox window, click on the Windows 7 virtual machine, click on Settings > Storage, and make sure you add VBoxGuestAdditions_4.1.2.iso as virtual CD/DVD disk file.  It helps if you remember where you had saved your VBoxGuestAdditions_4.1.2.iso on the host machine.

During the installation of your Guest Additions for Windows 7 virtual machine inside VirtualBox on a host machine, you might hit another snag where an error would complain that it could not find or open d3d9.dll file.  It might be the permission for d3d9.dll file is too strict.  You need to allow write permission for d3d9.dll file before Guest Additions could finish the installation.  So, when you see d3d9.dll error, don’t exit the Guest Additions installer, but make sure you are inside your Windows 7 virtual machine, go to Windows\System32\ and search for d3d9.dll file, right click on it and choose Properties, click on Security tab, and then from here you need to allow write permission for all users.  Get back to Guest Additions installer and try to finish installing the Guest Additions.  When done installing Guest Additions, don’t forget to remove write permission for d3d9.dll file for all users so this file can once again be secure as before.

In conclusion, Windows 7 virtual machine inside VirtualBox on a Linux host is ideal for security.  Nonetheless, if he or she forgets to secure Windows 7 virtual machine, he or she is not that secure in term of allowing Windows 7 virtual machine to be hacked easily.  If he or she is lazy, it’s best to use NAT network, but it’s always better to use Bridge network as it’s much more flexible.  NAT network hides the virtual machine inside a host’s network (i.e., not using the router’s DHCP or manual IPs), therefore one could say as long the host has a strong firewall, the virtual machine too could be protected by the same firewall.  Without the installation of Guest Additions, he or she could not open Windows 7 virtual machine in fullscreen mode, and so don’t forget to do this.

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