Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

November 3, 2004

Microsoft claims that Spoofing is not a security flaw

Filed under: Computer Related,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 6:51 PM

MS is claiming that the recent bug report in Bugtraq which explains in detail how to create a link which allows scamers to spoof a link so that it takes the user to a site different than the one shown in the taskbar is not a security flaw…

I mean come on, a flaw that allows hackers/crackers to fool people into going to a untrusted site when the browser is telling them thats is a trusted site is a serious security flaw in my books. Think about it, I can claim to be microsoft.com and tell people via email to download a new patch for their windows machines. Since the target is slightly computer savey they look at the link destination in the taskbar to confirm that its taking them to microsoft.com and then they happily download the ‘patch’ and proceed to install it thereby infecting their machine with my virus.

It does take some social eng but even the so called experts might fall for this one as who has the time to right click and verify each link before going to it? I don’t… but then again I use FireFox which doesn’t fall for this trick.. 🙂

MS seriously needs to think before making such statements…

Story URL: Here

– Suramya

November 2, 2004

New Method of posting website news

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 5:22 AM

Hi Everyone,
I have changed the way the Website News gets its information to make it more efficient. Now the site news on the Suramya.com main page pulls the information from my blog automatically.

The main advantage of this change is that I don’t have to edit the PHP pages to post a new item, I can just post an item on my blog and its posted on the site instantly. This means that you will see a lot more frequent news updates on the site.

More changes like this are in the works, along with a couple of new articles so make sure you revisit soon to check out the changes.

Thanks,
Suramya

Website now back to normal

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 1:05 AM

Hi,

DDOS on the site seems to be over so the access at the website is back to normal. Updated the site to fix the errors in pulling up the stats. So now everything seems to be working.

If you find something that doesn’t seem to be working let me know.

– Suramya

October 31, 2004

Vivek’s Birthday

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 6:55 PM

Its Vivek’s birthday today so we took him out in NY for a drink at this place called Tonic.

It was a lot of fun. Unfortunately everyone other than me had to work today for some reason (Wierd people) so we didn’t stay out that late. Surprisingly all of us were pretty sober when we got back.

We also stopped by in a club near 14th and 7th Ave for a drink before we got home. Most of the people there were dressed for halloween. Some of the costumes were very nice. Took some pics, planning on putting them on the site. Don’t know when thats going to happen.

Vivek’s back at work. I am planning on spending the day reading or updating my site.:)

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

Cya,
Suramya

October 29, 2004

Website Down due to a DDOS

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 1:39 AM

Hi Everyone,
These past few days have been pretty interesting.

Some idiot decided that it would be funny to do a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack on my IP range. So for the past 2 days all the IP’s we have are getting flooded with packets from about 100 – 150 hosts at a time. This obviously stopped our internet access.

At first we thought that it was an infected computer in our building network that was using up all the bandwidth (This has happened before) but then our ISP told me that it was our IP causing the problem so we started shuting down all the computers not being used. After about 2 hours of troubleshooting we found out that most of the traffic was incoming and wasn’t our fault. Our router was dropping all the packets.

So we called CNG Internet again and told them what was going on. Instead of helping us fix the problem the tech over there started yelling at us saying that we must have done something to be a target of a DDOS. Then the entire staff at CNG just disappeared, we tried calling them, sent them emails but got no response from them till today afternoon.

I noticed that the attack was focusing on our primary IP address so we started playing musical chairs with the IP addresses to give us net access (We kept routing the traffic to an IP different than the one under attack). This finally gave us network access back.

But I left my webserver offline for a while and used this time to replace the server with a new one that doesn’t crash so often. 🙂 I am slowly reinstalling all the software required on the server and until thats done some parts of the site won’t work.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

October 25, 2004

Nothing special done

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 2:46 AM

Did nothing special over the weekend. Did a little programming for home.
Rest of the time, I slept, watched Seven Day’s and finished the third season of Voyager.

Also read a book: The hunt for Ircarus. It was a good book most of the way but the ending was stupid. It made no sense at all.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

October 23, 2004

People throw away the nicest things.

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 12:01 AM

You have to admit it people are stupid.

Today my roommate found a box full of hardcover books in like new condition, a HP printer and some coat hangers lying outside our apartment. Apparently some joker was moving out and dumped all that into the garbage.

In the box there are 8 books by Tom Clancy, 1 Calvin and Hobbes comic and other misc authors. We are keeping 14 of the books and are donating the rest to the NJIT library. That way someone who appreciates books will get the chance to read them.

October 22, 2004

General Update

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 3:14 AM

Well like I had promised I forgot to update the blog over the past few days ’cause I got busy/lazy. The days have been a bit eventful.

Monday & Tuesday:

Fell sick so stayed at home and slept all day. It was nice to relax but the headace wasn’t that much fun.

Wednesday:

Got back to work and had to catchup on all the backlog of work, lucklily there wasn’t a lot of it but not that much fun. Gout out early and spent the evening watching Star Trek Voyager and Seven Days. Also upldoaed some new pics to the Photogallery.

Thursday:

Horrible weather today but still had to goto work. Worked with a cool javascript tab widget that simulates the windows tab appearence and layout. Having some problems with my grid when I use it but still a lot of fun.

David brought the puppies to work today which was fun, we got to play puppy catch. 🙂 Also got a IR controled car, spent a lot of time playing with it and got David mad ’cause I was draining the batteries so that he couldn’t play with it. If we had more of them we could have a race.

Spent the evening watching Voyager again, also played a bit with GIMP and did some image editing.

This is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

October 13, 2004

Office Fun

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 3:22 AM

Today when we went to do our weekly grocery shopping for snacks/drinks for work (We go through 12 Ltrs of Mountain Dew in 5 days) we found halloween costumes being sold at PathMark so we bought

  • Vampire Teeth
  • Spider Web (Went up around Surabhi’s Desk)
  • Clown Nose

While we were ‘testing’ the products Piet rembered that he always wanted to be a clown so he immediately staked a claim on the clown nose and posed for some nice pics (Posted below)



Piet hard at Work

David is doing some enhancements to the vampire teeth and those pics will be up as soon as the final product is available.

This is all for now. Will post more stuff later.

– Suramya

October 12, 2004

Webserver Down

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 1:00 PM

The server hosting my website went down on Sat morning and was down till Tuesday early morning due to HW problems. So my website/Blog were down for the duration.

Sorry for the problems caused.

– Suramya

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