Weekend.

The weekend that just went past was pretty enjoyable. I went back to school on Saturday to attend the CompTIA Security+ Certification course (the second installment in a series of 10 sessions, may I add). It’s pretty interesting to be playing around with the Windows Server 2003 (even though it was only on a virtual machine), as I learned about all things security-related. It’s actually quite a shame for me to claim that I came out from SOC yet I didn’t know all those things about computer security. Sure I did a course on security back in university, but if you asked me to set up the security perimeters of a server I probably would tell you I didn’t know how to do it. Now that I get the chance to learn, it’s definitely a good thing.

And in case you don’t have any idea about how insecure our computers are in terms of network communication, check this out: (if you already knew about this, pardon me for trying to show off something that you think probably the whole world knows)

(Click on the image for a bigger picture)

This is the network monitor on Windows Server 2003, with FTP being installed as one of the available services. If you take a look at lines number 29, 30 (the one being highlighted in blue) and 32, you’ll notice that if you do not apply IPSec (a security feature) on the channel communication pathway, everything that you communicate with the server is being sent on plaintext, meaning that your username and your password are all visible (in this case, the username is “myuser” and password is “password1” – though I entered a wrong username/password combination, just to illustrate this point about it being plaintext). I always had the idea that FTP communication isn’t exactly safe, but I didn’t know it was that unsafe.

Spent the whole of yesterday playing on my Wii. Generally my verdict about the Wii so far is that most of the games are silly in nature, and are generally meant for a group of people having a bit of mindless fun. I think it’s good once in a while to just put aside the frustrations that I’m having for my work and engage in some “excuse brain” activities.

My eyes are hurting now – I wonder if I’m getting old, or is it because the air in Hong Kong is so bad that I’m having these frequent eye irritations. Hmm.

Going for my security class later. Hopefully it’ll be fun.