Category: Techspeak

Posted on

I'm a GCFE! (GIAC Certified Forensic Examiner)

Today I passed the GCFE exam, making me GIAC Certified Forensic Examiner number 490. From the GIAC website,

The GCFE certification is for professionals working or interested in the information security, legal and law enforcement industries with a need to understand computer forensic analysis. The certification focuses on core skills required to collect and analyze data from Windows computer systems.
The GCFE certifies that candidates have the knowledge, skills, and ability to conduct typical incident investigations including e-Discovery, forensic analysis and reporting, evidence acquisition, browser forensics and tracing user and application activities on Windows systems.

Rock on! Oddly enough, as I was walking out the door to take the exam, we got a support request from a client who just located a stolen laptop and needs us to do some forensics on it to find out where it’s been. Great timing.

Posted on

When You're Going Through Hell…

Winston Churchill said “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” Brilliant man, he was. We’ve been going through email hell. Today, it continued. For some reason, our main ticketing system, which runs the Postfix mail server, decided that it had never heard of our main [email protected] email address. A simple restart of the mail server was all that was needed to fix this problem, but given that no changes have been made to this system in several days, it does give me pause as to why this problem occurred right now.
Personally, I blame Mercury.

Posted on

The Quest for a SIM Card

Not having Internet data on my iPhone kinda bites. I’ve got GPS, and the ability to take pictures and videos and compose emails of things that I see and experience… and no way to use them unless there’s open WiFi. Unfortunately, a lot of folks around here actually lock down their networks (good for them, bad for the casual traveler in search of a few kilobytes of data to find out where the heck he happens to be).
The first step was finding a cell phone store. Despite what I’ve heard about the crime rate in Brazil, everyone on the street seems pretty comfortable and casual so I figured I’d be fine as long as I paid attention and didn’t wander down the wrong street. If you’re reading this, I didn’t.
I found one store that was closed, stopped two women on the street and asked if they could direct me to another one (which was just a couple of doors away). Although the store does carry GSM phones and SIMs, and has a pre-paid plan with unlimited texting, Facebook, and Twitter, my iPhone didn’t work with their SIM. It looks like I forgot to unlock it after jailbreaking it this last time around. Oops! So I just followed these handy instructions to unlock the phone again. Of course, I can’t test this until I get another SIM card when my host returns and I can borrow his Nokia to verify.
Yup, you can take the tech-geek out of the country, but you can’t take the… wait, that’s now how it goes.