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HBGary planned to "blow the balls off Nmap"
- noonespecial 16y agoI am deeply sceptical of any technology where the builders think up the name first and then try to find a reason it should be called that. It just seems too much like stuff I did when I was 12.
- bl4k 16y agoor people who register a domain name first and then do nothing with it
- slapshot 16y agoHow do you feel about GNU?
- mahmud 16y agoGNU is not a technology, it's a movement. And to get all Marxist up on this joint, the building blocks for a new movement is created long before the leader is conscious of the need for one; the status-quo automatically provides an anti- checklist to motivate mobilization. One only has to scream "down with the government!" in a poor neighborhood to prove this; no further deliberation is needed, as the audience comes equipped with its own reasons to revolt.
- pyre 16y agoMy impression is that this part of the email sounds like some business/sales guy that has a great idea where the technical parts are 'easy' and can be 'implemented by monkeys.' "I have a great idea, let's make a product that can make us a lot of money. We'll work out the details later, that's the easy part."
- tzs 16y agoIt doesn't say they came up with the name first.
- sorbus 16y ago"I would like to call it "B.E.S.T. Scanner" so people kind of get stuck calling it "the best scanner". We can figure out what BEST means later."
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- Vivtek 16y agoThis characterizes his entire attitude better than anything I've seen so far: "too much like stuff I did when I was 12". That, and some of my early Web customers in the 90's. I cringe just to read this stuff.
- chopsueyar 16y agowhere the builders think up the name first and then try to find a reason it should be called that How about federal legislation?
- nikcub 16y agoI was reading this and thinking 'I am pretty sure nmap already does this', and as the first reply confirms, it does: http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2011/q1/768 http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2011/q1/768 all these leaked emails just remind me why I left the netsec industry so long ago Just reading this email and knowing these types of people I already know how this came about: 1. random surfing on the web and finds out about LFSR 2. thinks 'this would be awesome for a port scanner' 3. sends email with 'lets do something like nmap but better and faster using this thing i just read about on reddit' 4. 'i done my bit, GO TEAM!' 5. add 'software architect' to email signature
- tptacek 16y ago"There's this thing called an LFSR; it's math-y, but very cool" in a 2009 message from someone pretty well plugged-in to the vulnerability research scene tells you a lot about where we stand with crypto vuln research.
- Natsu 16y agoI wonder what he'll write when he discovers the Mersenne twister?
- weinzierl 16y agoIn reference to what he want's you can't compare a LFSR with a Mersenne twister. His goal is not primarily to produce a good pseudo random number (->Mersenne twister) but to enumerate enumerate all IPs of net range without repetition an. When you wand to be fast you want to avoid repetition.
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- barrkel 16y agoI think that's slightly unfair; Greg's expertise isn't in crypto, but in Windows NT kernel internals.
- olalonde 16y ago> I would like to call it "B.E.S.T. Scanner" so people kind of get stuck calling it "the best scanner". We can figure out what BEST means later. Epic.
- icarus_drowning 16y agoCertainly blew my balls off.
- electromagnetic 16y agoAre you sure it didn't just cause them to shrink to unrecognisable size through its ultimate suckitude?
- defen 16y agoBall Erupting Scanner Technology
- tomelders 16y agoI almost bust a nut loling out loud at that.
- jarin 16y agoMental note: come up with a new site "B.E.S.T. Social Network"
- smokestack 16y agoYou just did! Time to send it off to the developers. Your work here is done.
- jarin 16y agoMan, I didn't realize being an Idea Guy was so easy! I might have to consider a career change…
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- tptacek 16y agoYeah so these are ideas that date back to the '90s, so it is genuinely weird to see Hoglund talking about them in 2009. But for whatever it's worth: if ever a tool needed its balls blown off, it's nmap. I have nothing but respect for Fyodor, but that space badly needs real competition. There is, for what it's worth, very little reason why the best scanner need be written in C. Scanners aren't even I/O bound in their most common use case; they're timer-bound.
- electrum 16y ago> There is, for what it's worth, very little reason why the best scanner need be written in C. What about all the packet manipulation code? Bit twiddling tends to be difficult in other languages.
- tptacek 16y agoBit twiddling is much easier in other languages than in C. And virtually every mainstream language has a pcap binding for the packet reading and injection (although a good straight-socket scanner could still give nmap a run for its money).
- rwmj 16y agoI give you https://code.google.com/p/bitstring/ https://code.google.com/p/bitstring/
- defen 16y agoWhat kind of things are wrong with nmap (I've never used it). Fundamentally flawed, poorly implemented, neglected project, documentation, etc?
- tptacek 16y agoNmap isn't fundamentally flawed. It's ambitious and sprawling in ways that detract from its basic purpose. It wants to be a general-purpose network surveying tool, but is constrained to the UX of a port scanner. Someone else should write the best possible port scanner and free nmap up to be the giant network profiling system it clearly wants to be.
- Getahobby 16y agoPlease, please, please STOP referring to networks as class a, b, c, etc. The 1980s called, they want their networking jargon back.
- nostromo 16y agoI doubt HBGary reads HN. And if he does, it's only for reconnaissance missions.
- Getahobby 16y agoApparently there are people I insulted that still use that terminology. It really makes you sound, umm, managerial and pointy haired when you use those.
- jarin 16y agoWhat are you talking about? It is a critical part of Layer 3 of the OSI Model!!
- bingaman 16y agoWhat is the correct terminology?
- jf 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing
- bdhe 16y agoCould you enlighten me? What is a better way to refer to /24 /16 /8 networks?
- tedunangst 16y ago/16 obviously. Say it aloud a few times and just feel how it flows off the tongue. "slash sixteen, slash sixteen." So much smoother than getting tongue tied saying "class B" out loud...
- pyre 16y ago> It should be FAST AS SHIT Last I checked, fecal motility was pretty low. Maybe he should get that checked out... [update] http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2011/q1/771 http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2011/q1/771 : > I've already had my brain cranking on what > elite networking code I could now write in > the kernel and I've always wanted to write > a badass portscanner too. And now he can program those both over wifi with his laptop while in his tree fort with the "no parents allowed" sign hung off the side. Afterwards he can rescue his girlfriend from ninjas with is excellent karate skills... Both of those emails seriously boggle my mind...
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- tptacek 16y agoEverything about it is mindboggling; if you're going to put effort into building something in a place as inhospitable as the kernel, a portscanner? Who's going to pay for that?
- jrockway 16y agoThe harder it is to write an application, the better the application must be. Putting stuff in the kernel means it will be harder to get right, so clearly the app will be better. A security hole in the kernel is a small price to pay for a 0% speed increase.
- alexgartrell 16y agoSystem calls are expensive for a variety of reasons (including, but not limited to, the cost of extra data copies and the cost of switching security "rings"). For system-call heavy applications (in particular, networked services), moving things into the kernel provide huge speed benefits. [0] [1] You are right that it's generally a stupid choice to make, but you're dead wrong in assuming that it's got no benefit at all. [0] http://read.cs.ucla.edu/click/click http://read.cs.ucla.edu/click/click [1] http://www.research.ibm.com/afpa/ http://www.research.ibm.com/afpa/ "All three components are implemented in the operating system kernel for maximum efficiency"
- chipsy 16y agoMost programmers I know get the "I just discovered a silver bullet, damn I'm awesome" nonsense schooled out of them somewhere between entering college to a few years after, but apparently HBGary is an entire organization built on the exception.
- noonespecial 16y agoYeah, I remember the day when my default action on thinking up an "awesome game-changing idea" became immediately looking up who had already tried it and why it didn't work. Older, sadder, wiser. It gets better, eventually you think of an idea that some tried that did work and feel a little better.
- blhack 16y agoWhat's terrifying about this is that this company somehow scored a contract with the FBI. How many other HBGary Federals are there out there?
- tptacek 16y agoWhy is wanting to compete with nmap a terrifying attribute of an FBI contractor? Technology within the FBI pretty much begins and ends with EnCase.
- kovar 16y agoWhile the FBI isn't known for being on the technical bleeding edge, and used to bleed a lot for technical screwups, the RCFL's - Regional Computer Forensics Labs - are very much out there on the leading edge of computer forensics technology. --- There are some amazing technical innovations in EnCase and the products built on it. Unfortunately, the company has management issues that result in some very poor decisions in many areas, including deployment of software development resources.
- m0nastic 16y agoI've been using EnCase for about a decade (including a large portion of that working with the FBI), and I honestly can't think of any amazing technical innovations. The support for reading .pst files? The fact that it can finally handle filesystems besides FAT32 and NTFS? Certainly not it's stability. EnCase is very good at what it was designed for, which is basically an idiot-proof way for an investigator to comb through a hard drive looking for search terms. I would argue that technically EnCase isn't even as good as FTK, which is something that pretty much every third-party evaluation of the two products has shown. I won't disagree that there are some smart folks working at the FBI, and that's not even counting the ones who spend all their time developing "zoom and enhance" software for photo analysis.
- arctangent 16y agoOne who immediately springs to mind is Dennis Montgomery. Here is a link that is NSFW: http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-man-who-conned-the-pentagon-dennis-montgomery/ http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-man-who-conned-the-penta... In all of these cases one of the main problems seems to be that non-technical people have too much decision making power in technical areas. (I'm not going to address this huge problem here.) I've lost count of the number of times I've been in a meeting listening to someone talk about something like the "Linear Feedback Shift Register" mentioned in the article. Unfortunately, technology seems like magic (or snake oil) to people who don't know anything about it...
- wheels 16y agoIt's lame that this is on HN. Basically it's just finger pointing and laughing at someone for being stupid on the internet (in a private mail, it seems).
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- jarin 16y agoNot being stupid on the Internet could be considered relevant for Internet entrepreneurs
- desigooner 16y agoIs this a case of greed and a road to fast fame?! This coming out from someone as respected (at least in the past) and renowned researcher like Hoglund doesn't give a ringing endorsement to the industry. Was he that desperate for fame and fortune?!
- svag 16y agoI think a similar effect with LFSR you can have with a De Bruijn sequence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence.
- ajl2011 16y agoWait until they figure out the mighty powers of rc4 and other shitty stream ciphers beware... once the info$ec experts start skimming wikipedia more for probability distributions and cryptography we are doomed! doomed!
- s00pcan 16y ago"We can find source code for such things on the net to help us write it. It's just a few lines of code."
- some1else 16y agoSo this is really what all the commercially oriented security researches are like? It seems that the people I truly consider hackers rather commit a patch.
- sucuri2 16y agoEveryone says stupid things on emails. Specially on PRIVATE emails. It is funny, sounds stupid what he is saying, but how many stupid things we say on email, IM etc on a daily basis? Don't judge just because of it...
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