Security+ - August 28th

So I have decided to go ahead and sign up for the 28th as my test date. I have 9 days to go over the 5 domains of the exam. I am purchasing selftest today and I will be going over Darril's book again as well as continuing through the reading Network Security Bible and reading the Security+ Mega guide. I will make a few more notes and post them. Hopefully this will be enough to get me over the hump. It has been ahwile since I went for a cert (February) and I honestly feel a little rusty. I don't plan on failing, and if I am not getting 85-90 percent on the test next Thursday, I might move it back a week, but I plan on killing this thing on the 28th!

This week: DROID+EXCHANGE=Please the CEO

Last week, my boss came to me and said her boss wants to use a DROID 2 as his work phone. Since we are moving to Verizon as our main carrier we should be able to get DROID 2s soon. This just leaves me with the task of testing our activesync profiles on it. I don't know much about exchange so this will be an interesting week. I will post my findings later.

WCNA, Packet Capture, and Ubuntu

I am in the middle of doing a network analysis at my job. Since this has never been done before and I need to do it for the IDS anyway I figured I'd use Wireshark. I have used it before but I will admit that my understanding is at script kiddie level. Well I found out something new a few days ago. Wireshark has problems capturing large files. I sat it on the edge of my network (reading traffic from a spare laptop plugged into my tap) during our peak times and it crashed, stating it had ran out of memory. This is a known issue. http://wiki.wireshark.org/KnownBugs/OutOfMemory I was a little pissed but I still need this information. So I decided to try to find a solution. TCPdump seems to be the answer for this. It was even recommended by Laura Chappell herself on her own twitter page.

I installed it on my ubuntu box. I still needed to find out a few basic commands and stuff. I found this site which has helped me get going. http://openmaniak.com/tcpdump.php It even mentions how to read the log with wireshark (which is what I plan to do). Make sure you run this program as sudo because it will not work otherwise. Packet life also has cheat sheets on both apps here: http://packetlife.net/library/cheat-sheets/

Which leads me to the second part of my post: WCNA. For those of you that don't know, there is a new certification based around Network Analysis and Wireshark. The Wireshark Certified Network Analyst is a new cert which to be honest looks pretty awesome. On several forums I am a member of as well as twitter, there has been talk of it. IT officially went live yesterday. I think I want it myself and it looks like a good 2011 project. How about you guys? What do you think? Here is a link for more information:

http://www.wiresharktraining.com/certification.html

Blackberry

So my boss came to me and said her phone wasn't working. After troubleshooting I determined that we needed to just wipe enterprise activate it again. I have wiped a device before and I have also enterprise activated the device, but I have never done both at the same time, nor have I actually administered a blackberry so this is a first.

The first thing I did was wipe the device. Most of the company is on 8520's so you can do a security wipe as it is described here: http://freeblackberryweb.com/how-to-reset-blackberry-curve-8520-to-factory-settings/

While that was going I logged onto the BES server (with a BES account, this is important!) and log into Blackberry Manager (we are using 4.1). I then clicked on the users tab and found her name. I then right clicked her account and clicked "Generate and Email activation password". The password as emailed to her and I retrieved it. I then went onto her device and went into options and selected Enterprise activation. I put in her email address and clicked activate now. Several days later, it finished lol. Testing the device involved looking at her calendar, doing a look up to see if it was hitting exchange, then finally sending her an email.

We are going to be doing a roll out of 25 new phones which will give me some much needed BES exposure so stay tuned!