Update: The date is the 3rd, not the 4th. Repeat, the date is Wednesday August 3rd for the meetup. Also, it is a 21+ venue only. My apologies to the younger twits.

Yup folks, it's that time of year again. That time when hoards of hackers, crackers, geeks, nerds and the odd FBI agent descend on Las Vegas for DefCon.

Which means it is also time for the annual SecurityTwits Las Vegas Meet-up!

Woot!

Before I get to the details, I want to send out a big thank you to Jack Daniel who put me in touch with Chris Nickerson who offered up the BSides LV venue as a place for us to gather. That just completely rocks.

I also want to thank everybody else who sent me notes offering to help. I may yet call on you

One final note, unless somebody wanders forward and wants to buy us all drinks, this is a cash bar situation. Because of that, there will not be a guest list/sign-up process. Just show up. If there is room, you'll get in, if there isn't, you won't That shouldn't really be a problem, but be warned.

Here are the details:

Date:

Wednesday August 3rd, 2011

Time:

Starts at 8:00 pm and goes till whenever

Location:

The Artisan Hotel
1501 West Sahara Avenue, Las Vegas, NV 89102

In the bar/pool area.

Important: The venue is a 21+ location. My apologies to those under 21.

I look forward to seeing everybody there. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below, reach me via twitter, or email me at kriggins@infosecramblings.com.

-Kevin

For the full disk encryption how-to, you will need to use blkid instead of vol_id and you can use the ext4 filesystem instead of ext3 if you like.

It also appears that a 300MB boot partition will work.

Some are having good luck and some are having problems. Again, a full update will be out some time this weekend. Probably a new how-to for 5 so we can leave the 4 how-to in place.

Kevin

InfoSec Ramblings has been a one man show since it's inception in 2008.

Side Note: Wow, almost three years. Just about forgot the blog birthday is coming up

Anyhoo, I have longed toyed with the idea of allowing/looking for folks to do guest posts on InfoSec Ramblings.

This is even better.

I am really excited to introduce you to Jill Van Zelfden, the first official contributor to InfoSec Ramblings. I met Jill through Infosec Mentors where we were paired together.

I'm not going to give much away about her other than to mention that she manages a group of infosec professionals for a managed systems security provider. I feel this gives her a great perspective which she can leverage to help us all learn more.

Her first post will be coming out this afternoon.

You can reach Jill at jill.vann@infosecramblings.com and she is @JillVann on Twitter.

Stayed tuned.

As always, comments are encouraged below or you can email me at kriggins@infosecramblings.com if you prefer.

If you are interested in getting our content regularly, go ahead and subscribe to the RSS feed. You can also subscribe to have posts emailed to you if you prefer.

-Kevin

Hey folks.

I just completed a pretty massive update of the Backtrack 4 Full Disk Encryption How-to.

Changes:

• Increased the boot partition to 200MB just to make it an even number .
• Removed all references to Backtrack Final.
• No longer creating a swap partition.
• Changed the root partition to mount as ext2 instead of ext3.
• Changed the way we configure the encrypted filesystem for booting.

Removing the swap partition and changing the root partition to mount as ext2 are to increase performance a bit and to reduce unnecessary writes to the drive to extend its life.

As always, let me know if you have any questions or comments, particularly if you notice any issue, typos or errors with the document.

-Kevin

On May 17th, 2008, I published the first Interesting Bits post on this blog. Since that time, I have pointed out 2400+ items that I thought you might find interesting.

As you may have noticed, the bits posts have been coming less and less frequently and with less and less commentary from me. There is a reason for that which really didn't gel until this past weekend. I was having a very nice diner with my friends Ron Woerner and Hal Pomeranz when, somehow, the topic of the bits posts being sporadic came up. It was at that point that I vocalized what had been at the back of my mind for a while.

The bits posts have become a chore and frankly detrimental to my own continued learning.

How's that you ask?

For the bits posts, I track and skim the posts of over 630 blogs in the information security space. That's a lot of blog posts. It has become a slog to just get through the list which means that I often can't devote enough time to really dig into some of the meatier content that exists out there. That is bad.

I don't know if you have ever experienced this, but saying something out loud that has been buzzing around in the back of your head can really crystallize things. Hence the reason for this post.

I will no longer be doing the Interesting Information Security Bits posts. I am also going to really trim down the number of blogs that I follow so I can concentrate on the content and not just getting through my queue.

However, do not lament the lack of the bits posts. Something new is taking its place, 'What to Read Wednesdays.'

What was that? I didn't hear you...oh...what's the difference between the bits posts and 'What to Read Wednesdays?'

Every Wednesday, I will point you to a blog that I think deserves your attention along with why I think so. As mentioned above, I follow quite a few and you might enjoy some of them too.

Some you will be familiar with, some you might not be.

Finally, I will still point out interesting things now and again. Hopefully, with a little more of my own thoughts included, and the @InfosecRamblins Twitter feed will continue to point to some things that I am reading.

To those who have appreciated the bits posts, thank you for reading. I apologize for taking something away from you. I hope you enjoy the new feature.

To those who were annoyed by the bits post, your welcome

Look for the first 'What to Read Wednesday' post next week.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments below or via email at kriggins@infosecramblings.com.

Kevin

PS - If you know of a blog you think deserves a place in the Wednesday posts, let me know that too.

It looks like everything went smoothly with the move to a new hosting platform. InfoSec Ramblings now lives on a VPS from Linode. BTW - I highly recommend Linode if you are looking for a VPS provider. Their support has been absolutely fabulous.

There may be hiccups as I mess around making some changes I couldn't do on a shared hosting platform.

For those interested, I will be posting how InfoSec Ramblings is setup under the covers in a post in the near future.

Kevin

Hi all.

InfoSec Ramblings is moving to a new home in the very near future, very near being  tomorrow, October 3rd, most likely. Hopefully the move will be transparent, but things do happen. If things look a little wonky around here for the next few day, you now know why.  I will let everybody know when the move is finished.

Kevin

Photo courtesy: idogcow

I have talked about Security BSides conferences before. They are a lot of fun and free. Free is good

Because they are small conferences, the atmosphere is very conducive to great conversations and interactions with your fellow information security inclined folk.

BSides Kansas City is this Friday the 17th. The line up looks good and, remember, it's FREE.

They do ask that you indicate if you are coming by either updating the page here or by emailing bsideskc@gmail.com. That helps plan for some things.

I'll be there. You should show up and introduce yourself I would love to meet some of my readers!

Kevin

Hi folks. As you may have noticed, there has not been an IISB post in the last week or so.

Unfortunately, this is going to continue for a little bit. I am taking a break from the IISB.

There is some other stuff that is taking some of my attention right and I also have some other posts I would like to get out of my head.

The news isn't all bad though. I am not going to leave the one or two of you that read the IISB in the lurch. As you may or may not know, all the links that I include in the IISB get tweeted by @InfosecRamblins, this site's Twitter account. That practice will continue. It is just the daily post with my few words of commentary that will be missing.

But wait, there's more. If you are a RSS fan, you can subscribe to my Delicious IISB feed here.

My apologies if the IISB has become a part of you routine. It will come back, I promise.

As always, if you have something to say,  feel free to leave a comment or email me at kriggins _at_ infosecramblings dot com.

-Kevin

It turns out that the install of R1 pretty much uses up close to 8GB, actually about 7, but who's counting. Thanks to Tim who left a comment to this effect.

Anyway, this doesn't leave enough room to do much of anything, including install future updates. For that reason I have increased the minimum drive size to 16 GB for R1 and change the lvcreate command to use '-l 100%FREE' which makes it a bit easier.

This does not affect the how-to that uses persistence.

Backtrack 4 - Bootable USB Thumb Drive with "Full" Disk Encryption

-Kevin