Ten-thousands Belgian credit cards were blocked because hackers copied cardnumbers. This was published by Febelfin (the Federation of the Belgian finance sector) on tuesday October 20th 2009. It was stated that the criminals copied the numbers after they gained access to computer files. The hackers did not succeed in retrieving the pincodes.
I find it very strange that hackers were able to retrieve creditcard numbers from computer files. Specifically since PCI puts great restrictions on storing this stuff:
- PCI 3.1 – Keep cardholder data storage to a minimum
- PCI 3.2 – Do not store sensitive authentication data after authorization
- PCI 3.4 – Render PAN (PAN == cc-number), at minimum unreadable anywhere it is stored by using one of the following: one-way hash, truncation, strong cryptography with associated key-management processes and procedures
- PCI 3.4.1 – If dis encryption is used rather then file or database encryption, logical access must be managed independently of native OS access control
There are other requirements but the above give a good idea of the caution you must take when deciding to store this data. The full list of requirements can be downloaded from https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_dss_download.html
Personally, I think these news items should contain more information, or should be evaluated somewhere so people can learn from the mistakes made by others. By being open on the causes of these problems people can easily prevent the holes that others left open. I know, this will probably not happen any time soon… 
Link to original story: http://www.elsevier.nl/web/Nieuws/Internet-Gadgets/248802/Duizenden-creditcards-geblokkeerd-na-aanval-hackers.htm#
I use racktables to keep track of our devices and ip space. To prevent duplicate work and differences in naming I wrote (as all sysadmins 
) a script to export a rancid config file from Racktables. To be able to enable or disable configuration backup via Rancid, I created a Dictionary ‘chapter’ called Rancid, with a Yes and No option. I added this Dictionary as an Attribute and mapped this to the Firewall, Router and Switch objects.
Now I can set the Rancid backup from the properties of the object. To create the Rancid config file I created the following script:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use DBI;
$db="racktables";
$host="localhost";
$user="XXXX";
$passwd="XXXX";
$connectinfo="dbi:mysql:$db;$host";
$filename="racktables-rancid-devices.txt";
$dbh = DBI->connect($connectinfo,$user,$passwd);
$query = "select inet_ntoa(IPBonds.ip), RackObject.name from RackObject JOIN AttributeValue JOIN IPBonds ON RackObject.id=AttributeValue.object_id AND AttributeValue.object_id=IPBonds.object_id WHERE AttributeValue.attr_id=10003 AND AttributeValue.uint_value=50030 group by RackObject.name";
open FILE, ">", "$filename" or die $!;
$sth=$dbh->prepare($query);
$sth->execute();
$sth->bind_columns(\$IP, \$Name);
while($sth->fetch()) {
print FILE "# $Name \n$IP:cisco:up\n";
}
$sth->finish();
$dbh->disconnect;
This script creates the rancid ‘router.db’ configuration format. I created a keypair and used ssh-agent to be able to run the following script to copy over the file to our rancid server.
#!/bin/sh
/home/rancid/export-rancid.pl
scp racktables-rancid-devices.txt rancidserver:.
ssh rancidserver 'cp router-manual.db router.db'
ssh rancidserver 'cat racktables-rancid-devices.txt >> router.db'
ssh rancidserver 'mv router.db /usr/local/rancid/var/networking/router.db'
I encountered the an error while experimenting with the OpenNebula (ONE) EC2 interface. I tried to upload an image file, to a OpenNebula host running CentOS 5.3 with ONE 1.3.8. After a couple of seconds the command exited with the following error:
[rogierm@cloudtest3 ~]$ econe-upload /home/rogierm/centos5.img
image /home/rogierm/centos5.img
/usr/local/one/lib/ruby/econe/EC2QueryClient.rb:164:in `http_post': server returned nothing (no headers, no data) (Curl::Err::GotNothingError)
from /usr/local/one/lib/ruby/econe/EC2QueryClient.rb:164:in `upload_image'
from /usr/local/one/bin/econe-upload:116
I informed the ONE developers of this issue on their mailing list and Sebastien Goasguen pointed me to the correct solution. There seems to be an error in the curl implementation on CentOS. I installed the multipart-post gem and executed the econe-upload with the (yet undocumented) switch ‘-M’. This fixed the problem.
Install gem:
[root@cloudtest3 ~]# gem install multipart-post
Run the working econe-upload command:
[rogierm@cloudtest3 ~]$ econe-upload -M /home/rogierm/centos5.img
ZX-Spectrum, my first computer
My collegues at work got me my first computer for my birthday! A fully function Sinclair ZX-Spectrum with tape drive, printer, manuals and lots of games! Not to forget, a couple of old issues of the MCN Magazine. This certainly brings back some good memories
