This works even when alone too. Force yourself to answer every question you'd want to know if you weren't interrogating your own brain. Verify everything you think you know.
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SwiftOnSecurity
@SwiftOnSecurity
computer security person at a place. former helpdesk. they/them/tay. Microsoft MVP, Client Security @SwiftOnSecurity@infosec.exchange
Cyber, USAJoined April 2014
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Replying to
Apparently my special power on site visits is asking about the physical layer. The last seven or eight things I've helped troubleshoot at other people's facilities were loose cables, power cables, ethernet cables that were wrong. "Let's start at the wall jacks and work up."
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I hammer this nail into my team again and again. I know they get tired of it, but you want to know where the problem usually ends up originating? With a piece of information that can be gathered with the right questions before touching a single piece of hardware.
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If you are troubleshooting an enterprise problem, you need to establish a chain of supporting evidence instead of assumptions and heuristic blame. I'm going to ask you down to the hard drive and build up from there.
You called me. You will learn to deplore complexity.
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as a dev, the most tear-your-hair-out bugs were always obscured by a false assumption of which you were absolutely certain was true
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If you are troubleshooting an enterprise problem, you need to establish a chain of supporting evidence instead of assumptions and heuristic blame. I'm going to ask you down to the hard drive and build up from there.
You called me. You will learn to deplore complexity.
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I'll be forever informed by this event. Sleeping on that hard bench was worth it. I will absolutely no longer give a shit or deference to what you did before you called me. I'm going to watch you go through it. I'm going to see you prove it as a higher-level problem.
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Turns out IT systems depend on storage being either healthy or report unavailable, and inconsistent behavior by an intermediary layer obfuscating true health behind the intent to simplify, instead cascades across an enterprise where neither databases or logs are sources of truth.
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Literally last week I saw a team explain a performance issue on a InfoSec service. I was added to the problem chat. I was humble and asked for examples.
Turned out, a Security service was named similarly to an Ops service. 10+ people did not see this. They didn't force evidence.
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Advice from an IT troubleshooter:
People who are "in the shit" often lose perspective on a problem. I have been that person. I have also been the person who calls it out.
It it rare a problem exceeds my skill. But it often subverts my assumptions. It is incredibly humbling.
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I am one of a few people in the final escalation tier in a large firm. It's my job to figure it out.
Something I see often is people seizing onto an obvious explanation, and ending the inquiry. But they were wrong. They found a routine blame. And continued issues assure them.
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Ghost Plane | FULL EPISODE | Mayday: Air Disaster youtu.be/P52BESqVCd0
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If you're in IT, and you're curious about a failure in the news – more mature professions study their failures publicly. Go look it up! Seek out the reports! News is just a public-interest summary with dead bodies. The real stuff is in reports. IT fails like all human systems do.
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Complex systems defend themselves against routine failure, until they encounter a truly novel and unanticipated issue, after which - from the perspective of an operator - they devolve into absolute inexplicable catastrophe.
how.complexsystems.fail
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Ghost Plane | FULL EPISODE | Mayday: Air Disaster
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Oh I lit the brakes on fire coming down the mountain from Lick Observatory.
If I had anything better I'd be 100% dead. I would not be tweeting. I am so thankful I had a piece of shit embarrassing car when my brain wasn't developed yet.
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Replying to @SwiftOnSecurity
I am legitimately impressed. You got a mercury sable up to that speed without driving off a cliff.
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The ticketing officer told me to stop shaking when I was so scared. I think he also was going "what the fuck how did you do this."
Not a proud moment.
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Replying to @SwiftOnSecurity
The ticketing officer:
GIF
read image description
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I'm so glad I had a well-maintained but absolute reputational and performance shitbox as my first car.
I could have unlimited money and I'd give my teen some Volvo with side-impact airbags. You don't get keys to anything else.
At 19 got 105MPH ticket in a teal Mercury Sable:
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you know "-funsafe-math-optimizations" doesn't stand for "fun, safe, math optimizations", right?
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I heard one in NW Iowa about 10 years ago. (National guard jet from SD on training run 6 mi. away)My initial fear was that my wife’s science building with all the chemicals, gas lines, etc had exploded. I was a block from the building at the time. Pushed the air out of my chest.
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humans just don't deal with uncertainty very well... one of the reasons I love working in emergency management where dealing with uncertainty is our main job haha
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Replying to
yeah i had a mildly popular thread about this afternoon's incident and my mentions are absolutely ruined by conspiracy theorists saying the wildest things... people cling to anything that explains the random chaos of the world
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Yup happened here in Germany two weeks ago in eastern Westphalia- people called in gas explosions and in a 200 mile area the fire departments went out
All because a flight from France was on the wrong frequency and Eurofighter jets went up from Rostock
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Conspiracies are comfort blankets that salve terror of the unknown. A rational world driven by _something_, replacing one of absolute undefinable chaos where bad things happen, hard and uncomfortable. They couldn't happen to you. You've found agency in life. You're safe from fear
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People felt it and heard it as a literal explosion. I always pictured them as more of a nuisance - despite having seen several documentaries about the history of trans-sonic travel and technologies.
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Like, I knew sonic booms were loud and that's partly why supersonic travel never took off.
But the massive swathe of a metro area that heard a little jet pass the sound barrier, really emphasized how much of a barrier it is. I didn't really understand their magnitude until now.
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Go clean your %TEMP% directory and run cleanmgr.exe you'll feel better.
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We weren’t able to get into the #TaylorSwift show, so we joined the thousands outside instead! #ChicagoTSTheErasTour
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Why do they not simply lift their trucks and drive over the center
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*sitting in exam chair at dentist*
"You know, the Bible doesn't mention flossing."
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"I was put into service 8 years ago."
"Eight years?"
"AIs deteriorate after 7, Chief."
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Microsoft has confirmed that it's ending support for Cortana on Windows 11 and Windows 10 later this year windowscentral.com/software-apps/
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I think somebody drove to Chicago and…booted their own car?
I was going to laugh but then realized it’s a Hyundai prone to that USB hotwiring trick.
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"They'll pair you with another AI. Maybe even a GPT. It won't be me"
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I am so thankful I don't have a pool. I can't even get myself to clip the bushes. Or pay for sprinkler repair. Which is like a mini pool system to be honest. It has valves right.
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That was fucking 23 years ago. Your married postgrad kid is younger than this shit.
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Seriously, when people complain about Microsoft security baselines, some of those things have been supported since Windows 98 SE (NTLMv2). You've got to start harshly questioning what the heck is going on with teams/vendors saying they need exceptions. This is ridiculous.
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Windows & Server have supported requiring signing since NT. Your only compatibility issues here will come from 3rd parties not supporting signing. Please contact me if you run into any so I can document them.
Expect a lot more news in the SMB security space this year. Thnx /f
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This is going to make a lot of pentesters (particularly mediocre ones) very, very sad. That's a good thing.
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