Much to do today. I worked the Network Outage last night, and had an On-Call issue this morning at 7:40am, so I have the afternoon off. The deadline for my security paper is fast approaching - October 31st. This will be my focus for most of the weekend, until I have to shift gears to begin my next program for my
Data Structures and Algorithms II class.
On a side note, I forgot how lame OSU's scheduling is in Tulsa. There was one class that I
really enjoyed in my undergraduate studies:
The Theory of Computation. It built on the topics discovered by the likes of Turing and Church. It was all theory, and incredibly entertaining for me. I wanted to stay on the firm ground of theory for my Master's degree, and study more of the topics covered under the theory of computation. I slated two classes to flesh out this desire in my optional electives:
Automata and Finite State Machines (CS5653) and
Algebraic Structures of Formal Grammars (CS623). :( Neither are being offered next semester. I guess it is all the same since I will need to knock out
Formal Language Theory (CS5313) as a prerequisite. Soooo... I will be taking a much needed class in Network Programming and some other core class that I won't find terribly interesting.
Side Note: I'm at my favorite cafe again. There are five other wireless lab tops on the network today. One other artisan using a Macintosh like mine, the other four are windows machines owned by
professionals ( they look like developers ). I thought I would take a little survey of what they were running - found something interesting on one:
Interesting ports on (192.168.1.114):
(The 1595 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
| Port | State | Service |
| 135/tcp | open | loc-srv |
| 139/tcp | open | netbios-ssn |
| 445/tcp | open | microsoft-ds |
| 1031/tcp | open | iad2 |
| 3306/tcp | open | mysql |
| 12345/tcp | open | NetBus** |
|
| | This is a port typically used by a trojan for those who don't know (although it could have been running anything) |
Opps!! He isn't running a personal firewall. Shame, shame. He was smart enough to take it off the network quickly *grin* Actually, I was hoping to give him a warning, but they left ;( I hate to see boxes get compromised and the owner not know it. I would hate for that to happen to me... although I strongly suspect that it already has once in the past while I was taking a class at Black Hat 2003. One of the teachers of the class had a Mac just like mine... after that class, I began to notice that my Apple-S key would no longer save files... I'm probably just paranoid. I am planning on doing a fresh install of 10.3 with the first application being tripwire.
