share and enjoy a laugh

[Xist]

Allegedly, Isaac Asimov wrote a joke book, and this joke supposedly came from it. I have told it several times and the other person always laughed, but misinterpreted the punchline:

Dave walks into a bar and sees Joe sullenly sipping a beer. He immediately rushes over, sits down, and asked him what was wrong.

"My wife ran off with my best friend."

"But Joe! I am your best friend!"

With an enormous grin, Dave responds "Not anymore!"

Um... Refuge? Will you please insult men now?

[Weather Spotter]

I do not think she insults anyone.

[myrefugeisintheLord]

Lol, nope. I might have without my knowledge.
I have to work REALLY hard to be "mean" even in play! For instance: I'd rather have snowballs thrown at me, then throw them at others. But that's just me.
There are SOME things I'm competitive with though.... Cars, you had better watch out!!

Edit: Hmm, that makes me sound like a push-over, I'm not. I just like being nice/caring to others. Honestly, there's no reason not to be!

[Piwoslaw]

She only insults gas guzzlers, just by filling up

[myrefugeisintheLord]

Thank you Piwoslaw. I'm not very witty. (Being at work doesn't help either!)

When it's anything vehicle related, I'm just another one of the guys! Okay?

[Arragonis]

Guy 1 - cries

Guy 2 - Hey, whats the matter ?

Guy 1 - My wife and my best friend ran off with each other.

Guy 2 - Oh, very sorry to hear about that.

Guy 1 - yes - I'll miss him.

[larrybuck]

Why did the blonde smile when a lightning storm flashed through the window of her place?

She just thought someone was taking her picture!!!

[myrefugeisintheLord]

I didn't come up with this story on my own, but I did spend some time looking for a nice, short story that is funny.

It was the end of the day when I parked my police van in front of the station. As I gathered my equipment, my K-9 partner, Jake, was barking, and there was a little boy in view nearby, staring in at me. 'Is that a dog you got back there?' he asked. 'It sure is,' I relied. Puzzled, the boy looked at me and then towards the back of the van. Finally he said, 'What'd he do?'


But I also found this really good, cute story that I just have to share. It's really good!

Windshield Wiper Lesson from a Child

One rainy afternoon I was driving along one of the main streets of town, taking those extra precautions necessary when the roads are wet and slick. Suddenly, my son Matthew spoke up from his relaxed position in the front seat.

"Mom, I'm thinking of something."

This announcement usually meant he had been pondering some fact for a while and was not ready to expound all that his seven year old mind had discovered. I was eager to hear.

"What are you thinking?" I asked.

"The rain," he began, "is like sin and the windshield wipers are like God, wiping our sins away."

After the chill bumps raced up my arms I was able to respond.

"That's really good, Matthew."

Then my curiosity broke in. How far would this little boy take this revelation? So I asked.....

"Do you notice how the rain keeps on coming? What does that tell you?"

Matthew didn't hesitate one moment with his answer;

"We keep on sinning, and God just keeps on forgiving us."

Cute story!

[myrefugeisintheLord]

Old Farmers Advice


Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight and bull-strong.

Keep skunks and bankers at a distance.

Life is simpler when you plow around the stump.

A bumble bee is considerably faster than a John Deere tractor.

Words that soak into your ears are whispered...not yelled.

Meanness don't jes' happen overnight.

Forgive your enemies; it messes up their heads.

Do not corner something that you know is meaner than you.

It don't take a very big person to carry a grudge.

You cannot unsay a cruel word.

Every path has a few puddles.

When you wallow with pigs, expect to get dirty.

The best sermons are lived, not preached.

Most of the stuff people worry about ain't never gonna happen anyway.

Don 't judge folks by their relatives.

Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

Live a good, honorable life.. Then when you get older and think back, you'll enjoy it a second time.

Don 't interfere with somethin' that ain't bothering you none.

If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'.

Sometimes you get, and sometimes you get got.

The biggest troublemaker you'll probably ever have to deal with, watches you from the mirror every mornin'.

Always drink upstream from the herd.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.

Lettin' the cat outta' the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin' it back in.

If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around..

Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly. Leave the rest to God.

[Arragonis]

Meet Bob...

Case Study: Pro-active Log Review Might Be A Good Idea
Andrew Valentine
January 14th, 2013

With the New Year having arrived, it’s difficult not to reflect back on last year’s caseload. While the large-scale data breaches make the headlines and are widely discussed among security professionals, often the small and unknown cases are the ones that are remembered as being the most interesting from the investigators point of view. Every now and again a case comes along that, albeit small, still involves some unique attack vector – some clever and creative way that an attacker victimized an organization. It’s the unique one-offs, the ones that are different that often become the most memorable and most talked about amongst the investigators.

Such a case came about in 2012. The scenario was as follows. We received a request from a US-based company asking for our help in understanding some anomalous activity that they were witnessing in their VPN logs. This organization had been slowly moving toward a more telecommuting oriented workforce, and they had therefore started to allow their developers to work from home on certain days. In order to accomplish this, they’d set up a fairly standard VPN concentrator approximately two years prior to our receiving their call. In early May 2012, after reading the 2012 DBIR, their IT security department decided that they should start actively monitoring logs being generated at the VPN concentrator. (As illustrated within our DBIR statistics, continual and pro-active log review happens basically never – only about 8% of breaches in 2011 were discovered by internal log review). So, they began scrutinizing daily VPN connections into their environment. What they found startled and surprised them: an open and active VPN connection from Shenyang, China! As in, this connection was LIVE when they discovered it.

Besides the obvious, this discovery greatly unnerved security personnel for three main reasons:

They’re a U.S. critical infrastructure company, and it was an unauthorized VPN connection from CHINA. The implications were severe and could not be overstated.
The company implemented two-factor authentication for these VPN connection. The second factor being a rotating token RSA key fob. If this security mechanism had been negotiated by an attacker, again, the implications were alarming.
The developer whose credentials were being used was sitting at his desk in the office.

Plainly stated, the VPN logs showed him logged in from China, yet the employee is right there, sitting at his desk, staring into his monitor. Shortly after making this discovery, they contacted our group for assistance. Based on what information they had obtained, the company initially suspected some kind of unknown malware that was able route traffic from a trusted internal connection to China, and then back. This was the only way they could intellectually resolve the authentication issue. What other explanation could there be?

Our investigators spent the initial hours with the victim working to facilitate a thorough understanding of their network topology, segmentation, authentication, log collection and correlation and so on. One red flag that was immediately apparent to investigators was that this odd VPN connection from Shenyang was not new by any means. Unfortunately, available VPN logs only went back 6 months, but they showed almost daily connections from Shenyang, and occasionally these connections spanned the entire workday. In other words, not only were the intruders in the company’s environment on a frequent basis, but such had been the case for some time.

Central to the investigation was the employee himself, the person whose credentials had been used to initiate and maintain a VPN connection from China.

Employee profile –mid-40’s software developer versed in C, C++, perl, java, Ruby, php, python, etc. Relatively long tenure with the company, family man, inoffensive and quiet. Someone you wouldn’t look at twice in an elevator. For the sake of case study, let’s call him “Bob.”

The company’s IT personnel were sure that the issue had to do with some kind of zero day malware that was able to initiate VPN connections from Bob’s desktop workstation via external proxy and then route that VPN traffic to China, only to be routed back to their concentrator. Yes, it is a bit of a convoluted theory, and like most convoluted theories, an incorrect one.

As just a very basic investigative measure, once investigators acquired a forensic image of Bob’s desktop workstation, we worked to carve as many recoverable files out of unallocated disk space as possible. This would help to identify whether there had been malicious software on the system that may have been deleted. It would also serve to illustrate Bob’s work habits and potentially reveal anything he inadvertently downloaded onto his system. What we found surprised us – hundreds of .pdf invoices from a third party contractor/developer in (you guessed it) Shenyang, China.

As it turns out, Bob had simply outsourced his own job to a Chinese consulting firm. Bob spent less that one fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him. Authentication was no problem, he physically FedExed his RSA token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average 9 to 5 work day. Investigators checked his web browsing history, and that told the whole story.

A typical ‘work day’ for Bob looked like this:

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos

11:30 a.m. – Take lunch

1:00 p.m. – Ebay time.

2:00 – ish p.m Facebook updates – LinkedIn

4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.

5:00 p.m. – Go home

Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area. All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about fifty grand annually. The best part? Investigators had the opportunity to read through his performance reviews while working alongside HR. For the last several years in a row he received excellent remarks. His code was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building.

https://securityblog.verizonbusiness...e-a-good-idea/