How not to find great employees

Posted by Synfinatic on October 20, 2006 at 4:45 pm in /dev/random, It's Funny.

I won’t name any names, but I came across a job posting which required two rather highly sought-after skills in today’s market, neither of which is particularly common. They were very specific about what a great job it was, how you would be worked like a dog, and how they were only interested in people with previous experience.

Then they laid out this lovely gem (emphasis added):
We know we’re asking a lot and I’m positive we won’t make it worth your while financially if you have this highly specific skillset.

Yep, that’s what I always look for in a job: Hard work, previous experiance reqiured and you’ll be able to find better pay just about anywhere else.

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Tcpreplay progress

Posted by Synfinatic on October 14, 2006 at 10:28 am in tcpreplay.

First the good news… I’ve upgraded Trac for the Tcpreplay website which now supports built-in spam filtering. This means I’ve opened up the ticketing system to people who haven’t yet registered an account. Hopefully people will find it easier to open tickets for bugs and feature requests.

The bad news is that rewriting the L2/DLT code is even more complicated then I originally thought. Right now I’m spending my time working on the design, trying to make sure it’s flexible and easy to extend over time. Anyways, if you’re reading this, why not go check out that ticket, read the design document (realizing it’s a work in progress) and let me know what you think?

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Is it live or is it Memorex?

Posted by Synfinatic on October 13, 2006 at 12:37 pm in tcpreplay.

About 15 years ago an audio tape company challenged people to figure out if it was live or if it was Memorex. It seems that in the networking security space we’re at the same place, trying to figure out if live tools like Metasploit can be replaced by replay tools like tcpreplay.

Now, it would seem obvious that the answer, like most things is that “it depends”, but there seems to be people who are convinced that if it’s not live it’s not a real test.

Probably the best argument against replay tools is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). If you don’t properly vet your test samples (often in libpcap format) then you’re going to have a …

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