Musings

Why The Skies Are Blue

There’s a mass exodus from Twitter – (laterly known as “X”) – and for many good reasons.

I have now joined that exodus.

The owner of Twitter – (and Tesla, SpaceX, and others) – has destroyed a platform that became the background radiation of the internet. People went there to interact, to check out what was going on – it was often the best place for breaking news.

While it is still reasonably good at those things, the level of discourse – (frankly) – has turned to shit.

When he took over, the owner promised things would be better:

  • He promised to get rid of the bot and spam accounts or “die trying“.
    • Frankly, he should have died many times over by now if he were sticking to his word – I’ve not been keeping count, but I would guess 450 of the last 500 accounts that have followed me have been bots or porn spam. I’ve blocked most of them as they’ve come in, but there’s only many you can block before you give up.
  • He promised Twitter would be a bastion of “free speech“.
    • Well, only if it his free speech – not ours. There is a clear bias that downplays views that he doesn’t agree with, and promotes that which he does. It’s not so blatant that such tweets are “quietly disappeared“, but the algorithm does not actively promote them when tweets that suit his world view are promoted. The last time I looked at the pointless “For You” tab, 13 of the first 15 tweets were from the man himself.
  • Moderation has gone to hell, with the trust and safety team decimated.
    • I have reported many highly offensive tweets over my 17 years on Twitter, and previous to the change of ownership, most if not all were dealt with appropriately. Now, almost none are dealt with – with “no violation found” responses common, yet while seemingly in breach of the published rules. I am guessing this is likely to line up with the “free speech” policy.
  • And of course, the politics.
    • The owner’s current politics – and propensity to attack others who disagree with his world view – is just rotten. Don’t get me wrong, like everyone he is allowed his political views, but to actively use the platform to discourage, attack and belittle people with different views once again goes against the free speech “policy”. He is a hypocrite of the highest order.
  • Legal changes.

Enough.

The skies are much clearer and bluer in other corners of the internet. I will keep my Twitter account open – (such that I can protect my 17 year old Twitter handle from misuse – and it’s a handle I have used all over the internet for more than 30 years) – but I will no longer actively use it.

My automatically posted news links will still appear there – (for the sake of reach) – but other than that, I’m not going there. Don’t expect interaction from me there, and the account is in private mode now anyway.

Twitter can go to hell.

But – to be fair – I think it already has.

Technology

Juniper Management Routing Instances

If you’re doing network security properly, you are running the management interfaces of your network devices – (routers, switches, server management boards) – on a completely separate network from your end user traffic, so that management traffic is maintained out-of-bounds (OOB).

OOB networks achieve several things – it separates management traffic, through which login credentials may be passed – from operational network traffic, providing a layer of security. Administrative access to the device should not be available from any other network to which the device is connected.

Secondly, OOB networks can provide a non-flooded network path to the device if the operational interfaces of the device are under some kind of attack – (eg: DDoS) – increasing your chance of getting onto the device to take remedial action without having to take the device completely offline.

So, pretty useful.

I’m currently working on a firewall deployment and found myself needing to configure the management interfaces on a pair of Juniper firewalls. It used to be difficult to connect the management interface to the network without using the same routing table as the operational traffic.

Yes it could be separate, but you weren’t able to get the management interface – (typically “fxp0”) – into its own virtual routing instance so that it could be physically connected to a different physical network, while still being routed. This would be required when you’re not on the same network as the device, and you have to get to it remotely.

I’ve achieved this in the past, but it’s been a super long time since I’ve had to do it, so had to go Googling to remind myself what you had to do. The Juniper document has all the pieces required, but smooshed it all up in other discussion and for some people it will be hard to follow.

It only requires three commands and JunOS 17.3R1 and above to achieve – (you have been doing updates, right?)

Let’s say your management network is 192.168.11.0/24, with a default gateway of 192.168.11.254.

The first thing you need to do is tell the device that you want to use a management virtual routing instance. This is a special kind of virtual routing instance that works slightly differently than any others you might need to run on the device.

Just turn the feature on with the following:

set system management-instance

This tells the device to enable a routing instance specifically for the management interface, which for most Juniper devices is “fxp0”.

Next, set the address you want within your network range, for example “192.168.11.11”, noting that it needs to be on the management interface – (noting the “fxp0” reference):

set interfaces fxp0 unit 0 family inet address 192.168.11.11/24

Then you need to create the special routing instance to tie it all together. This routing instance must be called “mgmt_junos” – (when you enable management-instance with the first command, it tells JunOS to look for a routing instance with that name, so that it knows to treat it as management traffic only, and therefore prevents you from creating two of them) – and then set the default route on that management network:

set routing-instances mgmt_junos routing-options static route 0.0.0.0/0 next-hop 192.168.11.254

Done.

The device will now route traffic within your management network, independently of the routing table for the rest of the traffic – thereby separating the management traffic from anywhere the bad guys might be hitting you from!

Technology

Missing BitLocker Keys in Azure AD

The recent worldwide outage caused by a faulty Crowdstrike update was a major hassle for many people – not to mention the people working in various IT departments around the world who were left to clean up – (in many cases) – thousands of machines.

We run Crowdstrike at my current employer, and we too were affected by this outage. We’re a relatively small organisation, and an information technology organisation at that – so most of our users were able to resolve the situation themselves.

As long as they had access to their BitLocker recovery keys!

Many of the team did already have their recovery keys safely stored elsewhere, and got themselves back online pretty quickly.

Those who didn’t have their keys had to come to the IT team to get them. Almost all of the keys were found in our Microsoft Intune environment, as they should be.

However, handful were missing – here’s how to get them back into Intune to cater for any future need for them. Fortunately, the machines that had them missing did belong to people who had personally saved their keys elsewhere.

To get them back, there is an option to in the BitLocker control panel to save your recovery key(s) back up to Azure/Intune:

However, in the case of an environment with thousands and thousands of machines this might not always be practical. It might also be a pain if new drives are added, or disks are decrypted and re-encrypted – so here’s a PowerShell script that achieves the same, which you might regularly run across your workstation fleet and keep the keys centrally located for disaster recovery.

$BLVolumes = Get-BitLockerVolume

foreach ($BLVol in $BLVolumes)
{
    foreach ($keyProtector in $BLVol.KeyProtector)
    {
        if ($keyProtector.KeyProtectorType -eq "RecoveryPassword")
        {
            $KeyProtectorID = $keyProtector.KeyProtectorId
            $result = BackupToAAD-BitLockerKeyProtector -MountPoint $BLVol.MountPoint -KeyProtectorId $KeyProtectorID
            if ($result)
            {
                Write-Output "Recovery key upload for $($BLVol.MountPoint) was successful!"
            } else
            {
                Write-Output "Recovery key upload for $($BLVol.MountPoint) failed!"
            }
            break
        }
    }
}
Technology

Improving WordPress Login Security – Revisted

In a previous article, I spoke of a method for restricting access to the WordPress login screen by directing requests for “wp-login.php” away to a standard WordPress 404 page.

Server Ethernet Ports
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jemimus/8469760647

Recently I came across a situation with one site that I manage, where an unrelated change meant that this was no longer working. Interestingly, on some sites I manage it still works, and on others it does not – despite the underlying configuration of the web host being no different.

I believe I do know why it stopped working on some sites – but I choose not to explain the reason at this time for security purposes.

To get the “non-working” sites to work again, the included configuration needed to replace the configuration construct with the following, using the “Require” directive instead:

<Location />        
  ErrorDocument 403 /idontthinksotim
</Location>
<Files .htaccess>
  Require all denied
</Files>
<Files wp-login.php>
  Require all denied
  Require ip aa.bb.cc.dd
</Files>


Refer to the previous article for complete understanding, but the “Require all denied” directive here is equivalent to the combination of “order deny,allow” and “deny from all” directives in the previous example. It basically says “by default, deny everyone from the file.”

Each allowed IP is then listed in sequence below that – in this example “Require ip aa.bb.cc.dd”. This of course will need to be the IP address you wish to allow access from, and as before, can also use CIDR notation to allow entire ranges of IP addresses.

Other than the use of the “Require” directives, the concept of this article remains the same as the previous, and once again, don’t assume your website is 100% protected if you do this. Hackers are clever people, and if they are determined they will find a way.

Basically, each version could and should work – but if you find you’ve tried one, and it doesn’t work – try the other!

Technology

Improving WordPress Login Security

WordPress is the most common CMS used by websites, recently topping 43% market share of all sites currently on the internet.

With such a significant presence, it is also the largest target for website hackers, and given that it is open-source, good and bad actors are always examining the code for vulnerabilities.

There are plenty of things you can do to tighten defences – the Wordfence plugin is an excellent start, that I highly recommend.

https://flickr.com/photos/136770128@N07/40492737110

Another thing you can do is restrict access to the “wp-login.php” script, based on IP address – however, note that this solution will only work if you have a fixed and known IP address from which you will be logging in to your site.

If you move around, you’re probably locking yourself out of your own website console unless you’re at the IP address we’ll use in the example below. The example below is specific to Apache web servers, but the same principle can be applied to other configurations.

Let’s say my IP address is “aa.bb.cc.dd”. Put the following in the virtual host configuration for your WordPress website, and you can now only log in to your website from that IP address. Your site is still completely visible to the internet, but even if someone has your username and password, that login will be denied – they won’t even get to the login page.

<Location />
  ErrorDocument 403 /idontthinksotim
</Location>
<Files wp-login.php>
  order deny,allow
  deny from all
  allow from aa.bb.cc.dd
</Files>

The “order deny,allow” command tells Apache that it should follow any “deny” command access to “wp-login.php” first. The “deny from all” command is the only example of that that we need here. The “allow from aa.bb.cc.dd” command allows only the specifically listed IP address to get to “wp-login.php”.

You can of course add multiple “allow from” commands, and if you understand CIDR notation, you can use that to specify ranges of IP addresses you might want to allow with a single entry.

The above code means every other IP address on the internet is denied access to “wp-login.php”, and causes a “403” error to be thrown. To make things nice and neat and pretty, I have redirected “403” errors to a URL that does not exist – so that visitors are greeted with a proper “404” page from your WordPress site, rather than the standard “403” Apache error screen.

One final note – there are lots of other ways for bad actors to compromise a website – this is just another potential tool in your bag of tricks to keep them out. Don’t assume your website is 100% protected if you do this. Hackers are clever people, and if they are determined they will find a way.

Technology

Extracting Wordfence Attacker Data

Wordfence is a web application firewall (WAF) designed for WordPress – (the most common website platform on the internet today) – which I have used and trusted for a long time.

Wordfence helps identify attacks and vulnerabilities on your WordPress sites and takes appropriate action to mitigate what it finds. It comes in two forms – a paid and unpaid version, where the paid version gives more rapid updates to its core list of security vulnerabilities and known bad actors, as well as direct support if your attacker does manage to breach your site.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/140988606@N08/36883845116

I highly recommend it – it can be a little tricky to configure but is well worth the effort.

When it finds something hitting your site, the most common thing it does is to block the IP address of the attacker, carte blanche.

As I operate a series of WordPress sites – (in both my professional and personal spheres) – it would be nice to be able to extract the list of all of the IP addresses Wordfence has blocked, to ingest that list into other security systems you might have so they can be reused to implement security policy on other internet facing assets.

I do exactly this to block these identified bad IP addresses for accessing any service on any server I am responsible for.

On the surface, the data Wordfence stores in your WordPress database isn’t easily identifiable as an IP address, so it needs to be translated, for which I use the following SQL:

SELECT `raw_data`.`ipaddress` AS `ipaddress`,`raw_data`.`count` AS `count` FROM (SELECT REPLACE(CONVERT(INET6_NTOA(`wordpress_database_name`.`wp_wfBlockedIPLog`.`IP`) USING utf8mb4),'::ffff:','') AS `ipaddress`,SUM(`wordpress_database_name`.`wp_wfBlockedIPLog`.`blockCount`) AS `count` FROM `wordpress_database_name`.`wp_wfBlockedIPLog` GROUP BY `ipaddress`) `raw_data` ORDER BY `raw_data`.`ipaddress`;

When using the above, change ‘wordpress_database_name’ to the actual name of the database your WordPress installation is using.

Also, I’ve noticed that sometimes the Wordfence table ‘wp_wfBlockedIPLog’ can have different capitalisation, and can appear to be ‘wp_wfblockediplog’ – just look for the table, and change the SQL above to suit the name as it stands in your database.

This query spits out a list of blocked IP addresses, and a count of how many times it has been blocked. I usually create a database view using this query so that it is queriable in the same way as a table, making it much easier to work with.

Once you have that, you can use the data to spread the knowledge of bad IP addresses across your infrastructure, and use the intelligence Wordfence provides to help secure that infrastructure.

Technology

First Use Of Mastodon API

With the growing exodus of people to various Mastodon instances in the wake of the purchase of Twitter by serial boofhead Elon Musk, people will be starting to look for integration tools to start exploiting the Mastodon API.

My first dabble into it has been to update my personal management console to post my links to my chosen Mastodon instance, as well as Twitter for the time being at least.

Here’s a simple PHP function I wrote this morning that allows for simple toots to be posted via scripts or other tools you might like to do this for.

function mastodon_toot ($user_token,$mastodon_url,$toot_content)
{
  $post_data = Array("status"=>"".@str_replace("\'","▒~V~R~V~R~@~Y",$toot_content)."","language"=>"eng","visibility"=>"public");
  $post_headers = ['Authorization: Bearer '.$user_token.''];
  $curl_handle = @curl_init();
  curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_URL,"https://".$mastodon_url."/api/v1/statuses");
  curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_POST,1);
  curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$post_data);
  curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,TRUE);
  curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER,$post_headers);
  $curl_execute = @json_decode(@curl_exec($curl_handle));
  $http_code = "".@curl_getinfo($curl_handle,CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
  @curl_close($curl_handle);
  if ($http_code <> "200") {
    $result_code = "HTP";
    $result_message = "cURL returned HTTP code '".$http_code."' when attempting post to the '".$mastodon_url."' instance!";
    $result_data = NULL;
  } else {
    $result_code = "AOK";
    $result_message = "The flilm is okie dokie!";
    $result_data = Array("api_response"=>$curl_execute,"toot_id"=>"".$curl_execute->id."");
  }
  return(Array("result_code"=>$result_code,"result_message"=>$result_message,"result_data"=>$result_data));
}

There are three required parameters – $user_token, $mastodon_url, and $toot_content.

To make use of the function, create an application within your Mastodon account. In most cases you’ll find this in “Preferences -> Development“, then click “New Application“.

Fill in the fields – just use the URL of your website for the requested URLs. We won’t be doing any two-way communication between your application and Mastodon, so they won’t matter in this instance. Save your new application.

Take note of the “Your access token” value – this is what needs to be passed to the function as $user_token. Remember, you must keep this token secret and secure – as anyone with the token will be able to post to Mastodon as if it were you.

The value of $mastodon_url should just be the name of your Mastodon instance – eg: for me, it is “aus.social”.

The value of $toot_content is exactly what it sounds like – whatever you want to post to Mastodon via your script.

The first line in the function does a little cleanup on the content, just to remove crappy characters – I’m not 100% sure this is needed for Mastodon, but I carried this over from my corresponding Twitter tweet function, and it seems to not cause any issues here – so it’s there!

And that’s it. The function returns an array with some diagnostic information – (did it/didn’t it work?) – and the ID of the toot posted, if it was successful.

While the above function is written in PHP, given I’ve chosen to use PHP’s cURL library, if your chosen scripting language is not PHP it should be pretty straightforward to use the cURL library for whichever language you prefer, to come up with an equivalent script.

Over time I’ll delve more into what the Mastodon API can achieve, but in the meantime, happy automated tooting!

Technology

Inform Active Directory Users of Password Expiration

Sometimes your Active Directory users will appreciate receiving notifications of when their passwords are about to expire. Having your CEO call you on your day off to let you know that they can’t login because their password has expired is never fun.

Creative Commons [by-nc-nd]

Here is a simple Powershell script that you can use to easily send out emails to users with impending password expiration.

All you will need to modify is the “-From” address and the “-SmtpServer” address on line 13 to suit your environment, and potentially the “5” on line 28 to adjust the number of days until expiry that will trigger the email to be sent.

Import-Module ActiveDirectory

function Get-PasswordExpirationDays ($User)
{
    (([datetime]::FromFileTime((Get-ADUser –Identity $User -Properties "msDS-UserPasswordExpiryTimeComputed")."msDS-UserPasswordExpiryTimeComputed"))-(Get-Date)).Days
}

function Send-ExpirationEmail ($expDays,$expEmail,$expFirst,$expLast)
{
    if ([int]$expDays -eq 1) { $expNoun = "day" } else { $expNoun = "days" }
    $expSubject = "Your computer password will expire in $expDays $expNoun"
    $expBody = "Our records indicate that your computer password is due to expire in $expDays $expNoun`r`n"
    Send-MailMessage -From [email protected] -To $expEmail -Subject $expSubject -SmtpServer "smtp.example.com" -Body $expBody
}

$Users = Get-AdUser -filter { passwordNeverExpires -eq $false -and enabled -eq $true }

ForEach ($User in $Users)
{

    $CurrentUser = "" + $User.SamAccountName + ""
    $CurrentEmail = "" + $User.UserPrincipalName + ""
    $CurrentFirst = "" + $User.GivenName + ""
    $CurrentLast = "" + $User.Surname + ""
    
    if ($CurrentEmail -ne "") {
        $CurrentExpiration = Get-PasswordExpirationDays $CurrentUser
        if ([int]$CurrentExpiration -ge 0 -and [int]$CurrentExpiration -le 5 -and $CurrentEmail -notlike "*local*") {
            Write-Host "$CurrentExpiration - $CurrentEmail"
            Send-ExpirationEmail $CurrentExpiration $CurrentEmail $CurrentFirst $CurrentLast
        }
    }

}

Run the script via Task Scheduler once a day, and you’re all set.

However, any decision you might make towards implementing such a mechanism needs to be considered as part of your broader security policy. It may not be appropriate for your organisation, and I make no warranties towards your use of the above code.

Nevertheless, this is a quick and easy way to achieve the goal, if it is right for you.