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Men&Mice

5 ways to have fun while not doing IPAM this Christmas

Merry Christmas from the very merry bunch at Men&Mice!

Dec 23rd, 2016

At the end of a year overshadowed by Mirai botnets, leaked emails, late-night Twitter rants and talk of upgrading the dormant Cold War to Version 2.0,  perhaps this Christmas is the ideal time to sit back, pop that (nut) roast in the oven and relax with a little something different. Have your pick from this short collection of fun IPAM-like things to enjoy this festive season.

  1. First up, a highly entertaining TED talk by Mikko Hypponen, well-known security specialist from F-Secure. Hilarious anecdotes, most notably when tracing the makers of the first PC virus (Brain A), help to make Mikko’s talk on all things cybercrime just as relevant today as it was when he first delivered it in 2011.
  2. If Mikko’s talk set in motion a nostalgic longing for the good old days of ‘hobby’ viruses, what better place to visit than the Malware Museum? Take a walk on this ‘formerly’ wild side and rediscover the almost cutesy retroviruses of yore. OK, not quite so yore, only the 80s and 90s, but still tech yore, really.

It’s hard to believe Casino and Walker may have paved the way for the massive effects of a Mirai botnet or bizarre developments such as ransomware as a service, but hey, everything’s got to start somewhere, doesn’t it?

  1. Speaking of Mirai. Not satisfied with taking the DNS out of Dyn in October in the biggest DDoS attack witnessed so far, a new Mirai strain set its sights on routers and modems in November, causing an outage affecting 900,000 Deutsche Telekom users and possibly leaving up to 5 million devices vulnerable With commercial routers biting the malware dust in such spectacular fashion, perhaps it’s just better to build your own. This handy Ars Technica guide to building a Linux router makes it look easy. Well, at least for some of us.
  2. Let’s face it. All things DDI aren’t very funny. Actually, very little is. But that doesn’t stop some of us from trying to make it funny. And the rest of us from trying to explain the trying to everyone who doesn’t get it. If you are really at a loss for fun things to do this Christmas, then maybe this SysAdmin thread will liven it up for you. Or maybe not. Worth a shot for some of the comments on the comments, though!
  3. Last but not least. Some useful DDI tips and tricks as described by the 13 Icelandic Yule Lads. Monitoring DNSSEC, doing IPAM subnet discovery or sniffing out rogue IP addresses take on a whole new meaning if you do it with the help of the ogress Gryla’s boys. What can possibly go wrong if Doorway Sniffer, Pot Scraper and Sausage Swiper try to find ways to do DDI better? This seasonal eBook compilation makes for easy bed-time reading.
    Be warned: not for the faint of heart!

Merry Christmas from the very merry bunch at Men&Mice!