A while back I create “The Stout Experiment” in an effort to try multiple additions in a single batch.  Oddly enough the control (without any additions) ended up being the best.

I have since done three other bathes (including this one) that has tweaked the recipe slightly each time, based on my tasting notes.

Appearance: Dark, no light gets through. Tan (khaki) head with tight bubbles. Alcohol clings to the side of the glass with lacing from the head.
Mouthfeel: silky smooth, but not thick or heavy. The rolled oats contributed to this.
Flavor: Sweet Carmel at first gives way to burnt coffee, dark chocolate and a hint of grapefruit from the cascade hops.
Aroma: Carmel and noble hops.

All in all it’s the best stout I have ever had but I can identify at least two or three places that show room for improvement.

Next batch I think I will add more roasted barley to turn up that burnt coffee flavor a little and possibly change the aroma hop.

5stars

I am thinking either a Scottish wee heavy of Russian imperial stout.

The only problem is that these types of beers require extensive aging.  a RIS would be barely drinkable by Christmas.

I saw on a brewing tv episode that a mead maker used a staggered yeast addition to give his mead a cellared flavor right from the carboy.

Has anyone tried this with beer?  I would rather not experiment on a huge expensive beer like a RIS, but will if I don’t hear from anyone… for science!

At the same time I wanted my next batch to be the one I tried the “Brew in a Bag” method.  Do the full mash in my boil kettle is appealing.  To raise the temperature I just add or adjust flame.  After the mash I just lift the bag out, rinse/sparge and start my boil.  Plus it will be less clean up without having to rinse my mash tun.

The problem with my next batch being a big beer and my first bib batch is the risk of overflowing my kettle.  15-20 lbs of grain, 7 gallons for the boil plus however much I need to figure in for absorption during the mash… than re adding for sparge.  None of my software will do the math for brew in a bag so this is all going to have to be done manually.. yup.. on my fingers.

I pitched at about 70 degrees and stuck in my lager area at about 50 degrees. After a week of not checking on it I took a gravity reading and it was still at its original gravity. No fermentation had happened at all.

I transferred it off its yeast cake into a 5gal carboy and stuck it in my ale closet to warm up so I could pitch another yeast.

After one day at 70 (even after transferring it off its yeast cake) it went crazy! Lava lamp style active fermentation. Apparently this is a lager yeast that has to ferment at ale temps? After about 10 days the gravity was at its expected terminal gravity reading. I transferred it again and stuck it in the lager closet at 50. I will let you guys know how it turns out.

For those of you not close to me, I was hired by the DoD (Department of Defense).  What does this mean?  Well you will never again hear the words “today at work…” uttered again.  That does not mean I will lacking topics to post about.

My security research at home is picking up again.  Expect posts on the topics of forensics, anti-forensics, malware and possibly a new pentest tool or two.

It’s nice to be back and for those of you reading this, thank you for sticking it out and visiting again.

The traffic mostly (82 of the 84 events today) originates from sequential IPs out of China.  This immediately raises alarms with me.

Upon further examination I discovered even stranger patterns.

• destination port tcp/2550
• source port is tcp/80
• Over the last 24 hours 82 attempts had been made (and blocked) by Chinese
• All Chinese IPs target 1 specific host
• 2 attempts from US data centers to two other IPs
• Further correlated searches on source IPs returns little else outside of what I normally see on the firewall
• Digging back 30 days indicates that today was the first time such traffic has hit me

Port 2550 is associated with a protocol called ADS (Automation Device Specification) created by Beckhoff for use in their TwinCAT system.  This information meant absolutely nothing to me.  I have never heard of the protocol, company for product so I started digging.

It’s for embed systems.  Its billed as “PLC and Motion Control on the PC” meaning that it could be used for automating just about anything.

“TwinCAT consists of run-time systems that execute control programs in real-time and the development environments for programming, diagnostics and configuration. Any Windows programs, for instance visualization programs or Office programs, can access TwinCAT data via Microsoft interfaces, or can execute commands”

According to the “Applications and Solutions” section of their website it can be used for Robotic Assembly automation, Building/HVAC Automation, Water Treatment and Management, Semiconductor Manufacturing, Medical engineering, the Energy Industry and so on.  These all seem like pretty tempting targets if I was interested taking over a countries infrastructure.

Odder still… I port scanned the target server and it does not have anything running on that port.  I also have historical port scans going back months (so I can detect when new listeners are launched) and it was never open.

Am I missing any known malware that operates on that port?

I think I’m going to send some of this output to the SANs internet storm center to see if they know anything about it.

Today alone I have received 4 copies of an email with the subject line “2 Populaar Myths About Female Orgasms -  How to Become an Irresistible Lover” containing an attachment named “Preview.app Document”.

I haven’t had a chance to analyse the .app yet, but I think its safe to assume that its malware of some sort.

The good news is that OS X is still built well.  If I double click it thinking its a document its going to tell me “Hey stupid!  This is an app that was downloaded from the Internet.  Are you sure you want to run it?”.  Maybe not in those exact words.  At that point if I say – “I thought I was opening an document, but sure, lets run this app-like-document” – then I deserve to be infected.

For all the detail oriented folks here are the headers (bold are items changed to protect my info):

Return-path: <efflrescent@aperfectmix.com>
Envelope-to: MY_ADDRESS
Delivery-date: Fri, 01 May 2009 09:39:27 -0400
Received: from [87.18.181.177] (helo=ksecb.telecomitalia.it)
by myserver.mydomain.com with smtp (MyMail Dameon)
(envelope-from <efflrescent@aperfectmix.com>)
id 1LzsxZ-0000Ib-JG
for MY_ADDRESS; Fri, 01 May 2009 09:39:27 -0400
Message-ID: <49FAF79E.9745295@aperfectmix.com>
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 13:39:25 -0100
From: Chesner <efflrescent@aperfectmix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: MY_ADDRESS
Subject: 2 Populaar Myths About Female Orgasms -  How to Become an Irresistible Lover
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=”————32D524EA4E2E67F07C94899F”
X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.8
X-Spam-Score: 38
X-Spam-Bar: +++
X-Spam-Flag: NO

The body contains no data.

In the VM world this type of vulnerability is an absolute worst case, but are very rare.

On April 10th CVE-2009-1244 was released stating that a number of VMWare products are vulnerable to VM escapes.

You should patch as soon as possible if you are running:

• VMware Workstation 6.5.1 and earlier
• VMware Player 2.5.1 and earlier
• VMware ACE 2.5.1 and earlier
• VMware Server 1.x before 1.0.9 build 156507
• VMware Server 2.x before 2.0.1 build 156745
• VMware Fusion before 2.0.4 build 159196
• VMware ESXi 3.5
• VMware ESX 3.0.2, 3.0.3, and 3.5

Per the CVE this vulnerability:

allows guest OS users to execute arbitrary code on the host OS via unknown vectors, a different vulnerability than CVE-2008-4916.

This also validates why all of the best practice documents recommend that VMs of different sensitivity levels be run on physically separate hosts and/or clusters.

SANs Internet Storm Center reports that an exploit is available ‘in the wild’ for a fee.  They also provide a link to the following video of someone allegedly leveraging this exploit.

I think this will be a good way to detect new services and potential malware infection, but what about machines that are already infected?

To fix that I wrote in a function that parses the output for known malware ports.  The only problem is that I cant find a definitive list of known malware ports.  Does anyone know of such a resource?

*** Loaded C:\WINNT\system32\KERNEL32.dll differs from file image:
*** File timestamp:         Wed Apr 18 12:25:36 2007
*** Loaded image timestamp: Wed Apr 18 12:25:37 2007
*** 0x77e40000  0×102000  5.02.3790.4062  C:\WINNT\system32\KERNEL32.dll

Now I can think of lots of malicious reasons why this would be.  In fact I recently wrote on one of these reasons.   But I cant think of any legitimate reasons.

I’m not one to jump to conclusions without having evaluated all possibilities but my research is turning up almost nothing.

Can anyone think of a legitimate reason why windows would load kernel32.dll and then something alter it as its going into memory?

Thanks guys.

I remember a couple of years ago all the small form factor optiplex’s I had suffered from a bad cap on the motherboard.  Eventually all of them just die.

My whole team at work have the same model workstation and the PSU went on each of them, one by one.

I have a service tag – the “serial number” unique to each computer – and type it into their site looking for drivers.  You would think, being that this tag is unique, that they could look up your computer and give you your network card drivers, your video driver etc.  NO!  Instead they give you the choice to download every driver for every chipset that was ever used on that given model.  Why do I have this service tag?!  Why don’t I just type in the model?!  Its the same results!

After all that people still buy these pieces of crap.  They never even question why that is.