Blog
Notes on email infrastructure, security, and whatever else comes up.
My Security Sensor Just Flagged My AI Assistant
I've been building an endpoint security sensor for Windows, the kind of thing that watches process activity, file writes, and network connections in real time and flags patterns that look like malware. One of the rules I…
Picking a Small Model for Security Alerts
The endpoint security sensor I've been building has an optional feature where an AI model looks at an alert and gives a second opinion: is this actually suspicious, or does it look like a false positive. It never blocks…
Why RSA Is In Trouble (But Not All Cryptography Is)
Quantum computers get a lot of hype, and most of it's justified once you understand what they can actually break. RSA, the encryption used all over the internet including email authentication like DKIM, relies on one sim…
Using SSL/TLS with MySql in .Net
If you're looking to use SSL/TLS with MySQL in .NET, most tutorials will tell you to set the SSL Mode value in your connection string to Require . This may make you think you're good to go with authentication and encrypt…
Email Encryption Requirements
Since there has been a lot of talk and work recently on email encryption, I thought I would attempt to list the requirements. These are a combination of things I would want and some things others have asked for. 1. Easy…
If you are thinking of writing your own password hashing code, please don't!
Not only should you follow the recommended way to hash passwords, you should be using proven code that does it the correct way. Now that these "proven methods" exist there is no need to write your own code, because chanc…
Sophos minimum recommendation for safe storage of your users' passwords
Here is Sophos's http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/20/serious security how to store your users passwords safely minimum recommendation for safe storage of your users' passwords: Use a strong random number generator…
Top Lesser Known Security/Privacy concerns Today
Not a complete list, but some important items that not everyone is aware of. Metadata — Metadata is the information found about data. Even if your data is encrypted, there is still a lot of metadata that can be just as r…
Telnet - SMTP Commands (not enough)
There are lots of articles online that will teach you "how to connect to a mail server using telnet and send an email." Lots of them have good information on SMTP command syntax. The problems start when you are trying to…
Moving IP addresses from one Windows machine to another.
Here is a useful command for moving bulk IPs from one Windows machine to another. Export the IPs to a file: c:\ netsh interface ipv4 dump c:\ipstomove.txt Then import the list on another machine: c:\ netsh f c:\ipstomove…
Great Article on why not to purchase an email address list.
There is a great blog post on the SocketLabs web site that everyone should read. It's not about software, but anyone involved in email should know the consequences of sending to a purchased email list.
Atwill.com
Atwill.com is now the home of my new software development blog. This will focus mainly on email related software development.