May 7, 2013
2:32 pm
by: Rick

Red Bull Creation Challenge 2013 Entry

I haven’t posted any updates of the vacuum forming machine in the last couple of weeks.  That’s because I’ve been hard at working building this year’s Red Bull Creation qualifier entry.  I’ve been working with a team of about five other people to turn Red Bull’s “Turbull Encabulator” into “something awesome” that uses light.  We got bonus points for displaying it in a public place.  You may remember that I participated in Red Bull’s 2012 Creation challenge last year.

After much online brainstorming we decided to build a laser target range that could be mounted to a bicycle cart.  We figured it the entire thing was portable then we could ride it around town and draw attention.  Then as people gathered around they could take turns playing the game. Continue reading →

Posted in Project Tagged

April 17, 2013
3:49 pm
by: Rick

Fixing OSSEC Windows Logon Failure Events: Part 2

I previously wrote an article that described how I was able to update some OSSEC decoders and rules so that OSSEC would correctly identify the users who were failing to login.  I have since updated some of my custom decoders so they can also determine what the source IP is of the failed logins.  Some of the Windows events from my previous post do not include that information, so I had to just skip those.  I’ll skip the explanation and just paste the decoders below in case they are useful to anyone else.  If you want a detailed explanation of what is going on, I suggest checking out the original post. Continue reading →

Posted in security

April 16, 2013
1:05 pm
by: Rick

Vacuum Forming Machine: Part 16

Since my last vacuum former update, we have painted all the wood parts.  It took a while to get this done because you have to let the paint dry in between coats.  I had originally hoped we could just do one coat but the wood really sucked up the paint.  We ended up doing two coats of paint on pretty much everything, and then a few small touch ups.  We chose a black and green theme to match our Eugene Maker Space colors.  I think I might try to get a vinyl sticker of EMS’ logo to put on top of the machine.  Here are some photos of the process and the final paint job. Continue reading →

Posted in Painting Tagged

April 8, 2013
6:15 pm
by: Rick

Fixing OSSEC Windows Logon Failure Events

At the time of this writing I was running OSSEC v2.7 (latest release).

I have a beef with OSSEC.  I’ve had it ever since I started using it a few years ago.  At first, I thought that having rule number 18152 was great.  This is the “Multiple Windows Logon Failures” rule.  However, I quickly noticed a problem.  This rule doesn’t verify that the failed logons are all coming from the same user, or even the same system.  This may be by design.  After all, a skilled attacker may switch between many different accounts and source systems during a brute  force attack in an attempt to allude an IDS system such as OSSEC.  The problem is in my environment (and I suspect in many others’ environments as well) I get tons of Windows failed logon alerts all the time!  They are from all different users and they just seem to constantly happen.  It seems like this is just a fact of life in a network of this scale, although maybe we just have some things configured horribly.  All I know is, getting an alert that tells me that 5 different users failed to login this morning is basically useless.  Do you know how many people typo their passwords at 8AM when they get to work?  It’s a lot. Continue reading →

Posted in security

March 29, 2013
12:53 pm
by: Rick

Vacuum Forming Machine: Part 15

Last night Cord and I got back to work on the vacuum forming machine.  We had already purchased all the materials we needed last week.  This week we needed to build the bottom box.  This is the wooden box that goes around the mid-section of the machine.  This box protects all the components inside, will provide a control panel on the front, and helps make the machine look for professional.

We started out with two 8 foot pieces of 1 x 8 cedar.  Cord chopped these down into the four smaller pieces we needed for the main box frame.  Then Cord chopped our two 1 x 2 cedar beams into multiple smaller pieces.  These smaller chunks get screwed to the inside of the box and will act as a rest to lay a sheet of 3/4″ plywood on.  The plywood just rests on top of these and acts as a sort of protective cover. Continue reading →

Posted in Wood Working Tagged