“I’m not a number, I’m a free man” said Number 6 in the serie called “The Prisoner” (for the oldest amongst us). The serie was broadcasted in the Sixties but we have to admit that, still today, we are only numbers! And this will be worse in the coming years.
Personally, I’m not against being a number if controls are properly implemented. Numbers are easy to be indexed, to be sorted and searched. Numbers are a good way to identify things or people but they can easily be spoofed. As Wikipedia says:
“In the context of network security, a spoofing attack is a situation in which one person or program successfully masquerades as another by falsifying data (in this case the number) and thereby gaining an illegitimate advantage.“
I’m just back from an Easter break with $WIFE and $KIDS but it does not mean that I was completely disconnected. Between familly activities, I read some items pending in my todo list. One of them was the book called “Penetration Testing – Setting Up a Test Lab How-To” from 
The next edition of 
An interesting reflexion about a situation I faced while performing a pentest for a customer. The scope was the internal network or “show me what an attacker could access from a rogue device“. A very wide scope indeed… The customer is using a NAC (“Network Access Control“) solution to allow only corporate devices to connect to the network. To briefly explain, a NAC is based on tools and protocol to identifiy end-point devices and grant (or deny) access to resources based on multiple factors like the operating system, the installed patches, the presence of a firewall, an antivirus, a security component or a specific software configuration. A device granted on the network will usually by switched to a specific VLAN corresponding to its profile. Some firewalls may also be dynamically reconfigured to allow new traffic flows. If you are interested, Google has plenty of results on this topic. Most security $VENDORS have a NAC solution in their portfolio.
Here is a quick review of a book about the well-known network sniffer: 
Let me share this story with you. I faced a strange incident last Saturday. My web server was flooded with thousands of GET HTTP requests generated by WordPress blogs. Those connections apparently seemed legit. The “attack“, let’s call it like this in a first time even if I don’t think it was one, occurred Saturday PM between 17:00 & 18:00 PM (GMT+1). A first bunch of requests hit the servers starting from 15:54 and the real food occurred one hour later as you can see on the timeline below.
