Posts Tagged with 2016

New Host!

Random thoughts, Security, Website
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I’ve finally moved to a VPS on DigitalOcean, from my previous (free) shared hosting.  I did this for a couple of reasons: first, while my hosting was free for a year with my domain name, that year was almost up.  To renew my hosting for the second+ year, I would have needed to pay $38.88/year; while that’s a decent price, I looked at my options and decided that moving to DigitalOcean wouldn’t cost much more (around $30 more across the year, since I use the weekly backups option), would give me much more control over my server (now I get SSH access!), and would centralize all of my VPS instances in the same place (I’ve used DigitalOcean for several years to host various projects).

Of course, as with so many things, this migration wasn’t sparked by a simple glance at the calendar.  While I’ve intended to move my host for the last month or two, the timing was decided by my messing up a WordPress upgrade on the old site at the beginning of December.  I used the automatic updater, ignored the warnings about making sure everything was backed up first,[1]I didn’t actually ignore this warning.  I had a backup plugin configured on the site; I figured I could probably roll back if I really needed to. and told it to apply the new version.  When WordPress exited maintenance mode, I was locked out of the administration dashboard.  The public part of the website was still up and running, but the backend was locked off.  Since I was entering finals week at my university, I decided to just let it be until I had some time to come back and fix it.  Worst-case, I had backups I could restore from, and I’d been meaning to migrate my site anyway.

Of course, things didn’t work out that way.  When I finally had some time on Christmas Eve, I discovered that a complete backup hadn’t been made in months.

Yes, I committed the cardinal sin of not verifying the state of my backups.  Apparently I’d screwed something up with their configuration, and I’d never tried to restore from them before and hadn’t noticed until I needed them.  At this point, I decided that if the backups weren’t working, there was no point in trying to recover on a host that I was going to be abandoning within a month, and I spun up a WordPress droplet on DigitalOcean to hold the rebuilt site.

I still had copies of all the content that was on the site, so I’d be able to restore everything without much trouble.  Some copy/pasting and time would be required, but I could get everything back to the way it was without too much trouble.  But before I did all of that, I thought “what if I’m overlooking something really simple with the old site?”  I did a little searching, and apparently W3 Total Cache, which I used to create static pages for my site and decrease load times, can cause problems with WordPress upgrades.  I disabled that via FTP,[2]If you’re in a similar situation, just renaming the plugin folder to something else– w3-total-cache to w3-total-cache123, for example– will disable it reloaded the site, and I was able to access the admin area again.  Turns out the simple steps that you should take before completely rebuilding everything are actually worth it.

Since I had already spun up and started configuring my new site, I decided to press onwards.  My task was made considerably easier by my being able to access WP Clone on the original site, which let me move everything from my old site to the new one in just a few minutes.  I redirected the nameservers to DigitalOcean, and ran a few last checks before calling the bulk of my work done.

The next day, when I was tidying up some loose ends and preparing to get SSL set up, I realized that my email no longer worked– my email server resided on the same server that hosted my old website, which meant I needed to find a new solution.

While I have been meaning to setup my own email server sometime soon, I wasn’t confident in my ability to get it up and running quickly, and email is one of those vital services I depend on working 100% of the time.  In years past, I would have simply used Google Apps[3]Which is now G Suite, but that sounds silly. to host my email, but that is no longer the free option it once was.  Luckily, I found a solution thanks to Ian Macalinao at Simply Ian, which is to use Mailgun as a free email server.  Mailgun is designed to send out massive email blasts for major companies, but they also offer a free tier for people and companies that are sending out fewer than 10,000 emails per month.  I send out a fraction of that number, so this was perfect for me (and their mass email prices seem quite reasonable, so I might even use them for that if the need ever arises).  Ian handily provided a set of instructions for how to setup the proper routing, and, while some of the menu options have changed, I was able to get my new email up and running within a few minutes.

So I’d managed to get both the site and my email up and running, but I still couldn’t get SSL up and running.  For those that don’t know, SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and it’s what powers the little green padlock that you see on your address bar when you visit your bank, or PayPal, or this website.  I wrote an explanation on how it works a while back, and I suggest checking that out if you want to learn more.
One of the benefits of hosting my website on a VPS is that I don’t need to use the major third-party SSL providers to get certificates saying my server is who it says it is; I can use the free and open Let’s Encrypt certificate authority instead.  Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get the certificate to work correctly; the automated tool was unable to connect to my server and verify it, which meant that the auto-renewal process wouldn’t complete.  I could have generated an offline certificate and used that, but the certificates only last ninety days and I wasn’t looking forward to going through the setup process every three months.[4]It’s a pretty straightforward and simple process, I just know that I would forget about it at some point, the certificate would expire, and the site would have issues.  If I can automate that … Continue reading  I tried creating new Virtual Hosts files for Apache, my web server, but that just created more of a problem.  Eventually, I figured out that I had misconfigured something somewhere along the line.  Rather than try to figure out which of the dozens of edits I had made was the problem, I gave up and just reverted back to a snapshot I had made before starting down the rabbit hole.[5]Snapshots are essentially DigitalOcean’s version of creating disk images of your server.  I absolutely love snapshots; they’ve saved my bacon more than once, and I try to always take one … Continue reading  After reverting to back before my virtual hosts meddling, I was able to successfully run the Let’s Encrypt tool, generate my certificate, and secure my site.

Lesson learned!

Photo credit Torkild Retvedt.

References

References
↑1 I didn’t actually ignore this warning.  I had a backup plugin configured on the site; I figured I could probably roll back if I really needed to.
↑2 If you’re in a similar situation, just renaming the plugin folder to something else– w3-total-cache to w3-total-cache123, for example– will disable it
↑3 Which is now G Suite, but that sounds silly.
↑4 It’s a pretty straightforward and simple process, I just know that I would forget about it at some point, the certificate would expire, and the site would have issues.  If I can automate that issue away, I would much rather do that.
↑5 Snapshots are essentially DigitalOcean’s version of creating disk images of your server.  I absolutely love snapshots; they’ve saved my bacon more than once, and I try to always take one before I embark on any major system changes.

Uncertainty, the Fed, and the Economy

Economics
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The New York Times published this opinion piece recently, discussing the Fed’s continuing decision to delay raising rates.  While the entire article is interesting, I believe that the final paragraph is the most insightful:

Adding to the frustration is that Fed policy is not to blame for the economy’s underperformance. Congress bears much of the blame because of its tightfisted federal budgets when more government spending is needed to offset feeble spending and investment in the private sector. Still, sound policy making by the Fed requires answering to conditions as they are, not as policy makers might wish they were.

Right now, we should be spending money to stimulate the economy– cutting back is incredibly short-sighted, and could seriously damage the economy.  We should look back at other economic downturns from the past– the Great Depression, for example, was ended not by restricting government spending, but by massively increasing it (and by abolishing the gold standard, which let to the restriction in the first place)– and learn from them.  Economists have studied recessions for many years, and the Fed has done an admirable job in regulating the U.S. economy through this entire mess.  Politicians, however, often don’t understand the data, or are politically unable to make the best long-term policy.  For this reason, they should seek to reduce uncertainty in U.S. markets.
Economic uncertainty is a larger problem in the United States than we may care to admit.  John C. Williams, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, gave a 2012 speech in which he said that uncertainty was one of the largest problems facing the U.S. economy today:

By almost any measure, uncertainty is high. Businesses are uncertain about the economic environment and the direction of economic policy. Households are uncertain about job prospects and future incomes. Political gridlock in Washington, D.C., and the crisis in Europe add to a sense of foreboding. I repeatedly hear from my business contacts that these uncertainties are prompting them to slow investment and hiring. As one of them put it, uncertainty is causing firms to “step back from the playing field.” Economists at the San Francisco Fed calculate that uncertainty has reduced consumer and business spending so much that it has potentially added a full percentage point to the unemployment rate.

Obviously, with unemployment at 5.0% today,[1]When he gave that speech, the unemployment rate was at 8.3%, and the Economic Uncertainty Index (EUI) was at 178.3; today the latest numbers for the EUI place the United States near 98.3.  I was … Continue reading having uncertainty raise the unemployment a full percentage point is no small matter.  And on average, economic uncertainty is increasing—according to data collected by Scott Baker, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis in “Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty” over at PolicyUncertainty.com, economic uncertainty has been trending upwards for the past fifteen years.

A chart showing the rate of economic uncertainty, along with an upwards trend line, between April 2001 and April 2016.Obviously, this trend is heavily influenced by the 2008 recession, but I find it interesting that it may be beginning to rise again.  This is possibly a result of the fluctuating oil markets, combined with the slowdown of China’s economy; but no matter the cause both the Fed and the government should seek to reduce uncertainty and continue to promote stability in the economy.

Listing image by William Warby.

References

References
↑1 When he gave that speech, the unemployment rate was at 8.3%, and the Economic Uncertainty Index (EUI) was at 178.3; today the latest numbers for the EUI place the United States near 98.3.  I was unable to find any data correlating the EUI with specific unemployment rates, so at this time I cannot estimate how much of our present unemployment is a result of uncertainty in the economy.

Hacking the Hackers

Security
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Have you ever heard of Hacking Team?  It’s an Italian company specializing in “digital infiltration” products for governments, law enforcement agencies, and large corporations.  Simply put, they sell hacking tools.

You might think, given their business model, that they would monitor their own security religiously.  Last year, however, they were hacked.  Majorly hacked.  “Hundreds of Gb” of their internal files, emails, documents, and source code for their products were released online for all to inspect, as were their unencrypted passwords. [1]By the way, here’s some advice: if you are in security (or anything, really, this isn’t security-specific) you should really make sure your passwords are more secure than … Continue reading  Also released was a list of their customers, which included the governments of the United States, Russia, and Sudan—the last being a country controlled by an oppressive regime that has been embargoed by the E.U. [2]As an Italian company, this means that they were technically violating the embargo.

Last Friday, the person claiming responsibility for the attack, “Phineas Phisher”, came forward with details about how they did it.  It’s worth reading through if you’re interested in security; if you’d like an explanation geared more towards the layperson, Ars Technica has a pretty good write-up/summary of the attack.

I was particularly struck by how they gained access to the network.  According to Phineas,

Hacking Team had very little exposed to the internet. For example, unlike Gamma Group, their customer support site needed a client certificate to connect. What they had was their main website (a Joomla blog in which Joomscan didn’t find anything serious), a mail server, a couple routers, two VPN appliances, and a spam filtering appliance… I had three options: look for a 0day in Joomla, look for a 0day in postfix, or look for a 0day in one of the embedded devices. A 0day in an embedded device seemed like the easiest option, and after two weeks of work reverse engineering, I got a remote root exploit…  I did a lot of work and testing before using the exploit against Hacking Team. I wrote a backdoored firmware, and compiled various post-exploitation tools for the embedded device.

Basically, to avoid detection, Phineas discovered a unique vulnerability [3]These unique vulnerabilities are called a “zero-day” in computer security circles, because the hackers find it before the company maintaining the software or device does— so once the … Continue reading in one of their embedded devices (likely one of their routers), figured out how to use it to get into the rest of the network using that vulnerability, and then carried out the attack through that piece of hardware without anybody noticing.  No matter your feelings about the attack, this is an impressive feat.

References

References
↑1 By the way, here’s some advice: if you are in security (or anything, really, this isn’t security-specific) you should really make sure your passwords are more secure than “P4ssword”, “wolverine”, and “universo”.  Use a passphrase instead.
↑2 As an Italian company, this means that they were technically violating the embargo.
↑3 These unique vulnerabilities are called a “zero-day” in computer security circles, because the hackers find it before the company maintaining the software or device does— so once the company finds it, they have zero days to mitigate damage.

Orchids at the Missouri Botanical Garden

Photography
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The Missouri Botanical Garden’s Orchid Show ended today.  I went on a date there yesterday to visit the Garden and see the show. [1]Luckily, my girlfriend didn’t mind my bringing my camera along.  I honestly didn’t know that there were this many different types of orchid; there were one or two hundred different varieties on display, and the Botanical Garden boasts more than 3,200 different species of orchid in their collection.

I took quite a few close shots of the orchids, and I’ve included my favorites below.  I’ve made slight adjustments to try to bring out their colors, and to emphasize their structures, but I’ve tried to keep everything as true-to-life as is possible.

While at the Garden, I also took a walk through the rest of their grounds.  While I put my camera away for much of it, I did get a few nice shots of various plants and trees.

I had an awesome time taking photos and walking around.  It was a little crowded, but still pretty nice.  I don’t really make it over to the Garden as much as I would like to, but hopefully I’ll have a chance to visit another time or two during spring break.

References

References
↑1 Luckily, my girlfriend didn’t mind my bringing my camera along.