Survival Homestead

The tone of the article is funny and it is entertaining to read, and yet very serious contentwise…

Via: The StarPhoenix

People are always asking me, “Chef Tony, if you are attacked in your kitchen by an intruder, what is the best utensil for self-defence?

I always tell them the same thing. I’m not a chef and my name isn’t Tony.

It so happens, however, that I do know something about the use of kitchen utensils for self-defence. When I empty the dishwasher, say, I always ask myself, “Would it be possible to kill someone with this?”

It’s not a question you want to be asking for the first time when a kitchen intruder comes at you. You might choose to defend yourself with something other than the optimal weapon. Bacon tongs, say. These are almost useless as a weapon, unless, of course, someone attacks you with a strip of hot, crispy bacon, in which case you might use the tongs to disarm him. Otherwise, bacon tongs are the second-worst weapon in the kitchen, right after the basting brush.

Of course, the weapon of choice for most experienced chefs is the large, all-purpose chef’s knife. That’s why they call it all-purpose. You can use it for slicing, chopping, hacking or stabbing.

Certainly, a knife is ideal for mincing fresh shallots or for trimming the fat off a rack of spring lamb, but is it the best weapon against one or more determined attackers who might themselves be armed with knives? I’m not so sure. For this kind of heavy-duty work, you’re better off with a meat cleaver, if you have one. What makes the meat cleaver so effective in the event of a home kitchen invasion is that the perpetrators almost always are made out of meat.

A better weapon still is the cast-iron skillet. It’s the kitchen equivalent of a medieval mace. A heavy, iron skillet can also deflect an opponent’s knife or even a small-calibre bullet, so it’s a shield as well as well as a blunt instrument. When you hear the gong-like peal of an iron skillet connecting with an intruder’s cranium, you know the fight is over.

Full Story

Via: The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — In a disaster such as an earthquake or terrorist attack, nearly two-thirds of U.S. parents would disregard orders to evacuate and would rush to pick up their kids from school, according to a new survey.

The survey found that 63 percent of parents would ignore orders to evacuate and instead attempt to reunite with their children, possibly hindering rescue efforts by adding to traffic congestion.

The authors of the study, released Thursday on the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, said that despite years of government efforts to enhance disaster preparedness, schools need to do more to plan for disasters and parents need to be made aware of the plans.

The report was commissioned by the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Children’s Health Fund.

Among parents of school-age children, 45 percent said they do not know the location where their children would be evacuated as part of the school’s disaster plan.

“There should be an outcry from parents to push their schools and their school districts to develop a plan that makes sense,” said Irwin Redlener, associate dean for public health preparedness at Columbia and president of the Children’s Health Fund.

The federal Department of Homeland Security has allocated billions of dollars to help state and local governments set up disaster contingency plans.

But just 44 percent of the U.S. residents surveyed this year said they have all or some of the basic elements of a disaster preparedness plan, including food, water, a flashlight with extra batteries and a meeting place in case of evacuation.

The survey has been administered annually since 2002 by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.

The telephone survey of 1,579 adults was conducted between July 25 and Aug. 9. The margin of error for the entire survey was 2.5 percentage points. The margin of error for the subset of households with children was 4 percentage points.

Parents said Thursday they were not surprised by the finding that most of them would disregard evacuation orders and pick up their children.

Diana Ennen, of Margate, Fla., is the author of “The Home Office Recovery Plan: Disaster Preparedness for Your Home-Based Business” and a mother of three.

“As a mom, you wouldn’t be able to keep me away from picking up my children,” she said in an e-mail. “My first instinct would be to get them at all costs. I would literally run the entire distance to get them. I believe most parents would feel the same.”

It was simply a matter of time

Source: Neowin.net

This week at the Black Hat Security Conference two security researchers will discuss their findings which could completely bring Windows Vista to its knees.

Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. have discovered a technique that can be used to bypass all memory protection safeguards that Microsoft built into Windows Vista. These new methods have been used to get around Vista’s Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and other protections by loading malicious content through an active web browser. The researchers were able to load whatever content they wanted into any location they wished on a user’s machine using a variety of scripting languages, such as Java, ActiveX and even .NET objects. This feat was achieved by taking advantage of the way that Internet Explorer (and other browsers) handle active scripting in the Operating System.

While this may seem like any standard security hole, other researchers say that the work is a major breakthrough and there is very little that Microsoft can do to fix the problems. These attacks work differently than other security exploits, as they aren’t based on any new Windows vulnerabilities, but instead take advantage of the way Microsoft chose to guard Vista’s fundamental architecture. According to Dino Dai Zovi, a popular security researcher, “the genius of this is that it’s completely reusable. They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That’s completely game over.”

According to Microsoft, many of the defenses added to Windows Vista (and Windows Server 2008) were added to stop all host-based attacks. For example, ASLR is meant to stop attackers from predicting key memory addresses by randomly moving a process’ stack, heap and libraries. While this technique is very useful against memory corruption attacks, it would be rendered useless against Dowd and Sotirov’s new method. “This stuff just takes a knife to a large part of the security mesh Microsoft built into Vista,” said Dai Zovi to SearchSecurity.com. “If you think about the fact that .NET loads DLLs into the browser itself and then Microsoft assumes they’re safe because they’re .NET objects, you see that Microsoft didn’t think about the idea that these could be used as stepping stones for other attacks. This is a real tour de force.”

While Microsoft hasn’t officially responded to the findings, Mike Reavey, group manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center, said the company has been aware of the research and is very interested to see it once it has been made public. It currently isn’t known whether these exploits can be used against older Microsoft Operating Systems, such as Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but since these techniques do not rely on any one specific vulnerability, Zovi believes that we may suddenly see many similar techniques applied to other platforms or environments. “This is not insanely technical. These two guys are capable of the really low-level technical attacks, but this is simple and reusable,” Dai Zovi said. “I definitely think this will get reused soon.”

These techniques are being seen as an advance that many in the security community say will have far-reaching implications not only for Microsoft, but also on how the entire technology industry thinks about attacks. Expect to be hearing more about this in the near future and possibly being faced with the prospect of your “secure” server being stripped completely naked of all its protection.

Source: guardian.co.uk

New microchipped passports designed to protect against identity theft by terrorists and criminals can easily be faked, it was claimed today.

Tests showed that personal information could be cloned and manipulated within an hour before being inserted into new chips, the Times reported.

The paper said it had exposed “security flaws” in the passport system by asking a researcher to clone the chips on two British passports and implant digital images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. The altered chips were then passed as genuine by reader software used by the UN agency that sets the standards for such e-passports.

The tests showed that bogus biometrics could be inserted in fake or blank passports, the Times alleged, saying the flaws also undermined assertions that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week could not be forged.
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Info for those of us survivalists who are not also Neo-Luddites.

For a copy of the full report, go to TrendMicro

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in Internet content security, reported today that cybercriminals are not only leveraging new technologies to propagate cybercrime, but are also reinventing forms of social engineering to cleverly ensnare both consumers and businesses, according to the “Trend Micro Threat Roundup and Forecast 1H 2008″ report. As a result, the last six months saw an upswing in Web threats, but steady decreases in adware and spyware that are generated by outdated technical methods and can no longer compete with high-level security solutions.