Hello, welcome to the Friday, October 13th, 2017 edition of the Sands and the Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich,

and the time recording from Singapore. When we're talking about version control tools like Git, we usually talk about

software development, but Xavier today has a quick diary reminding us that these tools

are also very useful to control versioning on configuration files and the like. For example,

he's also sharing a quick script here that he threw together in order to manage blacklists and other things that he's extracting

from MISP. Now, for certain configurations, you also have some more specialized tools. For example,

one of our readers reminded us of Rancid, which is a real nice tool to manage configurations on routers and the like,

and it will also monitor these devices for any unauthorized changes.

Just from personal experience, I think this really goes way beyond sort of security in

that a lot of these changes unauthorized or not are often not properly documented

if you don't make it easy and tools like it do just that they make it really easy to document

what changes you made so in case there is a problem it's much easier to figure out what particular change caused the issue.

And the coin hive cryptocurrency miner, of course, is not going away. The latest sighting comes

from Pirate Bay. Now, Pirate Bay isn't exactly known for playing by the rules, So no big surprise there. They had a preliminary

allowancement a while ago that they may use a crypto coin miner in order to fund their

operation instead of ads. It's not clear if this coin hive miner was actually deployed by Pirate Bay or if it was actually loaded

via malicious advertisements. And there's also some competition for coinhive, Cryptolute.com

is also offering a similar JavaScript that can be deployed in browsers.

Both Cryptolute and Coin Hive actually do offer a little UI widget that you can load

in your page that does give the user control over how much resources they would like to use for coin mining,

but so far all the instances I have seen really are using it more or less maliciously

without asking the user for permission.

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