Is this the bottom?

Gold hit a low of 1180, quite a bit off from the bottom I called a few weeks ago, when gold was in the 1300’s. This bottoming process has taken 21 months. There could be more to go.

Despite all the indicators of bottoming, I never got “the” bottom I expected.  That’s because you can’t expect them. They come when you least expect it. By exercising patience, and recognizing that bottoms mean opportunity is all you can do.

By realizing that bottoms are never really predicted, but ridden out with an active level of patience and understanding. Gratitude is the reward.

 

 

It ain’t over till it’s over

Investing means you will go through downturns. In my last post, I called a bottom for gold, and it appears that a new lower is going to be made. At least it’s what I expect.

With all the tools in the world, they will break from time to time, so you have to trust that the fundamentals will save you when this is so.

This means the pain has be experienced. That’s where the money is made.

GS BS

Goldman Sachs is sneaky.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-14/gold-bulls-endure-bear-market-as-goldman-says-sell-commodities.html

Goldman Sachs says sell commodiites so they can get in. What happened on 4/12/2013 is a move that large players make so that they can fill in their orders. Why else is GLD making a huge buying on weakness post?

G.S.B.S! A strong contrarian move is the cure.

Meanwhile gold is up $10 as I write.

Another low…this has to be it.

In one of my last posts, I mention a bottom. Wrong. Yet another setup for big money to come in came on 4/12. Gold dropped about $90 over the day to $1477. $1433 is the 200 day moving average. Days like this don’t come often. Here’s a chance to get some funds in.

This doesn’t mean it’s the bottom bottom, but certainly big money came in to buy up the stops. Big money sees value here. Expect margin calls to go out on Monday and more selling should proceed. Regardless, this was a good buying opportunity. I did take advantage of what I could here.

Buying on weakness. GLD leads on 4/12. Alot of stops were broken.

 

The bottom is in

I pondered if the bottom is in for the miners last week after another waterfall. It’s been quite a trek down, which included another major leg down and numerous fakeouts. I couldn’t get a clear read on this one otherwise I would have stopped out.

As I write this post, the bottom came last week. There I said it. With so many people now wanting to go back into the general stock market when it’s not the time to do so, tell me people are hanging the towel on miners.

When I’m going to doubt myself, I can always reflect back on this post and this time. It’s never different. This is how bubbles happen.

Hang tight.

OWASP Top Ten Defenses for Secure Coding

An excellent presentation by Jim Manico overviews tactics for secure coding for major web application vulnerabilities. He’s a master at his craft and I picked up new interesting insights from a countermeasure perspective, especially on XSS.

Click to access AppSecEU2012_Top_Ten_Defenses.pdf

python – experimenting

If you want to learn to program and want to start somewhere, python is pretty solid. It has good readability with straightforward syntax. It has packages that you can use to make life easier, but doesn’t have the depth ruby has (not always a bad thing). While I’m not a novice programmer, I found it tasting a bit like ruby and php. Heavier on the ruby.

As always, googling for knowledge is easy. It’s on you to do the rest.

https://developers.google.com/edu/python/

I think Google has lots and lots of python gurus. It’s a pretty good way to get familiar with the language. Reaching competency will take the work. At least google gives decent exercises.

 

Disk volumes vs Disk partitions

Digital forensics requires the knowledge of file systems fairly closely. One interesting piece I have looked at so far is the concept of volume vs partition. They look similar, but are very different.

Volumes are OS facing objects that identify the disk and its corresponding file systems. Partitions are divisons in the physical media so that single disks can be used as multiple volumes.

Another important distinguishing characteristic between the two is file system type. Volumes have this property, so that the corresponding OS can interpret data on the disk. Partitions do not possess this property, so any OS can identify what partitions are available, but can’t always read the volume if the file system is not recognized.

Pentesting meets Forensics

Rootkits do funny things to hide what it is doing in the background on an infected computer. Sometimes, you need to take on the outsider perspective to get clues into how rootkits behave so you know how to handle the situation.

fiwalk: making sleuthing easier

Fiwalk allows you to take a disk image and get header-like information about the files.

It appears the basis of it’s function is similar to the fls function, but you get lots more information.

fiwalk practical.floppy.dd.dd

image_filename: practical.floppy.dd.dd
fiwalk_version: 4.0.1
start_time: Mon Dec 31 13:37:31 2012
tsk_version: 4.0.1
# fs start: 0
partition_offset: 0
sector_size: 512
block_size: 512
ftype: 2
ftype_str: fat12
block_count: 2880
first_block: 0
last_block: 2879

parent_inode: 2
filename: Docs
partition: 1
id: 1
name_type: d
filesize: 512
alloc: 1
used: 1
inode: 4
meta_type: 2
.
.
.

What’s great here, is you can pipe this output, filter and get output like this

fiwalk practical.floppy.dd.dd | grep filename
image_filename: practical.floppy.dd.dd
filename: Docs
filename: Docs/.
filename: Docs/..
filename: Docs/Benchmarks.xls
filename: Docs/Computer_Build.xml
filename: Docs/Law.doc
filename: Docs/whyhack
filename: Docs/Private
filename: Docs/Private/.
filename: Docs/Private/..
filename: Docs/Private/ReyHalif.doc
filename: Pics
filename: Pics/.
filename: Pics/..
filename: Pics/C800x600.jpg
filename: Pics/bike2.jpg
filename: Pics/bike3.jpg
filename: Pics/matrixs3.jpg
filename: Pics/mulewheelie.gif
filename: Pics/Stoppie.gif
filename: ARP.EXE
filename: FTP.EXE
filename: loveletter.virus
filename: ouchy.dat
filename: snoof.gz
filename: $MBR
filename: $FAT1
filename: $FAT2
filename: $OrphanFiles

Even better, put this information into xml and now you can begin automating sleuthing scripts.

fiwalk -x practical.floppy.dd.dd > floppy.xml

I’ll leave out the lengthy output here Try it yourself.