Posts

Updating HP enterprise SSD firmware on Debian
I recently bought two used HP enterprise SSDs for VM storage on Proxmox. These are rebranded Intel drives, the specific ones I bought are designed for read intensive workloads because that’s what was available second hand.
David Cannings
Feb 9, 2025 7 min read Computing
cloudflared on Debian with Ansible
Today I wanted to make a web service internet facing without exposing the origin server. Cloudflare offers cloudflared, a tool that tunnels traffic from the origin server to Cloudflare’s network. This gives the benefit of Cloudflare’s protection.
David Cannings
Sep 21, 2024 1 min read Computing
Servicing a Chamsys PC Wing
After months of searching I managed to purchase a used Chamsys PC Wing from eBay at a good price. Described as “owned from new by a nightclub venue” and “cosmetically very poor” it was sold as not working.
David Cannings
Aug 26, 2024 3 min read Electronics
An interesting Callisto YARA rule
Yesterday Félix Aimé posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) a neat YARA rule to detect PDF documents. Tweet by @felixaime These documents relate to the Callisto group, which is attributed to the Russian FSB by various Western intelligence agencies.
David Cannings
Jun 26, 2024 9 min read Computing
Testing Magika

Google recently announced the release of Magika, an “AI-powered file-type identification system”. I tested this on a corpus of nearly 125k files to see how it fared.

David Cannings
Mar 24, 2024 9 min read Computing
rtfsig released
Today I released a new tool named rtfsig. rtfsig is a simple Python utility that helps create signatures for malicious RTF documents. The tool automatically generates YARA rules and makes suggestions for VirusTotal’s vtgrep based off potentially distinctive parts of RTF documents.
David Cannings
Sep 21, 2020 1 min read Computing
New GPG key

I have updated my GPG key, revoking ID 0x35076cbaa663a704 and replacing it with 0x57974c5b48a00d9b (find it on keyservers).

David Cannings
Mar 22, 2019 1 min read General, Computing
Signaturing an Authenticode anomaly with YARA

This is a local mirror of a blog written by me and originally published by NCC Group.
David Cannings
Sep 1, 2017 5 min read Computing
Solving Suko with pysmt

In a waiting room this week I opened a newspaper to find the following puzzle, named “Suko” (a trademark of Puzzler).

David Cannings
Jun 3, 2017 7 min read Computing
Why I disabled comments

During the recent site cleanup I decided to disable comments and remove (most) previous comments from the site. This post explains my reasoning.

David Cannings
May 29, 2017 2 min read General