Checking a sample of South African ID Numbers in Excel

Posted on March 11, 2015

All South African Identity numbers have built in validation digits. The formula to check these isn’t a secret. This afternoon I needed to check a list of ID numbers to ensure they were all valid and was most grateful to Robert MacLean (and Riaan Pretorius) for their work in putting together (and sharing) an excel sheet which can validate the numbers. Just copy and paste in your sample.

Find a copy of this useful spreadsheet here : ID Number checker

Cross posted on ITSec’s blog.

 

Visualisation of time based attacks on DMZ (videos)

Posted on August 24, 2014

Visualisation of two weeks of IPS data

Critical and high significant IPS events detected on a public facing Palto Alto device, visualised using Microsoft Excel Power Map for a period in November and December 2013.

The data is taken from daily detection summaries so although it covers a nearly two-week period has 24 hour time resolutions.

The attacks are differentiated between Spyware and Vulnerability.

Note the fairly constant levels of vulnerability attacks from China, Turkey & Indonesia.

The practical application of such a visualisation in detecting or preventing attacks is limited, however, it provides an effective mechanism to explain the level of attack (directed and random) against the organisation on a pretty much constant basis.

 

 

Visualisation of 24 hours of IPS data

Critical and high significant IPS events detected on a public facing Palto Alto device, visualised using Microsoft Excel Power Map for a 24 hour period on the 10th and 11th December 2013.

The source data is per event detected over that 24 hour period.

The attacks are differentiated between Spyware and Vulnerability.

The video shows two types of visualisation, first a “phased decay” where the attack is plotted and then fades away if not detected. This shows the attacks coming and going across the globe with the exception of China which is fairly constant source of attack.

The second segment shows a continuous growth in the sizes of the attack bubbles over the period. This illustrates the overall relative number of attacks from the various sources.

Note the main sources of vulnerability attacks being China, Turkey, Argentina & Indonesia.

The practical application of such a visualisation in detecting or preventing attacks is limited, however, it provides an effective mechanism to explain the level of attack (directed and random) against the organisation on a pretty much constant basis.

 

Excel Tool to download Twitter Statistics

Posted on January 20, 2013

I have been interested in analysing various Twitter stats and producing lists of top twitter users (j-j.co.za/toptwits) for some time now and been using various tools to do so. This has been challenging and the results I have been producing have been limited as a result. The tool I have used most is NodeXL,which is more for mapping social networks but has the side effect of being able to download “extended statistics” for each of the Nodes (people) on the network. This however does not give me all of the information I wanted and also works on screen names rather than the Twitter ID’s, so if someone changes their name they fall off my list.

Searching on-line I found that Google Docs spreadsheet provides a function ImportXML which a number of people have been using to bring XML results into a spreadsheet. It appears to have some limits (50 calls per document) which at the time seemed problematic since I was wanting to work with much larger lists. I know better understand some of the Twitter API calls so that limit is less extreme than I first though. Nonetheless I wanted to work in Excel as I am more comfortable with it.

I found online that Excel can import an XML document, and that you can enter a URL there, which includes the ability to enter the Twitter API calls directly. Using the macro recorder I then figured out the calls and put some basic scripting around it to take a column of screen names, break it up into batches of 25 and then execute the XMLImport function for each batch and insert the results into the sheet.

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