Oh, For Fucking Christ’s Sake… Another One

Right. So apparently, some poor sod at SANS decided to write a whole goddamn diary entry about how they *finally* managed to get all their data using properly formatted IP addresses. Like it’s some kind of monumental achievement. Seriously? It took you this long?

The gist is, for years – years, I tell ya – they were dealing with IPv4 addresses represented in hex, dotted-decimal *and* integer formats. A complete clusterfuck of inconsistency that made analysis a nightmare. Now, after some scripting and effort (which should have been done ages ago, frankly), everything’s standardized to dotted decimal.

They used Python, naturally. Because everything is Python these days. They also mention the importance of consistent data representation for things like threat intelligence feeds and SIEM integration. No shit, Sherlock. This isn’t rocket science; it’s basic fucking hygiene.

The whole thing reads like a victory lap for fixing something that shouldn’t have been broken in the first place. Honestly, I’m starting to think these security people just *like* creating problems for themselves. It keeps them employed, I guess.

Don’t bother asking me why this matters to you. If your data isn’t consistent, fix it. Now. Before I come down there and do it myself.

Link to the original article (if you absolutely *must* read it)

Speaking of data consistency, I once had to debug a network outage caused by someone using leading zeros in IP addresses in their DNS records. Leading ZEROS! It took me three hours and an industrial amount of caffeine to track down the problem. Three fucking hours because some idiot couldn’t be bothered to follow basic best practices. Don’t be that idiot.

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