Check For Vulnerable Printers |  
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Travis Altman had a great idea on building a Python script to scan internal networks for printers that have default settings. You should definitely check out his article.
Most Dangerous Search Terms |
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Which search terms would make it on the list if you would have to compile a list of the ten most dangerous web search terms? Most users would probably add search terms like warez, cracks and sex when asked to compile a top ten list. A recent McAfee study on the other hand came to a completely different conclusion. The ten most dangerous web search terms are everyday search terms that cannot be connected easily with malicious intent. The top spot is occupied by searches for Screensavers, followed by free games, work from home and Rihanna with Barrack Obama, the iPhone and Taxes in the list as well. It should however be noted that the top 10 list is made up of categories and not single search terms.
These search terms are more dangerous than, lets say warez, because most users know that warez can lead to malicious software quite easily while they most likely do not suspect the same from these popular search terms.
The McAfee researches searched for more than 2600 popular keywords examining the first five pages of results across five popular search engines with McAfee’s Site Advisor technology. The top 50 most dangerous search terms in the US were listed in the research paper as well. The phrase “word unscrambler” is taking up the top spot followed by lyrics, myspace and free music downloads.
The researches discovered that lyrics and free made up the two most category-specific risks on the web these days. The research paper can be downloaded directly at McAfee.
20 WordPress Security Plugins |
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1. Secure WordPress
It will help secure WordPress installation by removing miscellaneous items after the installation process which may aid hackers. It will remove error information from the login-page and also remove or change the WP-version data but leave it unchanged in the admin area. It is suggested to remove any unwanted information to the non-admin for security reasons so it will remove update information about plugins, themes and core update information. Secure WordPress will add a blank index.html to the plug-in directory such that if anyone is trying to view the contents of the directory they will be viewing a blank page instead of the contents.
2. Force SSL
Having a secure SSL connection to communicate with your users is beneficial. To enable this, your site must be SSL enabled first. To implement this, you need to buy the SSL certificate. By installing this plug-in it will force your user browser to connect to your site via a SSL connection. This eliminates any third party attacks between the connection and all the data that is transmitted to and from the site will be encrypted for better security.
3. Chap Secure Login
If you are not having a secure connection like SSL to protect your password , then you can use this plug-in for encrypting passwords. It will use the Chap protocol to hide the passwords and transmit it encrypted. The only information that is transmitted unencrypted is your username. Protecting password will give full security because password leaks will enable the hacker the gain full control of your WordPress blog.
4. HTTP Authentication
The HTTP Authentication plugin allows you to use existing means of authenticating users for WordPress. This includes Apache’s basic HTTP authentication module and many others.
5. Anonymous WordPress Plugin
All the WordPress versions 2.3 and above have the feature to get automatic updates for plugins. During this process it will send some of your information like your blog’s URL, version number, list of installed plugins and activated plugins to WordPress.org. This information could be of potential use for hackers. So to avoid this, installing Anonymous WordPress plug-in is a feasible option. It will strip off your blog’s URL and version number and empty the activated plugins list. This plug-in is compatible with WordPress 2.3 and above.
6. Login Encrypt
This will help encrypt the login information using the complex DES and RSA combination. It uses the JavaScript appended and encrypted the password of the user and generates a unique DES key. And by using this key, user can have secure login each time they login to your blog.
7. Admin SSL
This plug-in will work with both the private and shared SSL connections and it will force a SSL connection in every page where password can or has to be entered. It is very helpful to protect the admin area, posts and all the pages of your WordPress installation and secure the login page. This plug-in works on WordPress 2.2 to 2.7.
8. AskApache Password Protect
It will block the bots and creates a safe wall for any vulnerability your WordPress blog may have. It will protect your password as well as your WordPress directories like the wp-includes, wp-content, etc. It is like placing your WordPress blog behind a security wall.
9. TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker)
TAC stands for Theme Authenticity Checker. Currently, TAC searches the source files of every installed theme for signs of malicious code. If such code is found, TAC displays the path to the theme file, the line number, and a small snippet of the suspect code. As of v1.3 TAC also searches for and displays static links.
10. Invisible Defender
This plugin protects registration, login and comment forms from spambots by adding two extra fields hidden by CSS. This approach gave me 100% anti-spam protection on one of my sites.
11. Semisecure Login Reimagined
Semisecure Login Reimagined increases the security of the login process using an RSA public-key to encrypt the password on the client-side when a user logs in. The server side then decrypts the encrypted password with the private key. JavaScript is required to enable encryption. It is most useful for situations where SSL is not available, but the administrator wishes to have some additional security measures in place without sacrificing convenience.
12. Stealth Login
This plugin allows you to create custom URLs for logging in, logging out, administration and registering for your WordPress blog. Instead of advertising your login url on your homepage, you can create a url of your choice that can be easier to remember than wp-login.php, for example you could set your login url to http://www.myblog.com/login for an easy way to login to your website.
13. WordPress File Monitor
Monitors your WordPress installation for added/deleted/changed files. When a change is detected an email alert can be sent to a specified address.
14. WordPress Firewall Plugin
This WordPress plugin investigates web requests with simple WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious attacks. There exist a few powerful generic modules that do this; but they’re not always installed on web servers, and difficult to configure.
It intelligently whitelists and blacklists pathological-looking phrases based on which field they appear within in a page request (unknown/numeric parameters vs. known post bodies, comment bodies, etc.)
15. WordPress Guard Plugin
Angsuman’s WordPress Guard Plugin is a must-have WordPress security plugin that protects the vulnerable areas of your blog from outside access with an additional layer of security.
16. WP-Dephorm
wp-dephorm protects your users from the prying eyes of phorm. This is achieved by setting a cookie to opt out of the phorm information mining. Your blog viewers will not have their information stored and used in marketing campaigns whilst viewing your site.
17. WP Security Scan
Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.
-passwords
-file permissions
-database security
-version hiding
-WordPress admin protection/security
-removes WP Generator META tag from core code
18. AntiVirus
AntiVirus for WordPress is a smart and effective solution to protect your blog against exploits and spam injections. AntiVirus protection for your blog.
19. WordPress Exploit Scanner
This plugin searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.
It does not remove anything. That is left to the user to do.
20. Paranoid911
Paranoid911 checks your wordpress installation for changes and sends you an email when changes occur.
How to know if you are infected |
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Per Net-Security
1. My computer speaks to me. There are all types of pop-ups and messages on the desktop either advertising things, saying that the PC is infected and needs protection… This is a typical, surefire case of an infection. There is either spyware on the computer, or it has been infected by a fake antivirus (also called “rogueware”).
2. My computer is running extremely slowly. This could be a symptom of many things, including infection by a virus. If it has been infected by a virus, worm or Trojan, among other things, which are running on the computer, they could be running tasks that consume a lot of resources, making the system run more slowly than usual.
3. Applications won’t start. How many times have you tried to run an application from the start menu or desktop and nothing happens? Sometimes another program might even run. As in the previous case, this could be another type of problem, but at the very least it’s a symptom that tells you that something is wrong.
4. I cannot connect to the Internet or it runs very slowly. Loss of Internet communication is another common symptom of infection, although it could also be due to a problem with your service provider or router. You might also have a connection that runs much more slowly than usual. If you have been infected, the malware could be connecting to a URL or opening separate connection sessions, thereby reducing your available bandwidth or making it practically impossible to use the Internet.
5. When I connect to the Internet, all types of windows open or the browser displays pages I have not requested. This is another certain sign of infection. Many threats are designed to redirect traffic to certain websites against the user’s will, and can even spoof Web pages, making you think you are on a legitimate site when really you have been taken to a malicious imitation.
6. Where have my files gone? Hopefully nobody will be asking this type of question, although there are still some threats around designed to delete or encrypt information, to move documents from one place to another- If you find yourself in this situation, you really ought to start worrying.
7. My antivirus has disappeared, my firewall is disabled. Another typical characteristic of many threats is that they disable security systems installed on computers. Perhaps if one thing shuts down it might just be a specific software failure; but if all your security components are disabled, you are almost certainly infected.
8.My computer is speaking a strange language. If the language of certain applications changes, the screen appears back-to-front, strange insects start ‘eating’ the desktop… you might just have an infected system.
9. Library files for running games, programs, etc. have disappeared from my computer. Once again, this could be a sign of infection, although it could also be down to incomplete or incorrect installation of programs.
10. My computer has gone mad… literally. If the computer starts acting on its own, you suddenly find your system has been sending emails without your knowledge, Internet sessions or applications open sporadically on their own – your system could be compromised by malware.
PDF Password Cracking |
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Have you ever received a PDF file and was presented with a pesky PASSWORD alert window?
PDF files can be protected and encrypted with a password to deny unauthorized access and reading, especially sensitive private information. However, the password protection can sometimes lock out owner yourself, the legitimate author or its intended recipients from opening the PDF files, if you lost or forget the password required to open the document.
Even though there are TONS of commercial products out there to help you out, why pay for them? Especially when you have PDFCRACK.
PDFCrack is a GNU/Linux open source (GPL) PDF password cracker for recovering passwords and content from PDF files which have been locked and protected with lost or forgotten password. PDFCrack is command line driven without any external dependencies, and use guessing or password cracking method of dictionary attack and brute force attack. PDF Crack supports and works on Linux and other POSIX-compatible systems, and a Windows binary version has also been ported and compiled with Cygwin, a Linux-like environment for Windows.
About PDFCrack
PDFCrack is a GNU/Linux (other POSIX-compatible systems should work too) tool for recovering passwords and content from PDF-files. It is small, command line driven without external dependencies. The application is Open Source (GPL).
Features
- Supports the standard security handler (revision 2, 3 and 4) on all known PDF-versions
- Supports cracking both owner and userpasswords
- Both wordlists and bruteforcing the password is supported
- Simple permutations (currently only trying first character as Upper Case)
- Save/Load a running job
- Simple benchmarking
- Optimised search for owner-password when user-password is known\
To use PDFCrack, open a command prompt window, and run pdfcrack or pdfcrack.exe to list out all options available. The default command syntax is as follow:
pdfcrack -f filename OPTIONS
Any options is optional, and not necessary require. So to use PDFCrack to recover and crack owner password or user password of a PDF files, simply enter the following example command:
pdfcrack -f SomePDFName.pdf
Replace SomePDFName.pdf with the actual filename for the protected PDF files which you have forgot the password. To speed up the cracking process, specific minimum (-n) and maximum (-m) length for possible password, and specify the possible characters (-c) to brute force the password.
Having problems with it? Go to here!
Convert YouTube to an MP3. |
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This is not really a hack, but it is a pretty cool online application that I thought I would share with you.
It is called Dirpy.
What is Dirpy?
Dirpy Studio, which is currently in beta, is a tool that lets you download or convert your favorite YouTube videos to high quality mp3s in real-time. Dirpy Studio provides many useful features like real-time transcoding, id3 metadata tags, offsets, support for high quality formats (including HD), and more.
Dirpy also provides a powerful file search tool to help you find audio, video, archive, and executable files hosted in open directories across the web.
How does Dirpy work?
Dirpy Studio transcodes high quality YouTube videos to mp3s in real time for download. When a video is requested for download, Dirpy starts downloading the video from YouTube and in real time transcodes it to an mp3, which is made available for download to the user.
Dirpy finds files by utilizing Google’s expansive search indexes and advanced query syntax. To do this, Dirpy constructs specific search queries to try to find the best file matches hosted in open directories.
Craigslist Scams…. |
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Lately, I have been doing a lot of spring cleaning around the house. Instead of having a yard sell, I decided to first try to sell these items via Craigslist. One of the items that I am trying to sell is an old Dell laptop. Within 5 minutes of posting the ad, I received the following email.
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Ah ha!!!!! This is all starting to make sense now. At this time, people should know that this is a complete Nigerian scam. I was just curious as to how far this “Mary Cole” was going to go, so I decided to have fun and play along with her/him. And plus that, I do not even have a “PayPal” account. 
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Within a matter of 5 minutes, I received 3 emails from Paypal.
**Click the link to review the email messages.**
I then received the following emails….
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.. and then this email …
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… and then this email ..
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Just to push this scammer’s buttons, I decided to hold off on replying and see what next steps are taken. I finally received the next email from the FBI.
NOTE: This too is a complete scam. If you review the full “FROM” address, you will see that it is coming from the same fake PAYPAL email address.
So that’s about it. In a nutshell this is the same scam that many people fall for. Be careful out there.
Malware Analysis And Forensics |
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SANS Investigative Forensic Toolkit (SIFT) Workstation
The SANS SIFT Workstation is a VMware Appliance that is pre-configured with all the necessary tools to perform a detailed digital forensic examination. It is compatible with Expert Witness Format (E01), Advanced Forensic Format (AFF), and raw (dd) evidence formats. The brand new version has been completely rebuilt on an Ubuntu base with many additional tools and capabilities that can match any modern forensic tool suite.
SIFT Workstation 2.0 Capabilities
- Ability to securely examine raw disks, multiple file systems, evidence formats. Places strict guidelines on how evidence is examined (read-only) verifying that the evidence has not changed
- File system support
- Windows (MSDOS, FAT, VFAT, NTFS)
- MAC (HFS)
- Solaris (UFS)
- Linux (EXT2/3)
- Evidence Image Support
- Expert Witness (E01)
- RAW (dd)
- Advanced Forensic Format (AFF)
- Software Includes
- The Sleuth Kit (File system Analysis Tools)
- log2timeline (Timeline Generation Tool)
- ssdeep & md5deep (Hashing Tools)
- Foremost/Scalpel (File Carving)
- WireShark (Network Forensics)
- Vinetto (thumbs.db examination)
- Pasco (IE Web History examination)
- Rifiuti (Recycle Bin examination)
- Volatility Framework (Memory Analysis)
- DFLabs PTK (GUI Front-End for Sleuthkit)
- Autopsy (GUI Front-End for Sleuthkit)
- PyFLAG (GUI Log/Disk Examination)
- Key Directories in SANS SIFT Workstation
- /forensics
- Location of the files used for the Autopsy Toolset
- /usr/local/src
- Source files for Autopsy, The Sleuth Kit, and other tools
- /usr/local/bin
- Location of the forensic pre-compiled binaries
- /cases
- Location of your collected evidence
- /mnt/hack
- Location of the mount points for the file system images
- /forensics
- Cheat Sheet can be found here.
Test Your Antivirus Solution With Spycar |
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What does Spycar do?
Spycar is a suite of tools designed to mimic spyware-like behavior, but in a benign form. Intelguardians created Spycar so anyone could test the behavior-based defenses of an anti-spyware tool. Spycar runs only on Windows, the same platform most targeted by spyware developers.
Many anti-spyware tools put all of their eggs in the signature basket. That is, the vendor detects spyware by including thousands of signatures looking for specific sequences of bits on your hard drive or in memory. Behavior-based detection, another approach, lets anti-spyware stop malicious software based on its actions, not a specific set of signatures. We wanted to see how anti-spyware tools could cope with new spyware for which they didn’t have a signature. In our own laboratory, we tested a bunch of enterprise anti-spyware tools, and found that their behavior-based defenses were seriously lacking. As long as no signature has been defined for a given piece of spyware, a lot of anti-spyware tools offer virtually no protection. We wanted to give you a chance to evaluate your own anti-spyware tool, so we released Spycar.
Is Spycar evil?
No. Every change made by Spycar is benign, designed simply to measure whether your anti-spyware tool can block or detect the change. Furthermore, Spycar includes a scorebot/clean-up application that tells you how well your anti-spyware tool defended you, and automatically undoes every alteration made by Spycar. And, remember, these alterations are all benign, and will not impact the way your machine works.
Who made Spycar?
Spycar is an outgrowth of a research project at Inguardians Labs. Ed Skoudis came up with the idea and the name, but Tom Liston did the actual implementation, taking the wacky idea and making it real. Mike Poor did all of the infrastructure work.
Access Hulu and Pandora Outside of the US |
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Sites such as Pandora and Hulu only allow users within the United States to enjoy their services. Just recently, BBC has taken a similar approach to allow only users from the UK to watch their videos. So, let’s learn how to get around this restriction.
Understanding The Restriction:
There are 2 checks that are put in place to determine where the user is attempting to access the website.
Check 1: The user’s ip address is the most obvious check put in place to restrict users from outside of the states. This alone is very easy to get around. Originally you could find a proxy server to relay the user’s internet connection. This makes it look like the user is coming from the country where the proxy server is located.
These site’s figured out that this check alone would not be suffice, so they created a different check.
Check 2: The RTMP check. User’s have to understand that flash player does not abide by the same rules as the browser’s proxy setting. Instead flash player will make 3 different attempts to contact the source site (Hulu, Pandora, BBC) and show the true IP address/Location of the user. Flash player will first try on port 1935, if this fails it will try to connect to port 443 and finally try on port 80. If you can get it to connect on port 80, then flash player WILL indeed go through the proxy server.
How To Crack The Restriction:
For this hack, you do not even need to use a Proxy server. All you need is a handy Firefox plugin called Modify Headers
Once installed, go to Tools > Modify Headers in Firefox and add a new filter by clicking on the drop-down menu and hitting “add”. In the first box, type X-Forwarded-For and in the second box, type in the IP adddress of any US web site. Leave the third box blank, and then save and enable the filter.
Next, block TCP and UDP port 1935. To do so on Mac, all you need to do is type the following in a Terminal window:
sudo ipfw add 0 deny tcp from any to any 1935
sudo ipfw add 0 deny udp from any to any 1935
Linux users can install iptables to do it through Terminal as well, with the commands:
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 1935 -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 1935 -j DROP
Windows users should be able to follow these instructions to correctly block the ports.
This method should allow access not just to Hulu, but many other US-only streaming sites. Note that this may disable Flash on other sites, so you’ll only want to enable this while you’re watching video on one of these sites.
**Information retrieved from LifeHacker **
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