There has been some discussion about the topic earlier, but today I ran into this article at theregister.co.uk website. Seems that the law has now been passed that will ban creating, using or distributing tools that are used by security professionals and sys-admins, aka "hacking tools".
This will definitely take research underground and most probably causes more harm than good. When and how many countries will follow suit? How many have already implemented similar kind of laws?
May 30, 2007
May 26, 2007
Virtual machines
I was sick for a week and now feeling better. During that time I took the time to install a few virtual machines on VMWare. I did the install of my XP Pro (with IIS), Ubuntu 7.04 (LAMP) and Solaris 10, for research purposes (whenever I get the time).
Mainly I thought about putting different kind of web environments (and web-apps) to see better how these behave ( in a good and bad way ;). I also installed RedHat Linux 8.0 and BackTrack virtual machines as supportive tools for a training I have been thinking of keeping.
As a technical note, BackTrack can't really be used to its full extent on VMWare, like wireless activities, and tends to be a bit slow. However, it suits well for non-wireless activities and keeps your main OS from being cluttered with tons of tools. For wireless activities I'd suggest getting a large USB stick and then running BackTrack from the Live CD.
Mainly I thought about putting different kind of web environments (and web-apps) to see better how these behave ( in a good and bad way ;). I also installed RedHat Linux 8.0 and BackTrack virtual machines as supportive tools for a training I have been thinking of keeping.
As a technical note, BackTrack can't really be used to its full extent on VMWare, like wireless activities, and tends to be a bit slow. However, it suits well for non-wireless activities and keeps your main OS from being cluttered with tons of tools. For wireless activities I'd suggest getting a large USB stick and then running BackTrack from the Live CD.
May 16, 2007
Some old updates and ranting
I decided to add a short description of the contribution I have done to ISSAF into the "research"-section of my site, as it seems that the OISSG team has forgotten to put proper credits in the document for some contributors (including me). It shouldn't be such a big deal, they probably forgot because there are so many contributors. However, from personal perspective I usually give credits where applicable, as then you will not accidentally burn bridges behind you.
I have also noticed that things that you mention or do may sometimes come back at you, but not the way you'd expect. There are these people congratulating each others because they "happened" to come up with a good idea (whom you happened to bring it up with). The only problem with this is that you don't get what you would deserve (credit, in a form or other), and in the long run tends to make you keep your thoughts to yourself.
Isn't that a bit counter-productive? Yeah yeah, it is a cruel world and everyone should give the elbow whenever given the chance :) Those are only mental bridges, right?
I have also noticed that things that you mention or do may sometimes come back at you, but not the way you'd expect. There are these people congratulating each others because they "happened" to come up with a good idea (whom you happened to bring it up with). The only problem with this is that you don't get what you would deserve (credit, in a form or other), and in the long run tends to make you keep your thoughts to yourself.
Isn't that a bit counter-productive? Yeah yeah, it is a cruel world and everyone should give the elbow whenever given the chance :) Those are only mental bridges, right?
May 6, 2007
Diginfo 0.5 has been released
Diginfo 0.5 has been released and it can be found from here. It does different kind of DNS and WHOIS queries, for information gathering purposes. It aims to be as non-intrusive as possible and uses publicly available information (the intrusive stuff has been removed from the tool). It requires the dns-python module. This basically means that zone transfer and reverse dns lookup on ip-block was removed from it. In a nutshell, it puts different queries into one tool, reducing the amount of manual work required.
Comments and feedback can be left in this blog post.
Comments and feedback can be left in this blog post.
May 5, 2007
The tool is ready (sort of)
I'm pretty much finished with the tool, it containing the features I originally thought of. Only thing left for testing is zone transfer and I can't test it without setting up a virtual host with DNS-server installed. So, it means I will not release it for a while as I have never setup a DNS-server and I have limited time on my hands to work on the setup.
Based on the testing so far, it seems to work pretty well. It might fail ugly in certain points as I haven't yet encountered all possible failure situations in the application, so I don't know what kind of exceptions I have to write. Time will show, it is now version 0.4 :)
Based on the testing so far, it seems to work pretty well. It might fail ugly in certain points as I haven't yet encountered all possible failure situations in the application, so I don't know what kind of exceptions I have to write. Time will show, it is now version 0.4 :)
May 3, 2007
Old "project" revived
I picked up an old "project" I quit working on a year ago, and begun re-writing it in Python. It is basically a tool to gather different kind of information of an IP-address or hostname, digging up (reverse) DNS, aliases, name-servers, mail-servers, different kind of whois-information and so on.
This week I have used a couple of evenings for coding and almost reached the point where I dropped off a year ago (the whois part I copied directly from someones example code and it was a big part). I have to say that Python is quite an effective tool to write stuff with, also without prior experience (as long as some basic concepts are known). Maybe such tools already exists, maybe not, but I consider it also as a beneficial coding exercise.
The reason I started writing the tool in the first place was to have a convenient way of doing information gathering in a semi-automated way, but somehow I ran out of time or forgot about it. Maybe it would benefit pentesters and incident response people the most, but also sysadmins etc who are interested in where those connections are coming from.
This week I have used a couple of evenings for coding and almost reached the point where I dropped off a year ago (the whois part I copied directly from someones example code and it was a big part). I have to say that Python is quite an effective tool to write stuff with, also without prior experience (as long as some basic concepts are known). Maybe such tools already exists, maybe not, but I consider it also as a beneficial coding exercise.
The reason I started writing the tool in the first place was to have a convenient way of doing information gathering in a semi-automated way, but somehow I ran out of time or forgot about it. Maybe it would benefit pentesters and incident response people the most, but also sysadmins etc who are interested in where those connections are coming from.
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