Security
Cool Free Tool For Wardriving
Nov 29th
I think it was in 2006 I attended my first hacker convention in San Diego called Toorcon. It was pretty cool because the company I worked for at the time was a sponsor, so they paid for my admission in. I will never forget one of the guys that I saw there. Dude was bald with a douchy bluetooth headset on, a military M1 jacket with cammo pants, sunglasses indoors, combat boots, and of course a backpack with a friggin’ antenna coming out of the back that was easily six feet tall. The dude was a serious wardriver.
What is wardriving you ask? According to Wikipedia:
Wardriving is the act of searching for Wi-Fi wireless networks by a person in a moving vehicle, using a portable computer, smartphone or PDA…
…Wardriving originated from wardialing, a technique popularized by a character played by Matthew Broderick in the film WarGames, and named after that film. Wardialing in this context refers to the practice of using a computer to dial many phone numbers in the hopes of finding an active modem.
Basically you drive around, and look for open wireless networks. Simple right?
Now I’m not saying you need to be like the guy at the hacker convention, but sometimes it’s nice to know where in town you can go to catch some free Internet in case you have to send an emergency Tweet, or update Facebook at the drop of the hat.
Well I found a cool tool that runs on Windows that will automatically try find and connect to open wireless networks when you’re in range, and will alert you to stop when it has found an open access point and is trying to connect.
The tool is called outSSIDer, and you can get it as a free download. From their page:
outSSIDer automatically attempts to connect to any open access point that comes within range as you walk down the streets hunting for WiFi.
When an attempt is made it alerts you with sound to stand still and wait. That way you don’t need to watch the screen while walking – you can even close the laptop lid to save battery!
The connection is then verified against payment hotspots and restricted networks by trying to fetch the Google website icon.
If it fails connecting or verifying, it alerts you with the sound again and resumes scanning.
This tool is light and easy to use, and certainly a good tool to have in your wardriving goody bag. Do you go wardriving ever? What tools do you like to use? Let us know in the comments!
-=El Di Pablo=-
How To Reconstruct Shredded Paper
Nov 24th
What the hell did that title say? Reconstruct shredded paper? Yeah, that’s exactly what it said. You know those little machines you get at Office Depot to turn your banking and financial statements into spaghetti? Well, now there is a new service that easily lets you take shreds of paper from a paper shredder and scan them into your computer. You then run it through this software, and like a friggin’ jigsaw puzzle, it pieces it back together into a legible document.
This tool is called Unshredder, and luckily it’s not free. It’s sold as a monthly license subscription for $90, or an annual package where you can save a little on the monthly cost. Since this package is aimed at criminal investigators, I’m sure that cost in nominal. For the average teen hacker, they may try to find a different method of getting your info instead of dumpster diving.
From their page:
Unshredder is the first commercial document reconstruction tool in the world! A desktop software application that will put all of the pieces back together in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually. Unshredder is as simple to use as a word processor but it unleashes the power of your computer to achieve quick, accurate results. If you are a professional investigator Unshredder is an essential tool.
Putting shredded paper back together isn’t really new. When I was in the Navy, I learned that the Iranians did this to the American embassy back in the 70′s or something. They got a hundred old ladies to sit down with shredded American secret documents and scotch taped them all back together. Nowadays the US Military uses special shredders that doesn’t turn paper into spaghetti, it turns it into friggin’ confetti… Then they burn that s#!t!
Most of us at the office aren’t going to use incinerators though, but still using a shredder with cross-cut functionality is harder to piece back together than the simple spaghetti making shredders. Just some food for thought.
Know of a free tool that does this? maybe something open source? let us know in the comments!
Firefox advises users to disable McAfee’s ScriptScan software.
Oct 5th
t’s the last thing McAfee would want users to hear about one of its products, but the Firefox browser is advising users to disable McAfee’s ScriptScan software, saying that it could cause “stability or security problems.”
SriptScan ships with McAfee’s VirusScan antivirus program. It’s designed to keep Web surfer’s safe by scanning for any malicious scripting code that might be running in the browser. But according to Mozilla it has an unintended side-effect: It can cause Firefox to crash… a lot.
In a note posted to its website, Mozilla said that the add-on “causes a high volume of crashes,” and is “strongly encouraging” users to disable the software. The warning applies to all users of version 14.4.0 and below of the plugin, Mozilla said.
The Firefox browser started popping up warning messages Monday, advising that users disable the software
In McAfee user forums, there is a smattering of complaints about the Firefox problem.
The problem affects Firefox 7 users, according to Francie Coulter, a McAfee spokeswoman. “McAfee has identified the cause and is working actively with the Firefox team to resolve this issue and expects to roll out an update shortly,” she said in an email message.
[Via ITWorld]
Cant open the task manager on your Windows machine? I can help!
Jul 9th
I was dealing with some nasty infections over the last few days and the malware authors are getting better and sneakier on a daily basis. I was unable to reverse their shenanigans that blocked me from using task manager to kill the bad tasks. I was working crippled from the command line using taskkill /IM but once I found this little application that gave me back my task manager I was back in business.
It is called RRT and can be downloaded from here. Once you run it you will see a screen that looks like this:
Simply check Task Manager and hit Remove. That’s it! Happy Hunting Guys!
Recover your lost Windows 7, XP, Vista or 2000 Passwords.
Jul 7th
I orginally wrote about this way back when in 2006 when AskTheAdmin was just born. Now here I am 4 years later writing about the same tool! This is not just any tool though this is the Offline NT Password Recovery Boot CD. By downloading this ISO and burning it to a cd – you can then boot to this CD and change or blank out passwords by loading the SAM database offline hence the name offline password recovery.
It is as simple as booting to the CD, choosing the account and doing the deed. You write your changes back to the drive and reboot.
When you are back at the Windows login screen you will now be able to use the password you enetered or a blank password (just hit enter)
Here are the links to download the image:
- cd100627.zip (~4MB) – Bootable CD image. (md5sum: 6d80cdfbba97457e413f95a3554d9524 cd100627.zip)
- cd080802.zip (~3MB) – Previous version CD image. (md5sum: 33ecd38263f935b82e7b2e3e9f5de563)
and there is even a Floppy Disk release that is no longer updated:
Floppy release (not updated anymore), see below on how to use them
- bd080526.zip (~1.4M) – Bootdisk image (md5sum: 37889e4c540504e59132bdcdfe7f9bb7)
- drivers1-080526.zip (~310K) – Disk drivers (mostly PATA/SATA) (md5sum: 72ac1731c6ba735d0ac2746a30dbc3ee)
- drivers2-080526.zip (~1.2M) – Disk drivers (mostly SCSI) (md5sum: 30172bec657c85a5f1a0b43601452fb7)
This CD has saved my ass a number of times! Do you have another method of recovering lost passwords? We would love to hear about them in the comments! You can also check out their website for FAQ’s and other helpful hints here.
Have you seen this post on opening a command prompt during a windows install? Using this you can start a recovery install jump to a command prompt and run:
control userpasswords2
and bingo bango you can change your passwords!
Hack Windows Passwords in Win 7 (Video)
Mar 9th
We as administrators need tools. That is just a fact of life, and that is one of the reasons I just released Bauer-Puntu Linux 9.10R2.
I always have a copy of it on my USB stick, so I figured why not add some tools. One of them being a Windows password reset tool! Using this tool we can easily hack the Windows 7 Administrator password.
In this video episode of Bauer-Power (Which Karl so graciously let me re-post here) I show you how easy it is to hack Windows passwords using Bauer-Puntu Linux!
Besides Windows password hacking, Bauer-Puntu also gives you tools for:
- File recovery
- File shredding
- Hard drive wiping
- Disk imaging
- Disk partitioning
- Offline Virus Scan
Version 10.04 will be coming out soon. What other kinds of tools do you want to see on it? Like a different Live CD/USB distro? What is your favorite? Hit us up in the comments!
By ElDiPablo of Bauer-Power
