IT Dribble

While it may sound silly this is whats happening with vendors implementation of providing a ‘convenient’ end user solution for ‘security’. Imagine your local bank and the massive safe that lives within the walls of that building. Now think of the huge steel vault door that protects the banks (well actually, your) money – pretty safe huh? Wrong. (more…)

awk ‘/:/ {name=$1} ; /lastu/ {print name $3}’ /input/filename

So I was having a hunt around for the modified version of Netcat which is called Ncat developed by the lovely people who wrote the infamous port scanner Nmap. I needed the Win32 binaries for it and after a brief internet trowel it couldn’t be found. So I downloaded the source and compiled it and made it presentable for download for everyone else. Version 1 – Packed with UPX Packer. Version 2 – Not Packed. Happy Ncatting

It seems that John the Ripper (JtR) has been out done with some of the latest hashing cracking software in the business! Hashcat and oclHashcat (hashcat.net) is forging ahead with over 33 and 13 hash types respectivley which are able to be cracked. Did I mention oclHashcat uses the GPU of CUDA based video cards for seriously parallel processing? Well it does.

I came across a Windows 7 Skins for KDE – It looked really….exact but the install script was crap it installed a new user and was only Kubuntu based and was pretty brutal at overwriting stuff so I (more…)

After ‘successfully’ upgrading from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12 (64bit) on my laptop KDE4 failed to start with error: Kstartupconfig4 does not exist or fails. The error code is 127.

Gnome still worked but KDE and KDE apps failed to load. Trying to run dolphin in terminal produced libssl.so.8 & libcrypto.so.8 shared library missing errors.

The resolution is put in the symbolic links that are missing

cd /usr/lib64 (64bit) and /usr/lib (32bit)
ln -s libssl.so.1.0.0 libssl.so.8
ln -s libcrypto.so.1.0.0 libcrypto.so.8

and reboot

Today at work a client he needed to access a cisco router but no-one new the password but we had the config files saved which included the MD5 hashes of the enable and enable secret passwords. So I set about cracking the hashes, which was done successfully btw, following on from that I then remembered a John the Ripper MPI patch which I had seen some time ago I ended getting it going at home and the results are good!

Directions for installation are as follows (on Fedora 11)

yum install mpich2 mpich2-devel
wget http://www.bindshell.net/tools/johntheripper/john-1.7.2-bp17-mpi8.tar.gz
tar -zxvf john-1.7.2-bp17-mpi8.tar.gz
cd john-1.7.2-bp17/src
make linux-x86-64 (for 64bit version duh!)
cd ../run
touch ~/.mpd.conf && echo "MPD_SECRETWORD=secret" > ~/.mpd.conf && chmod 600 ~/.mpd.conf
mpd &
mpiexec.py -n 4 -path ./ -wdir ./ ./john --test

Initial Benchmarking looks good. Below is 1 core vs 4 cores

Traditional DES [128/128 BS SSE2-16]
1591K c/s real, 1594K c/s virtual / 6131K c/s real, 6380K c/s virtual
BSDI DES (x725) [128/128 BS SSE2-16]
Many salts: 53222 c/s real, 53329 c/s virtual / Many salts: 207665 c/s real, 215407 c/s virtual
FreeBSD MD5 [32/64 X2]
Raw: 9718 c/s real, 9816 c/s virtual / Raw: 37720 c/s real, 39581 c/s virtual
mysql [mysql]
Raw: 2571K c/s real, 2571K c/s virtual / Raw: 9397K c/s real, 10254K c/s virtual

About a 100% increase per core! Life is good!

Seems I’m in fix it mode tonight – amazing what you get done when you don’t have women distracting you!
Anyway it seems that my fail2ban has been broken for quite a while, the resolution of this was me running:
fail2ban-client -x start and that worked ok

So I modified /usr/sbin/rcfail2ban and added the line:
[ -e $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET ] && rm $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET;

Here it is in context:

case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "Starting Fail2Ban "
[ -e $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET ] && rm $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET;
/sbin/startproc $FAIL2BAN_BIN start &>/dev/null
rc_status -v

Well you get the drift. Happy Banning!

Recently I came across a new file format called RSDF, these appear to be txt files which have a bunch of links in them, so called link containers.  I wanted to access the URLS in these files, but I didnt really want to entrust my computer to just “any” application. (more…)

Hooray! I did it!
I have managed to boot my bootable usb pendrive (BackTrack 3) under QEMU within Windows XP.

For those of you who want the magic one liner here you are:

qemu.exe -L . -m 512 -std-vga -hda \\\\.\\PhysicalDrive2 -soundhw all -localtime -M pc -kernel ../../boot/vmlinuz -initrd ../../boot/initrd.gz -append "root=/dev/ram0 rw initrd=../../boot/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=6666 vga=0x317"

• This gives you TextMode with 512 MB Ram and Mouse Support!!
• You will need to change PhysicalDrive2 to what ever drive number your USB key is. (Hint look under the DiskManagment snap-in)
• You require administrative rights also
• My Qemu directory lives under USBDriveLetter\BT3\QEMU FYI
• QEMU Version Win32 PreCompiled 0.9.1

Hopefully this saves you a few hours