OpenSSH is a common tool for most of network and system administrators. It is used daily to open remote sessions on hosts to perform administrative tasks. But, it is also used to automate tasks between trusted hosts. Based on public/private key pairs, hosts can exchange data or execute commands via
Category: Pentesting
BackTrack4-R1 + AWUS036NH = Win!
This is a long story… but it is finally solved thanks to the developers of the BackTrack distribution! For a long time, I used a good old Orinoco PCMCIA card to play around with WiFi networks. But it died and I was looking for a brand new toy. After reviewing
Attacking by Obscurity
Everybody agrees to consider “security by obscurity” a false sense of security. By using this principle, the security of an information system in (falsely) increased by hiding sensitive details. Such information can be removed like: by altering the application welcome banner (in Apache, sendmail, etc), by changing the default port
Vulnerability Scanner within Nmap
Port and vulnerability scanners are common tools used by good as bad guys. Performing a port scanning is one of the first operations required to find potential vulnerabilities on a target system. That’s why vulnerability scanners have built-in port scanners. Writing a port scanner is really easy with a few
Detecting Rogue Gateways on a LAN
There was an interesting thread on the pentest@securityfocus.com mailing list a few days ago. A member asked how to detect illegal or “rogue” gateways in a big international organization. Rogue devices can be seen from different point of views. For the network administrators or the security auditors, it’s really a
Social Dictionary Generator
Fighting weak passwords is a pain for all security professionals. Security awareness trainings may help your users to increase the strength of their passwords. That’s the main problem: humans have difficulty to remember complex informations like strings of characters and numbers. That’s also why the DNS was invented: it’s much