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Archive - Tutorials Category

Secure your wireless networks!

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

wifi-logoI know a lot of people still run their wireless routers without any encryption whatsoever. You really shouldn’t do this. Why? Well, there are some people that use wireless networks to do malicious things. Maybe they’ll do a little hacking on your network, maybe buy some things with stolen credit cards, the list goes on. People with insecure networks often have the default password on their router, therefore anyone connecting to your access point can access your router! They could also be using packet sniffers sniffing out data you’re putting on the Internet. If you have a bandwidth cap, they’re stealing bandwidth you could be using.

Why leave yourself open to these kinds of threats? Generally all it takes is WEP encryption, which isn’t the most secure, but secure enough that most people wont touch it. Most router addresses are 192.168.1.1, some are a little different. You can look up these details on the Internet if you don’t have the manual handy. Just go into wireless security, WEP, enter a passphrase, generate, and select a default key. Then when you connect, insert that key to get onto your network. Simple as that.

Back when I was a wardriver, I found that almost 80% of wireless networks in my area were insecure. That percent may have changed, but I still see a lot of insecure networks out there. It’s unacceptable!

Introductory Reverse Code Engineering Tutorial

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

This has to be one of the easiest crackme’s I’ve found, it’s called Diablo’s Orion crackme 1. The only way you could really fail is if you have no knowledge whatsoever. The problem is, some programs protections are just as simple. Anyway, we want to load up the program in ollydbg.

crackme1

Then we hit play, the screen comes up asking for a code.

crackme2

That’s good, lets give it a code. I’ll put something random like cheesepie, and hit Ok.

crackme3

Now I’m going to pause the program in ollydbg by hitting the “pause” button in ollydbg. Then I’ll just view all the calls made through the call stack.

crackme4

Let’s go to 00439002  and set a break point at PUSHEBP, the beginning of the command. (By double clicking on the line in the dissembler) Now I’m going to press play on the program and try entering my code, cheesepie again.  Bam! It breaks on my break point.

crackme6What’s this? The registers already say “Wrong Code! Try again”. OK well I think it’s time to go back to the call stack and see if there’s something before that.

crackme7There is. Let’s go to 004016EC.

crackme8Again, I’m going to set a memory break point at the top of the command at PUSHEBP. I’m going to get rid of my old break point by accessing the B (Breakpoints) in ollydbg. Just looking through the code I see something interesting. It seems there’s some ASCII text possibly being compared to something. Still, I’m going to rerun the program and break on my new break point.

crackme91

It looks like there’s a JE coditional jump that would give me the happy message, so I could probably just change this line to “jmp” which just jumps always over the unhappy message. So I could do that, but I’m not going to bother. The code is for the crackme is actually standing right in front of me, so why not use that.

crackme10***vErYeAsY*** is the code.

crackme11It also goes on to show a naked woman after you hit ok  so if you’re offended by that I don’t think you should try this crackme. It took me all of 5-10mins to get past this kind of protection, therefore I’m calling it preschool stuff. If you’re interested and want to learn more, I suggest you head over to tuts4you.com and do Lena’s tutorials. I’ve done them all myself, but I feel like I need to do them again to be honest. I only reverse for fun, there’s many like me out there.

A goal of mine is to someday be able to reverse trojans/malware because I find them very interesting. That kind of thing could be done with IDA Pro or in a VMWare box, I’m guessing. They’re usually packed and spliced with something, and unpacking I’m not so good at, but that’s a major thing in reversing.

Entrecard – What you should know

Friday, December 19th, 2008

You should know that people that are doing 300 Drops a day (like myself :D ) are not manually clicking through entrecard. Some have lists of people made up for their drops. My method is a little different, and I think maybe a little better, I don’t know. Timing is also important, the best time to drop is 12AM eastern. I don’t do this all the time, but I do it when I can. I need sleep just like everyone else :)   Depending on the times of my drops, I might just do today’s or I might do today’s and yesterdays. This is because when I drop at midnight, I know I won’t be missing anyone that dropped me that day. When I drop at 4PM or so, I would be missing people that dropped me the day before. Below is a short tutorial to show you how to get 300 drops done in about 20 minutes.

NoScript

NoScript is a plugin for FireFox that blocks all scripts on pages. You have to disable script blocking on entrecard.com and amazonaws.com

noscript

Next, you have to MAKE SURE that temporarily allow top-level sites by default is clicked. It was blocking entrecard still and I wondered why, this option makes that problem go away.

noscript2

Firefox Settings

Go to Tools>Options>Content and add exceptions entrecard.com and amazonaws.com to the “Load images automatically” option. Then disable that optioin. Also uncheck “Enable Java”.

firefox1firefox2

Linky

Linky is a plugin for firefox that allows you to select links from a page. First, what I do is go into my drops inbox and select all the people who have dropped me. Then I use linky to open all selected links in tabs.

linkylinky2

I also drop randomly a lot, so I just go into campaign, select all the links in “New” , “Cheap” , or “Random” for about 12 rows. The only issue I have with that is I have to manually uncheck the details link, but I’ve been thinking about making an autoit script for that. The amount of tabs you can have will probably depend on how much RAM you have in your computer.

Note that I still browse blogs and drop comments after I’ve dropped my cards. I highly doubt anyone who drops 300 cards is doing everything manually, that would take an eternity :) I wouldn’t have anytime to blog or work on my site.

Let me know if I missed anything, this should be very similar to other guides out there, but I use linky instead of some other things people do. I have to thank nukeit.org for linky, I believe he mentioned it in one of his blog entries.

Tips on Running Multiple Operating Systems, Linux, Hackintosh, multiple Windows versions

Monday, December 15th, 2008

General things needed for multiple OSes

Setting up a multiple OS platform for is pretty straightforward. I recommend you buy another hard drive, because in my experience partitions are nothing but trouble. If you want to go with partitions, then just use tools to do so, there are many of them out there I used to use Partition Magic, but you can easily do this from the DOS prompt as well.

Linux

Linux is a highly useful operating system, with many programming tools pre-installed, and it’s really not that hard to get used to. (for me)

I’ve tried many different distributions of Linux, including SuSe, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Slackware Linux. Slackware Linux is my favorite Linux distribution. Why? It’s stable, it gets the job done. I don’t need all the fancy tools they include in Ubuntu. Often I will also install Dropline Gnome onto Slackware, and choose whether I want to run KDE or Gnome. Slackware Linux also offers a few other GUI setups that are less resource hungry, if your PC isn’t up to date, Linux and slackware is the best bet for you.

Linux generally requires an Ext3 file system, but there are others that it uses as well, so in partition magic select that when you go to make the partition, if you’re doing it that way, if you’ve purchased an entirely new hard drive, then continue on.

Now, you’ve successfully partitioned your hard drive or bought a new one. What’s next? Well, just download the distribution you want, burn onto a CD and look into your motherboard for directions on booting from the CD drive.  Insert the disc during start up, and wallah start installing Linux.

You might need to format your hard drive to Ext3, or if you made a partition, it should already be formatted. Just install everything, it will also most likely install grub or lilo, (I’ve used both) install that to your boot sector on your main drive. You should be about done now, the PC will restart, and you will be prompted to select Windows or Linux. Depending on your distribution, it may require some setup to get into the gui. Slackware linux generally requires a bit of command line work before you can access the GUI, so you’ll have to read a bit. (here) That guide helped me when I first took on the challenge of installing slackware, interestingly enough, slackware was the first distribution of Linux I ever installed.

Hackintosh

Hackintosh is another story alltogether, the same applies for setting up partitions or a new hard drive however. You may have to try multiple discs of hackintosh before the automated installer works for your system. You also have to check to see if your computer components are compatible with Hackintosh. To do this, I advise you read over a few things at insanelymac. There’s also a “legality” issue with running hackintosh, so I’m not promoting it or anything ;) I may or may not have installed hackintosh, I can’t remember :P

You’re going to have to create a “blank” partition, where it has not been formatted. This is because Partition Magic does not format to the Mac OSX file system, and neither does any other utility. This is done through the installation. Also, if you’ve purchased a different hard drive, then just leave it unformatted. Hackintosh is quite touchy with hardware compatibility, because it’s expecting your computer to be a mac, and macs basically just have USB ports. You’ll have to look for modification scripts on insanelymac, or if they don’t exist, then your hardware wont work and don’t continue. Many people purchase certain components on purpose to make it 100% hackintosh compatible, because their system will be MUCH cheaper than a Mac, but a lot of manual work is required. I’ve never been 100% hackintosh compatible myself.

Anyway, once the installation is done, then you might have to go into the bios and select the drive that hackintosh was installed on to be booted first. There are some utilities that can be modified to make dual booting with hackintosh work without doing it this way, but it is somewhat difficult.

Windows

Multi-booting with different versions of windows is a real pain. I currently have Vista and XP installed on separate hard drives, and have not had any issues, but it’s a real pain to setup. Each windows version will vary, Vista is very difficult to get working with dual-boot configurations. It requires some editing of the boot.ini file. Also, some of the boot files from windows XP have to be transferred to the Vista hard drive. This is because it is booting Vista first, and using the Vista bootloader. From there you select either XP or Vista. I can try to help you if you really want this kind of setup, but I’m not going to delve into it here, unless I get a request then I will edit this with the needed info. (Maybe I’m being lazy not wanting to look things up.. What you see here all came from my head :D )

There are some tools out there that can help you out with multiple Windows versions, I believe that every version except Vista works similar to Linux, but you have to edit the boot.ini file, or install one of the many OS selector applications out there.

Thanks, I hope you enjoyed reading this, and if you need help, I’m here, just go post in the forums :)

A goal of mine someday is to go Quad Boot. I love to mess around with different operating systems and have a choice when I boot up :) This is a general overview, to get you started on the road to multiple OSes, if I get a good response on this article I might make a more complete tutorial.

Small update: It seems Ubuntu has made it so you no longer have to partition your hard drive in order to install it. It will run with windows, apparently. I’m going to test this out soon.