Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the it-took-nine-months dept.
cnvogel wrote to us with the news that Phrack 55 has been released and is ready for download. It took a while, but it's worth the wait. Update: There's an HTML version of Phrack 55 here, and this is the Phrack main page.
That was hardly a troll. A troll is a post intended to illicit negative responses. I was only providing my opinion on Phrack and its place (or rather how I don't think it should have a place) on Slashdot. Maybe I didn't specify why I think the way I do and that's what makes you believe my post was a troll. So here I will expand on my opinion.
I question the ethics of the makers and writers of Phrack, and as a result I refuse to support them and fail to see why any respectable person in the computer industry would. Clearly most of those involved in the creation of Phrack come from the ranks of current and past crackers and phreakers, which both happen to be illegal activities in most countries. Phrack is not a respectable security information source like CERT or CIAC or BUGTRAQ. They don't just give information on vulnerabilities, but also information on how crackers and script kiddies can exploit those vulnerabilities. They've even provided examples.
The makers of Phrack certainly don't have any interest in advancing security, but rather their interest lies in cracking, phreaking, "warez", and other clearly illegal and unethical activities.
Normally, I respect Slashdot as a respectable source of information for technology news. Phrack is not respectable, and therefore Slashdot should not pay them any attention.
Phrack was never intended as an infosec technical journal. It was an ezine written primarily by high school kids and some college kids (the founders/editors were both around 16 when it was founded), intended for high school and college kids. It explored areas of security, computer and otherwise, that interested its authors. Hence articles covered everything from "how to pick Master locks" to discussion of Telenet's security. An important focus was always on community and learning about technology. The Phrack Loopback sections were interesting and contained useful dialog between the readers and the editors. Now they're just crap. The Phrack World News was good. The editors weren't egocentric. The list of differences could continue ad nauseum.
In short, Phrack today is not Phrack, except in name. It's a technical infosec journal that happens to have "borrowed" a name from a popular ezine with a much different purpose and editorial style. IMHO, it's a fine technical journal, but its use of the Phrack moniker is somewhat unfair and incongruous with its history. It's a cheap ploy to get more readership than a technical journal would normally get.
I agree entirely with the other guy who responded (I wish I had a short-term memory). Phrack is not some script-kiddie-house-o'-sploits. You'd have better luck looking at securityfocus.com (one of your "responsible" groups) for those. I haven't read all of it, but the articles I did read were much more into proof-of-concept and discussing technical issues than providing.c files to compile and run against your favorite hosts (note to script kiddies: nsa.gov is probably *not* the best place to test your k3wl sploit. Now back to our regular programming.) Bugtraq probably has more 'sploits, and you cite that as a "responsible" group. The only difference is that a lot of phrack contributers find holes because it's fun and challenging, not because they're getting paid to admin hosts that use swiss-cheese-security. (Not to imply that because one is getting paid to be a security consultant one can't still be a hacker, just that I get the impression that a much greater percentage of the people posting to Phrack are hackers in the pure sense just because that's what they are (in the "Gee, I wonder how this thing works" sense, not in the "d00d, let's generate some credit card numbers!", which isn't hacking at all, unless you actually reverse engineered the system to generate numbers and whatnot. Bonus points if you build a magstripe maker from household components, but anyhow). I just wish my C and assembly skills were up to the level necessary to do some of that stuff...
I'm glad that Phrack is still around. In the early years of my education, it always seemed to open my eyes to some new aspect of hack politics, electronics or technique. I think Phrack was partly responsible for my major and career. It pulled me away from 'Chuck Yeager's Air Trainer' and made me poke around the TCP/IP stack, caused me to do random scans of Tymnet, and to bend many a VAX to my will. Without Phrack, I might have taken up a worthless profession like Marketing.
Thank you, Phrack!! Viva le Phrack!
-- .sig: Now legally binding!
TOC for issue 55
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4
For those of you curious about what's in this issue:
-----------------------[ T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S ]
01 Introduction Phrack Staff 014 K 02 Phrack Loopback Phrack Staff 051 K 03 Phrack Line Noise various 037 K 04 Phrack Tribute to W. Richard Stevens Phrack Staff 004 K 05 A Real NT Rootkit Greg Hoglund 066 K 06 The Libnet Reference Manual route 181 K 07 PERL CGI Problems rfp 017 K 08 Frame Pointer Overwriting klog 020 K 09 Distributed Information Gathering hybrid 010 K 10 Building Bastion Routers with IOS Brett / Variable K 037 K 11 Stego Hasho Conehead 037 K 12 Building Into The Linux Network Layer kossak / lifeline 044 K 13 The Black Book of AFS nicnoc 011 K 14 A Global Positioning System Primer e5 015 K 15 Win32 Buffer Overflows... dark spyrit 078 K 16 Distributed Metastasis... Andrew J. Stewart 031 K 17 H.323 Firewall Security Issues Dan Moniz 015 K 18 Phrack World News disorder 021 K 19 Phrack Magazine Extraction Utility Phrack Staff 021 K
I have read only up to the NT article. If you actually bothered to read it, you would see that its not exactly geared towards the skript kiddie.
As a matter of fact phrack has ALWAYS demeaned and derided skript kiddies. A quick peek at the flame-ridden, mean-spirited "Loopback" section will tell you this. Sure, maybe it smacks of hypocrisy to you, but the fact remains - it has never been an exhaustive "mini-cracking howto" for dummies.
I'm guessing when it comes to cracking, you have as much actual computing knowledge as a kiddie. Given that premise, I offer you a challenge.
I will put up an NT machine on the Internet, and using the NT article (and absolutely NO knowledge of NT or x86 assembler) you will crack it.
Sound fair?
And as far as "respectable" goes, where do you think 90% of the stuff from CERT comes from? Hint: it is not from "respectable" corporations like Microsoft who audit their own software. They have no incentive to reveal how bad or insecure their (closed) code is. It is not from "respectable" programmers (like me), who need to actually get their code working. Yes, it is not from skript kiddies either, but there is a happy medium, and that is the marginally sociopathic, intelligent, curious group of computer geeks who think cracking is fun.
You may not respect them, because they seem immature and at best amoral. You may not respect them because they do illegal things. You may not respect them simply because you dislike them, but the fact remains, THEY are the ones finding security problems with NT and Linux, not Microsoft, not Red Hat, and certainly not people like you (or even me) who find finding and writing cracks and exploits personally distasteful.
For all these reasons I submit that announcements like this DO belong on Slashdot.
As good as these are...
by
Millennium
·
· Score: 5
Slashdot really shouldn't post these release notices until the day after a release. Give the mirror sites and more dedicated users some time to get it before Slashdotting the servers.
Besides which, then a list of mirrors can be posted along with the notice, to help reduce the load. Honestly, Slashdot's popularity is a Good Thing, but that popularity gives us a certain responsibility not to overload servers unless it's necessary (i.e. Web servers which typically don't have mirrors).
Of course, if Microsoft owns the server in question, all bets are off. But I doubt that's the case here.
Re:As good as these are...
by
zyklone
·
· Score: 2
Well, since I'm so nice I mirrored it. PHRACK 55 Now don't go kill the mirror
In all honesty I didn't think Phrack was still producing. Nice to see a longtime tradition (well, kinda) of phrack continue. I still remember the article on programming the serial port for linux that forced me to produce all kinds of useless hardware and waste money - god bless 'em.
In regards to those asking questions, Phrack is an electronic magazine convering various technical topics from vulnerabilities to tutorials (such as how to make your own shell, etc.)
Well, it's not really the same Phrack. Somewhere along the line Knight Lightning and Taran King gave it up, but other people started up a new magazine with the same name (due to its popularity). KL and TK eventually "blessed" this new Phrack, and it continued for a while, though certainly not the same magazine as the original. Then sometime 2-3 years ago route (daemon9) managed to take over the magazine (I have no clue what happened to the previous editor(s)) and turned it into his personal ego zone. Reading his responses to the reader emailed questions, it's sickening that somebody like that managed to get control of a magazine that used to be run by nice people...
Phrack is underground magazine that started in the days of phreaking. Using different methods to bypass phone charges.
See the jargon file. "phreaking/freek'ing//n./ [from `phone phreak'] 1. The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls). 2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on communications networks) (see cracking). "
Now adays, and in the old days phrack exposes new security holes, gives ideas about new directions to look for security holes (as in the last issue when they mentioned client apps should be invesitigated - over servers). They also have informative pieces about new and complicated technologies sometimes exposing the underlying system.
Phrack is almost always a difficult read, but new releases always mean more tools for script kiddies to run around with for a month or two.
1) Cloned Goat 2) New name for Windows 5.0 3) Beats the hell out of me 4) Maybe Found Here
Appeasing the "This isn't newsworthy" crowd
by
Neph
·
· Score: 3
I suggest a new article category, "New releases", for this kind of story. I myself am happy to see them, but recognize that some might not.
In that vein, the idea has been bouncing around in my head for a while that it should be possible to put articles in two categories. Many are the times I've seen an article and thought, "Funny, I would've put that under 'Linux', not under 'SGI'."
Clink, clink, . SNF.
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
We should set up some kind of Phrack fund to send the current editor (it seems to change a lot but I guess it's been around a long time) some funding to keep it coming out every 2 months or so. Woohoo I want a Phrack credit card! Cards that come with explanations of how to generate their numbers?:)
-- At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Either that or find a better editor. For years Phrack came out 4-5 times a year, without getting any money for it either. Now route puts it out maybe once a year.
IMHO it hasn't improved. Sure, some technical aspects of the magazine have improved, but it's mostly a dry technical journal these days. The personality that used to characterize Phrack is pretty much non-existant, and the editorial style has shifted towards one of "I know more about buffer overflows than you" arrogance. Take a look at the Phrack Loopback responses during the first 10 years to the recent ones. A much higher percentage of responses are along the lines of "you're an idiot, we at Phrack Staff are much smarter than you."
Re:Whats wrong with questions?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4
Sigh... I kinda agree. Being in and out of the Linux world since '94, I seem to see a large shift from just about anyone involved being willing to help you in chat rooms/discussion groups/email, to attitudes of "if I know it, and you don't, you're a fucking loser, and don't deserve to be told!!" (quoted nearly verbatim) This kind of slightly grown up script kiddie attitude really gets me down.. and if it becomes the mainstream, will do much to turn people away from becoming knowlegable users of Linux, and back to Microsoft. I do think its still the minority attitude.. but it may be time to examine our collective thinking. Should all the hard earned knowlege you've gained be something to hand down to help up other, newer people, like you probably were? Or, should all those hard won secrets be guarded and kept hidden, so that others who haven't paid their dues stay where they should be, and not compete with you? Hmmm.. is your attitude open source, or closed? Food for thought.. think about it. Now I'm going to lunch...
99% of webmasters could take a lesson from these people. I have never understood the attriaction of "glitzy" webpages (for a fine example check out www.intel.com). Prack seems to be "unslashdotable" due to their extensive use of --gasp-- text.
Let's face it multimedia, though often useful, was created for the purpose of selling faster procs, CD-ROM drives, and MPC-[1-4] compliant systems. Many people have bought the marketing, and decided that your toilet seat needs to be a multimedia device. (Okay, the term multimedia has fallen out of use in marketing land, but my point remains valid.)
My point is that WORDS are the basis of communication. Let's here it for words! And let's hear it for phrack for not using scaned images of text on their page!!
javascript is the enemy!
by
cthonious
·
· Score: 2
it's been used for more crappy ui design that I can handle... Someone's sig on usenet I found pretty funny (in your best yoda voice): "java leads to javascript... javascript leads to shockwave... shockwave leads to suffering...
Slashdot Mirror
That was hardly a troll. A troll is a post intended to illicit negative responses. I was only providing my opinion on Phrack and its place (or rather how I don't think it should have a place) on Slashdot. Maybe I didn't specify why I think the way I do and that's what makes you believe my post was a troll. So here I will expand on my opinion.
I question the ethics of the makers and writers of Phrack, and as a result I refuse to support them and fail to see why any respectable person in the computer industry would. Clearly most of those involved in the creation of Phrack come from the ranks of current and past crackers and phreakers, which both happen to be illegal activities in most countries. Phrack is not a respectable security information source like CERT or CIAC or BUGTRAQ. They don't just give information on vulnerabilities, but also information on how crackers and script kiddies can exploit those vulnerabilities. They've even provided examples.
The makers of Phrack certainly don't have any interest in advancing security, but rather their interest lies in cracking, phreaking, "warez", and other clearly illegal and unethical activities.
Normally, I respect Slashdot as a respectable source of information for technology news. Phrack is not respectable, and therefore Slashdot should not pay them any attention.
I already had WAY too much stuff to do today, and now I have to spend an hour or two reading Phrack! Thanks alot.
BTW, the FTP link was a bad choice. It's about dead, but you can pull it via HTTP pretty easily.
Phrack 55
Phrack was never intended as an infosec technical journal. It was an ezine written primarily by high school kids and some college kids (the founders/editors were both around 16 when it was founded), intended for high school and college kids. It explored areas of security, computer and otherwise, that interested its authors. Hence articles covered everything from "how to pick Master locks" to discussion of Telenet's security. An important focus was always on community and learning about technology. The Phrack Loopback sections were interesting and contained useful dialog between the readers and the editors. Now they're just crap. The Phrack World News was good. The editors weren't egocentric. The list of differences could continue ad nauseum.
In short, Phrack today is not Phrack, except in name. It's a technical infosec journal that happens to have "borrowed" a name from a popular ezine with a much different purpose and editorial style. IMHO, it's a fine technical journal, but its use of the Phrack moniker is somewhat unfair and incongruous with its history. It's a cheap ploy to get more readership than a technical journal would normally get.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
span.
C'mon, if news only mattered for a day our lives would be very, very weird.
+&x
hmmm, that's one funny Troll, maybe he'll come out from under the bridge and go on tour.
New Rule: Moderators must either begin smoking if they don't, or stop if they do (and I ain't talking about them tobaccy things neither)
+&x
I agree entirely with the other guy who responded (I wish I had a short-term memory). Phrack is not some script-kiddie-house-o'-sploits. You'd have better luck looking at securityfocus.com (one of your "responsible" groups) for those. I haven't read all of it, but the articles I did read were much more into proof-of-concept and discussing technical issues than providing .c files to compile and run against your favorite hosts (note to script kiddies: nsa.gov is probably *not* the best place to test your k3wl sploit. Now back to our regular programming.) Bugtraq probably has more 'sploits, and you cite that as a "responsible" group. The only difference is that a lot of phrack contributers find holes because it's fun and challenging, not because they're getting paid to admin hosts that use swiss-cheese-security. (Not to imply that because one is getting paid to be a security consultant one can't still be a hacker, just that I get the impression that a much greater percentage of the people posting to Phrack are hackers in the pure sense just because that's what they are (in the "Gee, I wonder how this thing works" sense, not in the "d00d, let's generate some credit card numbers!", which isn't hacking at all, unless you actually reverse engineered the system to generate numbers and whatnot. Bonus points if you build a magstripe maker from household components, but anyhow). I just wish my C and assembly skills were up to the level necessary to do some of that stuff...
I'm glad that Phrack is still around. In the early years of my education, it always seemed to open my eyes to some new aspect of hack politics, electronics or technique. I think Phrack was partly responsible for my major and career. It pulled me away from 'Chuck Yeager's Air Trainer' and made me poke around the TCP/IP stack, caused me to do random scans of Tymnet, and to bend many a VAX to my will. Without Phrack, I might have taken up a worthless profession like Marketing.
Thank you, Phrack!!
Viva le Phrack!
.sig: Now legally binding!
For those of you curious about what's in this issue:
-----------------------[ T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S ]
01 Introduction Phrack Staff 014 K
02 Phrack Loopback Phrack Staff 051 K
03 Phrack Line Noise various 037 K
04 Phrack Tribute to W. Richard Stevens Phrack Staff 004 K
05 A Real NT Rootkit Greg Hoglund 066 K
06 The Libnet Reference Manual route 181 K
07 PERL CGI Problems rfp 017 K
08 Frame Pointer Overwriting klog 020 K
09 Distributed Information Gathering hybrid 010 K
10 Building Bastion Routers with IOS Brett / Variable K 037 K
11 Stego Hasho Conehead 037 K
12 Building Into The Linux Network Layer kossak / lifeline 044 K
13 The Black Book of AFS nicnoc 011 K
14 A Global Positioning System Primer e5 015 K
15 Win32 Buffer Overflows... dark spyrit 078 K
16 Distributed Metastasis... Andrew J. Stewart 031 K
17 H.323 Firewall Security Issues Dan Moniz 015 K
18 Phrack World News disorder 021 K
19 Phrack Magazine Extraction Utility Phrack Staff 021 K
I have read only up to the NT article. If you actually bothered to read it, you would see that its not exactly geared towards the skript kiddie.
As a matter of fact phrack has ALWAYS demeaned and derided skript kiddies. A quick peek at the flame-ridden, mean-spirited "Loopback" section will tell you this. Sure, maybe it smacks of hypocrisy to you, but the fact remains - it has never been an exhaustive "mini-cracking howto" for dummies.
I'm guessing when it comes to cracking, you have as much actual computing knowledge as a kiddie. Given that premise, I offer you a challenge.
I will put up an NT machine on the Internet, and using the NT article (and absolutely NO knowledge of NT or x86 assembler) you will crack it.
Sound fair?
And as far as "respectable" goes, where do you think 90% of the stuff from CERT comes from? Hint: it is not from "respectable" corporations like Microsoft who audit their own software. They have no incentive to reveal how bad or insecure their (closed) code is. It is not from "respectable" programmers (like me), who need to actually get their code working. Yes, it is not from skript kiddies either, but there is a happy medium, and that is the marginally sociopathic, intelligent, curious group of computer geeks who think cracking is fun.
You may not respect them, because they seem immature and at best amoral. You may not respect them because they do illegal things. You may not respect them simply because you dislike them, but the fact remains, THEY are the ones finding security problems with NT and Linux, not Microsoft, not Red Hat, and certainly not people like you (or even me) who find finding and writing cracks and exploits personally distasteful.
For all these reasons I submit that announcements like this DO belong on Slashdot.
That is all.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
http://www.phrack.com/main-index.html
Slashdot really shouldn't post these release notices until the day after a release. Give the mirror sites and more dedicated users some time to get it before Slashdotting the servers.
Besides which, then a list of mirrors can be posted along with the notice, to help reduce the load. Honestly, Slashdot's popularity is a Good Thing, but that popularity gives us a certain responsibility not to overload servers unless it's necessary (i.e. Web servers which typically don't have mirrors).
Of course, if Microsoft owns the server in question, all bets are off. But I doubt that's the case here.
In all honesty I didn't think Phrack was still producing. Nice to see a longtime tradition (well, kinda) of phrack continue. I still remember the article on programming the serial port for linux that forced me to produce all kinds of useless hardware and waste money - god bless 'em.
In regards to those asking questions, Phrack is an electronic magazine convering various technical topics from vulnerabilities to tutorials (such as how to make your own shell, etc.)
Phrack is underground magazine that started in the days of phreaking. Using different methods to bypass phone charges.
/freek'ing/ /n./ [from `phone phreak'] 1. The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to
See the jargon file. "phreaking
make free long-distance calls). 2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on
communications networks) (see cracking). "
Now adays, and in the old days phrack exposes new security holes, gives ideas about new directions to look for security holes (as in the last issue when they mentioned client apps should be invesitigated - over servers). They also have informative pieces about new and complicated technologies sometimes exposing the underlying system.
Phrack is almost always a difficult read, but new releases always mean more tools for script kiddies to run around with for a month or two.
Joseph Elwell.
Download phrack55 here.
Phrack 55
For new readers the Phrack 55 is a
1) Cloned Goat
2) New name for Windows 5.0
3) Beats the hell out of me
4) Maybe Found Here
I suggest a new article category, "New releases", for this kind of story. I myself am happy to see them, but recognize that some might not.
In that vein, the idea has been bouncing around in my head for a while that it should be possible to put articles in two categories. Many are the times I've seen an article and thought, "Funny, I would've put that under 'Linux', not under 'SGI'."
Clink, clink, . SNF .
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
We should set up some kind of Phrack fund to send the current editor (it seems to change a lot but I guess it's been around a long time) some funding to keep it coming out every 2 months or so. Woohoo I want a Phrack credit card! Cards that come with explanations of how to generate their numbers? :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
ftp://128.253.254.56/phrack55.zip (274k)
ftp://128.253.254.56/phrack55.tar.gz (234k)
SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers
SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers
Sigh... I kinda agree. Being in and out of the Linux world since '94, I seem to see a large shift from just about anyone involved being willing to help you in chat rooms/discussion groups/email, to attitudes of "if I know it, and you don't, you're a fucking loser, and don't deserve to be told!!" (quoted nearly verbatim) This kind of slightly grown up script kiddie attitude really gets me down.. and if it becomes the mainstream, will do much to turn people away from becoming knowlegable users of Linux, and back to Microsoft. I do think its still the minority attitude.. but it may be time to examine our collective thinking. Should all the hard earned knowlege you've gained be something to hand down to help up other, newer people, like you probably were? Or, should all those hard won secrets be guarded and kept hidden, so that others who haven't paid their dues stay where they should be, and not compete with you? Hmmm.. is your attitude open source, or closed? Food for thought.. think about it. Now I'm going to lunch...
99% of webmasters could take a lesson from these people. I have never understood the attriaction of "glitzy" webpages (for a fine example check out www.intel.com). Prack seems to be "unslashdotable" due to their extensive use of --gasp-- text.
Let's face it multimedia, though often useful, was created for the purpose of selling faster procs, CD-ROM drives, and MPC-[1-4] compliant systems. Many people have bought the marketing, and decided that your toilet seat needs to be a multimedia device. (Okay, the term multimedia has fallen out of use in marketing land, but my point remains valid.)
My point is that WORDS are the basis of communication. Let's here it for words! And let's hear it for phrack for not using scaned images of text on their page!!
it's been used for more crappy ui design that I can handle ... Someone's sig on usenet I found pretty funny (in your best yoda voice): "java leads to javascript ... javascript leads to shockwave ... shockwave leads to suffering ...
support gun control: take guns from cops