Ok. maybe social engineering is an issue but it is hardly of interest to those of us who actually care about the technical side of security. Kevin's fascination with calling helpdesks make me seriously doubt that he has the technical know how needed to run a competitive security consulting firm. It seems more likely to me that he got so behind on the technical end of things during his time in jail that he is now trying his little butt off to make "social engineering" synonymous with scary hackers so that he can advance his own career without having to relearn what been going on technically while he was out of the game.
I also have a big problem with the "hacking is cool" point he makes. I read a little deeper into it though and understand the problem. He is refering to "hacking" as know how to use the exploit of the month, not as understanding the priciple the exploit is based on. I agree completely that it makes no sense for a sys admin to spend his time learning to compile and run the latest IIS exploit, but I do think that it is very important that a sys admin in charge of security understands how a buffer overflow/format string/sql injection works. To expect him to run a secure system without that knowledge would be silly.
Re:Difference between hacking and cracking...
on
Anatomy of a Hack
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually cracking is often creating something new too. At least when it is interesting it is. You are taking something, shattering it and then glueing it back together in a way that was never intended on a much lower level. To crack a system you have to understand the code much better than you would to simply design the system. I view this destruction as an art form. This is not to say that someone who runs the latest greatest "0day sploit" against a random system is an artist. But the person who figured out how to break and remake the system in the first place and subsequently released that "sploit", he is an artist by any standards.
What imediately came to my mind was printers and chai java. how long until we start seeing tivo like devices with a network connection and a remote administration daemon running a chai virtual machine. It makes me drool, and not because I want to by one but because I have enough fun storing things on random printers with a whopping 8mb rom, just think what could be possible with huge hds like in a tivo. Throw the java vm into the equation and you have one hell of a nice zombie box. Lets just hope the guys who make these are a little more security savy than HP with its printers.
Sounds like you may have gotten picked on in highschool. I only comment on it because you sound a bit bitter. Personally I think its hilarious that these guys are such idiots. The type of nerd I pride myself on being is not the type that would stand out side any theatre (let alone the wrong one) to wait for any of the massed produced pieces of crap we call movies to be released. See there are the smart nerds and then there are the people who really are just clueless about life. which are you?
The campus that I attended up until a few months ago was definately vulnerable to this. A guy I know got caught doing this exact attack, the only reason that he was caught was because he didn't understand ARP poisoning and managed to shut down all traffic on his switch. I am friends with the IT staff at another smaller campus that I went to years ago and am currently working with them to get around this issue, I was able to test the feasability there and found a machine in the library with no BIOS lock. So yeah, in my experience its just not something that campus IT staff think of when designing a network. Most people these days are worried about patching the servers every 5 minutes againt the latest greatest (next to impossible to exploit) integer underflow. Instead they should be looking at the flaws that have existed for years and are easily exploitable. A VPN for profs would go a long way but still I am not sure how well it would go over with administration. Most people want things to be easy and couldn't give a damn about security (untill the school gets hacked and its their ass).
Pertaining to you observation though, I really doubt that the firewalls you are talking about had anything to do with the internal network that I am talking about. blocking outside traffic is all well and good but any internal machine can still see everything that is going on internally.
but again you have the problem of empty ethernet jacks in the lab designed for students to be able to access the network with their laptops, wireless networks, all sorts of ways in. The only realy solution for now that I see to this is a seperate switch that only profs have access to. Grades and confidentials would only be allowed on this one switch, which would again be a nightmare to admin. Anybody have anothwer solution to this?
Go here, SSL is insecure if the key exchange is sniffed. Ettercap does this and ssh1 in real time as it sniffs. Its a fun program to play with. There is an option to just leave it on and let it log all passwords to a file. I was amazed when I first found it and have spent a ton of time in the source figuring out how it works. Cool stuff.
Fact of the matter is this is just going to happen more and more often. University networks are wide open, first there are computer labs where any one can sit down and pop in a knoppix std cd. then they can fire up ettercap and go to town on everything getting passed on the switch. When campuses use SSL protected systems for grades it is just asking for trouble. Its just a matter of time before Joe Blow will have eery profs passwords. Once that happens it can be tempting to change a couple grades here and there. And grades are nothing compared to the other information that can be obtained, SSN's of the entire campus for instance... Basicly ARP needs to get secure because there is really no way for a college (that has to have an open network to function) can be a safe place to send important data back and forth. Maybe the solution is a private network for profs with the important info on it. Good lesson though.
Thats the reality of the country... Its insane to see a street full of western european shops selling clothes for $100 a shirt in a country where most (or I should say lucky) people make that in a month. The shops are of course empty and the effect is that everyone buys from them but only owns 1 shirt. Personally I can't see spending a months salary on a single article of clothing but apparently thats the norm here.
This is an excellent point. I do IT for a company in Ukraine and our problem right now is that this country is starting to come around into the 21st century. Up till now it has always been that piracy is the norm (even for big companies). Everyone here uses windows, all our servers are windows, but I am not sure that the company actually owns a single Windows license. They hired me to try and switch EVERYTHING to linux. We are doing client machines first because thats where the huge costs come in. If they were to actually pay for all the software we are using right now it would bust the company (we are talking more spent on software than on employee salaries). So legitimacy is great and all but its a pain in the ass to switch to legitimacy after the fact. South Korea is probably in the same position, The US is riding them to get legit but the fact of the matter is no one can afford Microsoft's ridiculous costs. Sure its great for US businesses where there are millions just sitting around but in countries where the average person make $400 a year its just not feasable. Bah I will stop ranting and get back to this Gentoo install.
Ummm for my point read the definitions I posted... I did not say "Liberal" mean "socialist" everywhere. I said liberal means "open to change" everywhere. At the bottom of my post the referal to "socialism" was sarcasm which you would have realized had you read the rest of the thread before rushing to get in your 2 cents (or in this case cent and a half). Thank you for your time friend.
ok when did the word liberal become synonymous with politics. Its like it has been turned into some sort of buzz word up there with "terrorist" or "patriot" or "suicidal ninja monkey".... christ, get over it already its a damn word.
Slashdot Mirror
did no one else get this joke :(
What a sad world we live in.
double plus funny
What.. you mean held under the doesal guidance feathers?
Ok. maybe social engineering is an issue but it is hardly of interest to those of us who actually care about the technical side of security. Kevin's fascination with calling helpdesks make me seriously doubt that he has the technical know how needed to run a competitive security consulting firm. It seems more likely to me that he got so behind on the technical end of things during his time in jail that he is now trying his little butt off to make "social engineering" synonymous with scary hackers so that he can advance his own career without having to relearn what been going on technically while he was out of the game.
Whats the hostname of this database agian??? Maybe the sa account doesn;t have a password ;)
I also have a big problem with the "hacking is cool" point he makes. I read a little deeper into it though and understand the problem. He is refering to "hacking" as know how to use the exploit of the month, not as understanding the priciple the exploit is based on. I agree completely that it makes no sense for a sys admin to spend his time learning to compile and run the latest IIS exploit, but I do think that it is very important that a sys admin in charge of security understands how a buffer overflow/format string/sql injection works. To expect him to run a secure system without that knowledge would be silly.
Actually cracking is often creating something new too. At least when it is interesting it is. You are taking something, shattering it and then glueing it back together in a way that was never intended on a much lower level. To crack a system you have to understand the code much better than you would to simply design the system. I view this destruction as an art form. This is not to say that someone who runs the latest greatest "0day sploit" against a random system is an artist. But the person who figured out how to break and remake the system in the first place and subsequently released that "sploit", he is an artist by any standards.
Just my 2 cents.
Jesus.... George Bush..... Jesus........... George Bush.................
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I am sorry thats just hilarious.
What imediately came to my mind was printers and chai java. how long until we start seeing tivo like devices with a network connection and a remote administration daemon running a chai virtual machine. It makes me drool, and not because I want to by one but because I have enough fun storing things on random printers with a whopping 8mb rom, just think what could be possible with huge hds like in a tivo. Throw the java vm into the equation and you have one hell of a nice zombie box. Lets just hope the guys who make these are a little more security savy than HP with its printers.
Sounds like you may have gotten picked on in highschool. I only comment on it because you sound a bit bitter. Personally I think its hilarious that these guys are such idiots. The type of nerd I pride myself on being is not the type that would stand out side any theatre (let alone the wrong one) to wait for any of the massed produced pieces of crap we call movies to be released. See there are the smart nerds and then there are the people who really are just clueless about life. which are you?
The campus that I attended up until a few months ago was definately vulnerable to this. A guy I know got caught doing this exact attack, the only reason that he was caught was because he didn't understand ARP poisoning and managed to shut down all traffic on his switch. I am friends with the IT staff at another smaller campus that I went to years ago and am currently working with them to get around this issue, I was able to test the feasability there and found a machine in the library with no BIOS lock. So yeah, in my experience its just not something that campus IT staff think of when designing a network. Most people these days are worried about patching the servers every 5 minutes againt the latest greatest (next to impossible to exploit) integer underflow. Instead they should be looking at the flaws that have existed for years and are easily exploitable. A VPN for profs would go a long way but still I am not sure how well it would go over with administration. Most people want things to be easy and couldn't give a damn about security (untill the school gets hacked and its their ass).
Pertaining to you observation though, I really doubt that the firewalls you are talking about had anything to do with the internal network that I am talking about. blocking outside traffic is all well and good but any internal machine can still see everything that is going on internally.
but again you have the problem of empty ethernet jacks in the lab designed for students to be able to access the network with their laptops, wireless networks, all sorts of ways in. The only realy solution for now that I see to this is a seperate switch that only profs have access to. Grades and confidentials would only be allowed on this one switch, which would again be a nightmare to admin. Anybody have anothwer solution to this?
Go here, SSL is insecure if the key exchange is sniffed. Ettercap does this and ssh1 in real time as it sniffs. Its a fun program to play with. There is an option to just leave it on and let it log all passwords to a file. I was amazed when I first found it and have spent a ton of time in the source figuring out how it works. Cool stuff.
It was HER grades that she changed... I mean come on.
Fact of the matter is this is just going to happen more and more often. University networks are wide open, first there are computer labs where any one can sit down and pop in a knoppix std cd. then they can fire up ettercap and go to town on everything getting passed on the switch. When campuses use SSL protected systems for grades it is just asking for trouble. Its just a matter of time before Joe Blow will have eery profs passwords. Once that happens it can be tempting to change a couple grades here and there. And grades are nothing compared to the other information that can be obtained, SSN's of the entire campus for instance... Basicly ARP needs to get secure because there is really no way for a college (that has to have an open network to function) can be a safe place to send important data back and forth. Maybe the solution is a private network for profs with the important info on it. Good lesson though.
Thats the reality of the country... Its insane to see a street full of western european shops selling clothes for $100 a shirt in a country where most (or I should say lucky) people make that in a month. The shops are of course empty and the effect is that everyone buys from them but only owns 1 shirt. Personally I can't see spending a months salary on a single article of clothing but apparently thats the norm here.
This one is going to be the Intranet server :)
This is an excellent point. I do IT for a company in Ukraine and our problem right now is that this country is starting to come around into the 21st century. Up till now it has always been that piracy is the norm (even for big companies). Everyone here uses windows, all our servers are windows, but I am not sure that the company actually owns a single Windows license. They hired me to try and switch EVERYTHING to linux. We are doing client machines first because thats where the huge costs come in. If they were to actually pay for all the software we are using right now it would bust the company (we are talking more spent on software than on employee salaries). So legitimacy is great and all but its a pain in the ass to switch to legitimacy after the fact. South Korea is probably in the same position, The US is riding them to get legit but the fact of the matter is no one can afford Microsoft's ridiculous costs. Sure its great for US businesses where there are millions just sitting around but in countries where the average person make $400 a year its just not feasable. Bah I will stop ranting and get back to this Gentoo install.
Can you say windows underlying messenging system...
If only I had the clout to be able to say "nah, I don't think ill support it till you fix it"
in other news, AMD are still the kings of the desktop... Hope you aren't doing anything to processor intensive :P
Ummm for my point read the definitions I posted... I did not say "Liberal" mean "socialist" everywhere. I said liberal means "open to change" everywhere. At the bottom of my post the referal to "socialism" was sarcasm which you would have realized had you read the rest of the thread before rushing to get in your 2 cents (or in this case cent and a half). Thank you for your time friend.
ok when did the word liberal become synonymous with politics. Its like it has been turned into some sort of buzz word up there with "terrorist" or "patriot" or "suicidal ninja monkey".... christ, get over it already its a damn word.
Please note the quotation marks around the word socialist...
Thank you for your time...
actually I forgot to preview my post... slashdot cut out my [sarcasm] tags (non standard html or some such nonsense.
No i think liberal means the same thing pretty much everywhere..
1. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
2. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.
try here.
And we "socialist" fit #1 fairly well if I do say so myself.
With brains like that against them the russian mob doesn't stand a chance
We thought we were getting the mob out of power here in Ukraine recently, turned out we were putting a new one in.