On Saturday, October 10, 2009, James Madison University hosted their second annual Cyber Defense Competition. This year, there were three teams made up of JMU students, and two teams made up of high school students with JMU student advisors. The attackers were played by employees of Gemini Security Solutions, Computer Sciences Corporation, some JMU alumni, and other friends. The competition is based loosely on the setup of National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition events. Each team is scored on their ability to correct problems on their network of machines, perform IT-related business tasks, keep critical systems operating, and defend their networks from the attackers. In the JMU competition, the defenders are allowed to work to secure their systems for one hour[…]
Category: hacking
If you followed or attended the recent Blackhat conference you may have heard a talk given by Peter Kleissner regarding his recent work on “Stoned Bootkit.” A bootkit is a boot virus that is able to hook and patch Windows to get loaded into the Windows kernel and thus getting unrestricted access to the entire computer. It is even able to bypass full volume encryption because the master boot record (where Stoned is stored) is not encrypted. The master boot record contains the decryption software which asks for a password and decrypts the drive. This is the weak point, the master boot record, which will be used to pwn your whole system. No one’s secure! Peter even demonstrates getting past[…]
Questions about the trustworthiness of electronic voting machines have been in the news a lot over the last few years. Plenty of people acknowledge the potential for abuse of these machines, and discussions of how they can be used to swing elections are pretty common. A trait that these discussions share are hypothetical scenarios or instances where an attacker would need to have some kind of esoteric/insider knowledge about the hardware and/or software running the machine to mount an effective attack. However, I recently came across a video detailing a real attack against a real voting machine, carried out by real engineers, using real tools and data, and showing very real results. The Sequoia AVC Advantage, a pretty old piece[…]
Damn Vulnerable Web App (DVWA) has released an updated version (v1.04) of their PHP/mySQL web application that is intended to be attacked. It’s intended to be run on a local (closed) network as a learning tool for exploits and vulnerabilities. As it sits now, it pretty much contains a lot of the basics – brute force, command execution, file inclusion, SQL injection, and XSS.
With Windows holding 89.6% of the global market share, it is a very large target. This is one of the reasons Windows is targeted so much by malicious attacks. Not very hard when you’re such a big target. So, what if you could change that and make your Windows machine/server appear as something else, even to the most notable of sniffing tools (Nmap, P0f, Ettercap, etc.)? Well, you can.
This concludes parts 1, 2 and 3 of our Sniffing Networks series. This part is a little less technical, but I still recommend that you be familiar with the first three parts. In part 3 of our series, I showed you how to use Wireshark to sniff traffic and hopefully gather some passwords. It’s a lot of digging through a haystack to find a needle. It works, and if you know some of the protocols, you can search for keywords to help you. But if you’re just lazy, there are two excellent tools for just passwords: dsniff on Unix, and Cain & Abel on Windows. Both tools do a little bit more than sniffing and support things like ARP spoofing[…]