IT Breathes!

Some of my readers may have noticed I was missing some applications in part 1 and part 2. This discrepancy is caused by the fact that I wasn’t aware of the new Backtrack 4 pre-release. I’m not going to go back and visit those folders though; I’ll leave that exercise up to the reader.

Making our way to the next folder is the ‘enumeration’ folder. In this case enumeration really means gathering information/DNS.

Within the enumeration folder are multiple sub folders containing, in my opinion, an eclectic collection of tools. Starting with the first folder we have complemento. Within this folder is really three seperate tools. HTTPSquash, the first of the tools I looked is used to find the version of an HTTP server running. When scanned against a Win2k3 machine running IIS this is what it saw.

Yup, that's IIS 6

This is a nice tool to keep in your toolset when nmap or other tools are giving you conflicting answers. What is interesting is that the enumeration folder also contains another tool for identifying an HTTP server: HTTPrint. HTTPring also performs a scan and guesses which webserver is running on a given IP:

It means 'Eat At Joes'

Returning back to the complement folder we have Letdown. Letdown is a tool designed for performing a DoS attack on a given server and finally reverseraider which is a tool designed to brute force subdomains/domains for a given website, it does this through the use of a wordlist. You’ll notice a trend with the tools in the enumeration folder. Many of them are designed to gather DNS information. In my opinion a tool like Maltego is better served for some of these tasks.

DNS Enumeration

Instead of slowly walking through all the DNS enumeration tools one by one I’m simply going to list them all here. The command line options vary from tool to tool but the concept is the same:

DNSmap: Performs a map of your domains/subdomains using wordlists.

DNSwalk: A tool designed to troubleshoot dns zones and to detect where zone transfers are possible.

DNSenum: Using word lists or brute force this tool will discover machines on a certain domain. It also uses Google to help discover machines.

DNSRecon: Yet another DNS enumeration tool, this one written in ruby

Fierce: A wordlist based DNS enumerator written in perl.

Moving on we get to some of my favorite tools. The three following tools actually use Google to gather information instead of touching your target machines. This information can be useful in helping identify usernames, paths etc. Gooscan is a command line tool designed to scan a Google appliance for interesting folder/cgi-exploits by only talking to the goodle appliance. This means Google is doing all the research instead of identifying yourself.

Quite the frightening message. Better not test this at work.

Metagoofil is one of my new favorite toys. You give it a domain name and it will grab the files (such as Word Documents, PDF, Excel etc) and search those files for metadata such as usernames, paths, deleted text etc. It uses the ‘extract’ command to break out the metadata so you don’t really need this tool if you have some strong Google-fu. Though it is nice because it can give you an insight in to how a company is run. I had some initial problems getting this tool to run. You MUST but the #!/user/bin/python on the very first line of this script or it will not run (you can also issue the command “python metagoofil.py” but where’s the fun in that?

Who created this document? What kind of funky name is that?

The final Google tool is Goorecon. This tool uses Google to gather subdomains it may know about or email addresses. Why email addresses? Well knowing an email address may give you some insight in to account naming conventions and other interesting tidbits. You could also use it to social engineer yourself to access.

Now that we’re done with the Google and DNS Enumerators we can look at some of the other tools. The first tool on that list is LBD. LBD stands for Load Balancer Detector. It literally does what it’s called. You give it an IP address and it tells you if it’s being load balanced or not. List-URLS, in this same vein, also does exactly as advertised. You give it a website and it spiders the site for a listing or all URLs listed on the site.

There are two SNMP tools within this folder: SNMPcheck and SNMPenum. Both of them pretty much perform the same task: discover SNMP services running on a given IP address. This, again, is more about gathering information than gaining access.

The last tool in this folder is also very interesting. It’s called SEAT or Search Engine Assessment Tool.

Take a SEAT. See what I did there?

SEAT is a tool which performs the same functions as the Google tools but as you can see uses many more search engines to perform the searches. Using SEAT you can mine information from multiple sources using multiple queries to specify what you’re searching for. An interesting tool for any tool set.

Welcome to Part 2 of the /pentest A to Z story. Previously we went through the Bluetooth and Cisco folders. I also went through the trouble of explaining my lab setup. In this part we’re just going to be visiting one folder: database

Initially I thought this folder would contain tools for exploiting common database vulnerabilities or something simple like a mysql/mssql bruteforcers. Instead it contains some rather robust tools for testing databases and SQL injections.

For most of the testing performed here I used a Linux distro called ‘Moth’. Moth is a vulnerable Linux distro which runs a web app designed for exactly what I was doing, testing webapp/SQLInjection tools.

Moth is a VMware image with a set of vulnerable Web Applications and scripts, that you may use for:

1. Testing Web Application Security Scanners

2. Testing Static Code Analysis tools (SCA)

3. Giving an introductory course to Web Application Security.”

Speaking of SQL injections the first tool: blindsql fits right in. This tool is really just two shell scripts:

1. Sqlcheck.sh. This script simply takes a known URL and a known value that the page is supposed to return and checks if its vulnerably to SQL injection
2. Sqldata.sh. This script should be able to grab data from the SQL server itself. I, however, was unable to get it to do much more than complain and return nothing

The next three tools I’m going to lump in together here because I wasn’t really able to put them through their paces.

Metacoretex is a slick looking Java tool that’s supposedly to be used for testing Oracle databases. Not running Oracle in my lab (yet) made testing this tool tough. Also, walking through the tool I don’t think I ever got it working right and trying to read about it on the internet proved impossible because the site for the tool is down (and because Metacoretex is a term used in the Matrix Online which makes finding anything about it non Matrix Online related even harder).

SQLNinja sounds like a great tool for testing vulnerable ASP/.NET pages and getting a shell on a remote machine. Currently, however, I don’t have a vulnerable web-app I can bang this tool against in my lab. I’m sure ones exist all over the net (the entire .cn TLD perhaps, Exotic Liability shoutout!) but the way I’ve setup this lab is to be completely segregated from any outside network so I won’t be testing that.

Finally there’s sqlbrute. Presumably a tool used for brute forcing SQL databases. Unfortunately it’s only good for MS SQL and ORACLE database. Neither of which I have so I wasn’t able to test this tool. Though if you have tested this tool out let me know in the comments.

Next on the list is MiniMysqlat0r. I loaded this tool up and was surprised by the nice gui interface. I put in the ‘moth’ server IP address and let it scan away for about 10 minutes. What I was presented with was a whole slew of places where injection were possible. I selected one of these URLs from the list presented and tested out the SQL Exploiter feature

SQLater Exploit Tab

This tool was literally able to give me anything I wanted from the server. I could dump the MySQL users table, dump all the databases and even grab a copy of the /etc/passwd file!

That right there is a nice /etc/passwd file

I tried the /etc/shadow file but alas the mysql user didn’t have the right permissions. Given the time though I would be able to get enough information about this server to find another way in since I’d be able to grab every config file and read through them for weaknesses. One caveat, this was against a very vulnerable server and I’m curious if it’s able to work this well in the real world.

After spending about an hour playing with SQLator I pulled myself away to check out Pblind. Not a very complicated tool. You supply it with the URL to test and it tells you if it worked or not, plus a little bit extra. I was able to use it to get the current user but not much else beyond that.

T h a t i s t h e u s e r n a m e. Hard to read and other tools do a better job.

Next I tested out SQLiX. No idea what the name of the tool means or what exactly it’s supposed to do. But I was able to get it to tell me that the server I’m testing was vulnerable. Though the tool is a little old and there are far better tools available today.

SQLiX sounds like a charecter from Star Trek: Voyager

Finally we have SQLMap.

sqlmap is an open source command-line automatic SQL injection tool. Its goal is to detect and take advantage of SQL injection vulnerabilities in web applications. Once it detects one or more SQL injections on the target host, the user can choose among a variety of options to perform an extensive back-end database management system fingerprint, retrieve DBMS session user and database, enumerate users, password hashes, privileges, databases, dump entire or user’s specified DBMS tables/columns, run his own SQL statement, read or write either text or binary files on the file system, execute arbitrary commands on the operating system, establish an out-of-band stateful connection between the attacker box and the database server via Metasploit payload stager, database stored procedure buffer overflow exploitation or SMB relay attack and more.

Same as SQLator I really liked this tool and was able to get some interesting information gleaned from the database. In this screenshot you can see I was able to get all the users usernames from the MySQL user database:

It even recreates the formatting

Keep in mind this screenshot is from SQLMap itself, pulling information from a blind SQL injection. I don’t have access to the database other than the URL I supplied in the screenshot. However that was just the tip of the iceberg. Using sqlmap I was able to retrieve the name of all the databases I had access to, all the tables within those databases and, if I wanted them, the columns within those tables. All in all I was fairly impressed with this tool.

The version  provided on the back track 4 CD, however, is a little old and I’d recommend getting the most recent version from http://sqlmap.sourceforge.net. The newer version has even more interesting functionality such as creating a remote shell and your own sql shell. If you don’t want to download sqlmap yourself I would recommend you check out the Samurai LiveCD. A LiveCD designed specifically for testing web frameworks.

That pretty much wraps up the ‘database’ folder. There was one folder I didn’t touch: The UDF folder.  I have no idea what it’s for and apparently neither does the good people Remote Exploit https://wiki.remote-exploit.org/backtrack/wiki/UDF either (the makers of backtrack).

So since I just got my GreenCard I thought I’d throw together a quick blog entry that will help people transition from a TN visa to a GreenCard (through marriage only). The reason I’m doing this is because when I went through the whole process it was basically a crap shoot trying to get information about the TN status and what I should put where.

I’m not a lawyer and this is just what I did on my forms. If you have questions/comments above and beyond this document you’ll probably want to consult a lawyer.

First some things to get out of the way, from Wikipedia:

TN (Trade NAFTA) status is a special non-immigration status unique to citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico. TN status was created by virtue of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It allows American, Canadian and Mexican citizens the opportunity to work in each other’s countries in certain professional occupations.

One thing to pay attention to is that a TN-1 status is not a visa. You do not have a visa number, nor will you have an alien number. All you have is your departure number. If you’re working in the US on a TN status and you get married you can no longer renew that status. With the new 3 year period you’ve probably got a long while until you need to renew but if you get married and leave the country with your TN status in hand be aware that USCIS can deny you re-entry in to the country. So once you get married it’s probably a good idea to start to submit all the paper work. So what can you do? It’s called ‘Adjustment of Status’. It allows you to change your status from TN to GreenCard. To do so you must submit whets known as an ‘AOS Package’.

I’m going to quickly describe what I included in my AOS package:

1)       I-130 Petition for Alien Relative

1. My birth certificate
2. Wife’s passport, in full
3. G-325a Biographic information for wife (including 2 passport photos)
4. G-325a Biographic information for me (including 2 passport photos)
5. Evidence of bonafide marriage (marriage cert, joint bank account, lease, car loan etc)

2)       I-485 Adjustment of Status

1. Copy of my passport bio page
2. Copy of my I-94 front and back
3. Copy of my birth certificate
4. Copy of marriage cert
5. 2 passport photos of me
6. Another G-325a (including 2 passport photos)
7. I-693 (Medical Exam)
8. I-864
   1. i.      Wife’s 2009 Tax return and W2

3)       I-131 Advance Parole

1. Copy of my passport bio page
2. Copy of my I-94 front and back
3. 2 passport photos of me

4)       I-765 Employment Authorization Document

1. Copy of my passport bio page
2. Copy of my I-94 front and back
3. 2 passport photos of me

The I-130 is used to create allow you to get a GreenCard. It’s a petition to give you an alien number and allow you to get a GreenCard. The I-485 is the application to change from TN to GreenCard. The I-131 allows you to travel, more on this in a second. Finally the I-765 is to allow you to work while you wait for the green card.

About the I-131 and the I-765. When you submit your paperwork your status changes from TN to ‘Pending’. Basically you’re still allowed to work under the TN-1 status until you get your Employment Authorization Document (EAD). The only difference between the TN-1 and EAD is you’re no longer tied to a company’s sponsorship when working under and EAD. Once you’ve submitted the paperwork you can no longer leave the country. If you leave the country you are dropping your application, unless you have an Advance Parole (or the I-131). With this document you’re allowed to leave the country without forfeiting your application.  You submit both these applications at the same time and you should receive them in about 90 days or less. Mine took 2 months but YMMV.

Now for the helpful advice that took me days to hunt down:

1)       You don’t have an alien number (or A# or A). The TN-1 status is not a visa and as such does not give you an alien number. So what are you supposed to put when every form asks for an A#, you but ‘none’.

2)       If the form asks for your class of admission, visa type, current status, how you arrived in the country etc. You put ‘TN-1 Status’.

3)       This is specific for the I-765 so I’ll just include a screenshot:

4)       Within the I-485, since the TN-1 status is not a visa you’re going to put ‘none’ a lot. Just like this screenshot:

5)       One of the hardest pieces for me was getting the medical exam (the I-693) completed. What you’re going to want to do is go to the USCIS website and put in your zip code. Then what I did was create a Google docs spreadsheet of all my local doctors and called each and every one of them. Make sure to ask how much the medical including all vaccinations will costs. Doing this I was able to find the cheapest doctor in my area that used the local city vaccination clinic to get my vaccines. Total cost was less than $200. You might be able to get your family doctor to give you a physical and prescribe the shots to have insurance pay for it but I didn’t go that route.

6)       When filling out the I-864 it will ask you for 3 previous year’s tax records. You can easily request these records from the IRS.

7)       When the package is complete scan the entire thing to email and save a copy. This will save you many sleepless nights when you doubt what you put down.

8)       When you’re ready to mail the entire thing take it to USPS and use their tracking feature, this will let you know when it arrived at USCIS and who took it in.

9)       You can use the online case status at USCIS when you’ve received your case numbers. Be aware, however, that the system isn’t always up to date; my cases still haven’t shown-up there.

This obviously doesn’t answer every question out there and if you’ve got question I would recommend you check out the forums over at Visa Journey and the rest of the site. They can walk you through exactly what paperwork to submit and generally answer questions you may have. Best bet is to use the forum search feature as 9 times out of 10 someone else has had your exact problem. I’m sure you’ve got questions. If the Visa Journey forums or site don’t help you out feel free to leave a comment here.

My Virtual Lab

Throughout my career in IT security I’ve always seen hacks, exploits and vulnerabilities and thought ‘hey, that’s interesting, Too bad I don’t run XYZ to test this out’. Around last year I was given a client where I had to install software on my machine. Not wanting to actually install this software on my work laptop I obtained a VMware license. Now I have been using VMware at home for a long time to try out LiveCD versions of operating systems or to play around with stuff like OS X. Mostly with the free VMPlayer software. This software allows you to test out one vmware image but it’s a little locked down. Now that I had VMware installed I was able to actually setup some test networks with various operating systems. I tried this out last year and figured out (to my dismay) that VMware + Encrypted harddrive = A very SLOW death. With one image running VMware was barely usable, starting up a second image would just kill my machine. So I let the topic die for a while. Then earlier this year someone posted a harddrive image from a machine they found running Win95. They supposedly found this computer in a parking lot and made an image of the harddrive. The problem was, it was made for Virtual Box. Being curious about this harddrive image I installed Virtual Box and took a look. While there was nothing too excited about the image I found that Virtual Box ran really great on my system. I decided to try out another OS and installed Ubuntu. What would originally bring my computer to a crawl was now running at almost full speed. With this in mind I slowly built up a virtual lab to test various exploits, scanners etc against. This is the lab I’m currently using for my Backtrack articles and find it works great!

My Lab

The current lab I have setup was really more for my entertainment than anything else. I set it up in such a way that I can install software used for security (such at NetMiner, Wireshark, nmap, metasploit etc) but I wanted to be sure that the data flying around inside this network couldn’t get out to my actual network. Virtual Box has a nice feature were you can setup a simple internal network where all the machines can communicate with one another but not the outside network. But if you need to update a machine it’s as simple as changing the network type drop down booting the OS and making your updates. Virtual box also allows you to set a DHCP server for this internal network so you don’t have to worry about setting static IP’s (not that setting static IPs is a problem but when setting up WinNT, Windows 95/98/ME it saves time not having to reboot all the time.

Let’s walk through my current lab setup:

1)       Windows NT 4. This is an unpatched machine. Really super vulnerable. I just keep it around for nostalgic reasons. If you’re still running Windows NT run, don’t walk, do your IT guy and tell him to upgrade to the newest windows server version. If your vendor is telling you it’s because their software won’t run on a newer OS then you should weigh the cost of upgrading with a different vendor vs. the cost of having a data breach. But that’s a different article.

2)       Windows 2003. This is windows 2003 server. I use it to test Web apps to learn Injection techniques as well as a DNS server, Fileserver and MS SQL database server.

3)       Ubuntu Server 9.04. This the newest release from Ubuntu. I use this to test vulnerable web apps and web app scanning tools. I installed Damn Vulnerable Web App over the weekend and really like it.

4)       Windows 95. Just a nostalgic machine. Nothing really worthwile on it except ski-free.

5)       Windows XP. This is my XP machine with SP3. I don’t really run tests against it (though I will be shortly). Mostly it’s for testing out windows tools such as Net Miner, Cain & Able, L0pht Crack and running my Cisco emulator

6)       Cisco 7200 router. This is my cisco emulated hardware running a 7200 image. I used this in the most recent article about backtrack where I was testing the cisco tools. It runs on top of GNS3 (Graphic Network Simulator) and worked great.

7)       This is the Backtrack 4b image running. It runs from the ISO so as I do my testing I know I’m not changing anything from the default. Eventually I’ll install it to a harddrive image but not until I’ve gone through all the /pentest apps.

Once I got the lab setup it was easy to expand my knowledge about how to use the tools, which tools work which don’t etc.  One thing you’ll notice absent is a windows 2000 server. I’ll get around to setting one up eventually but for now I think what I’ve got works pretty good.

Note: I’m republishing this because my previous writeup was all messed up when I changed themes. It’s the exact same article as before.

A colleague of mine sent me an interesting article today from CIO.com, which was based off of this DC Examiner entry. While short on details the article was about how a programmer at Fannie Mae was able to place a logic bomb in some code at Fannie Mae which”:

“would have reduced if not shut down operations at Fannie Mae for at least a week. The total damage would include cleaning out and restoring of 4,000 servers, restoring and securing the automation of mortgages, and restoring all data that was erased.”

According to the actual FBI Complaint it would appear that the engineer, Makwana, was highly proficient at programming UNIX shell scripts. The complaint claims that Makwana’s program was set to run January 31, 2009, it would lock out the root account, disable all other accounts, find other servers on the network, copy over to those servers then zero out (write the byte 0 on the harddrive platters) the root partition. It was also setup to remove any records of Makwana’s account access.

At worst this would’ve cost Fannie Mae a week’s worth of down time, they would be forced to restore from backup. They might lose some customer data if databases running on their Unix servers were destroyed but at the most it would be a day or two old.

Another interesting part of the complaint is the fact that Makwana was terminated on the 24th of October at 1pm. His computer access was still activated until the end of the day (or even longer).

At the end of the day what the FBI Complaint describes is a Logic Bomb. A logic bomb is a program, script or hidden code that is set to activate (or explode, like a bomb, get it?) after a certain event happens.

Wikipedia: A logic bomb is a piece of code intentionally inserted into a software system that will set off a malicious function when specified conditions are met

Logic bombs are something every company needs to be weary of. Proper segregation of duties, code review, appropriate code testing and well trained system engineers can help catch logic bombs before they go off.

However, I wanted to comment on this last bit from the CIO article:

“The disgruntled employee is a real issue, and firms need to be thinking carefully about security issues, such as changing passwords and access control, in situations of layoffs, Cluley noted.”

while this statement is true, it has nothing to do with logic bombs and doesn’t reflect what happened at Fannie Mae. The real controls that are in place to help fight (or come back after) logic bombs are:

• Proper Segregation of Duties
• Good backup and recovery controls and testing
• Code review
• Proper change management for Unix scripts
• Disabling of accounts in a timely manner
• Script Reviews
• Monitoring Controls

Recently Backtrack 4 was released, Backtrack is a great resource to learn about security and penetration testing in general. It also has a lot of tools to perform a variety of task. One of the interesting features in Backtrack 4 is the /pentest folder. It contains tools and resources but it’s a little mystified in it’s presentation. Just a directory hanging out there.  For the next few months I’m going to attempt to de-mystify and test as many of the tools as I can. To make this even more exiting I’ll be doing it from A to Z. Starting with the first folder listed alphabetically and going from there.  Originally I had thought of just doing this as a folder by folder but after looking through everything I’ll just make a judgment call when I want to stop fiddling around. Some posts I’ll cover more than one folder and other times I might only cover a tool or two.

Pentest Folder Listing

So let’s get started shall we?

Not too many programs here!

This one is an easy one. There’s not too many Bluetooth tools here to begin with (mainly because a lot of the Bluetooth tools are built in to the OS (such as HCI Dump).

Taking a look at blueprint it’s a tool which allows you to profile a a Bluetooth device. You tell it the Bluetooth device ID and it will spit out as much information as it can

Bluesmash is a GUI tool designed for getting information from phones and exploiting a range of vulnerabilities.  Since I don’t really have access to Bluetooth on this machines I can’t go in to more detail than that. I have played with these tools in the past but since I didn’t have a vulnerable phone available at the time I couldn’t really test the vulnerabilities.

Moving on to the next folder, CISCO, we see there are a selection of tools for dealing with (and discovering) Cisco devices (what else did you expect?).  To test these tools out I used GNS3 (a Cisco router emulator) and setup my own virtual cisco 7200 router. Took me a while to set it up but your best bet is to follow the tutorials at BlindHog. I won’t be supplying any image files, I’ll leave that up to the reader to find.  The basic GNS3 configuration was setup like this:

Go go gadget Cisco emulator!

Since I’m running all these tests in my lab (with Virtual Box) on a virtualized internal network I had to run GNS3 on a virtual Windows XP instance. In the end, though,  it didn’t really give me too many problems getting it setup.

So once I had setup the practice router I was able to test all the tools available in the cisco folder.

A few more apps here

The first tool I took a look at was CAT, or Cisco Auditing Tool. To call it an auditing tool is a little bit of a misnomer since it’s really just a password brute force tool which connects over the telnet port (23). It has some other features for exploiting an old IOS bug but other than that it just takes a wordlist and attempts to guess the password. You’d be better served using something like hydra or medusa instead (we’ll get to those later on). But I have to say it did work at bruteforcing my password and successfully told me what the password was.

hack you? don't mind if I do

Cisco-Global-exploiter has some interesting functions:

Wish I could test all of these

However, since I didn’t have an image for any of the above cisco machines to try out I can’t really confirm if any of these work. But if you do have a cisco device and have tested this out let me know in the comments section.

Cisco-OCS simply scans for vulnerable Cisco devices. Turns out the device I was running wasn’t vulnerable, it was found but not vulnerable.

Ciscos-1.3 does the same as CAS but instead of trying multiple passwords it simply tries to connect to every IP trying the default password ‘cisco’.

And finally we’ve got copy-router-config. This really isn’t too hard to guess. Just start up the tftpd daemon in backtrack and provided you know the community name (an SNMP thing) it will strip out the full config. Letting you analyze it later and identify any weaknesses in the config.

And so ends part 1 of our series. As part of this series I’m going to also tell you how I put together my practice lab and a list of other tools that you can use in windows which are not included in the backtrack cd.

Update: So a friend brought to my attention that I was using an older version of the /pentest folder. Backtrack had released a new CD with a few more tools. Looking through I found two new tools: Redsnarf and Bluebugger. Redsnarf is a bluetooth tool designed to hunt down non-discoverable bluetooth devices (by guessing the last six bytes of the bluetooth address). Bluetooth bugger simply pulls down as much information from a bluetooth phone as it can. Unfortunately since I don’t allow Virtual Box access to my bluetooth hardware I wasn’t able to test these tools. If you have let me know in the comments.

 Further more in the Cisco folder I noticed a rather odd addition, a tool entitled ‘oscanner’. When I looked up what this tool does it doesn’t sound like it’s in the correct folder at all. This tool is really called ‘Oracle Scanner’ and is used to perform a slew of tests again an Oracle database. Since I don’t have Oracle installed I wasn’t able to test it out but from what I’ve read about the tool it sounds promising, if only it was located in the Database folder instead.

Note: It is illegal in some areas to forge emails. I am not telling you to go out and do this, it is merely a thought exercise. Use this information at your own risk. You have been warned.

Over the years there have been technological attempts to kick people off the internet. DoS, DDoS, modem hacks, netsplits etc etc. But these are temporary, eventually your DoS will get blackholed, your userid will get klined your botnets compromised. And worst of all your enemy won’t have to do anything about it, the ISP will be the one suffering trying to fix the problem, they just sit back and wait for the damage to subside.  Until I devised this devious ploy.

In an attempt combat piracy and copyright infringement groups such as the RIAA, MPAA and ESA have begun monitoring public torrents. They record the IPs of those who are downloading/uploading the torrent, they then (automatically I assume) email the ISP with a standard form letter similar to this:

Entertainment Software Association
575 7th Street, NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20004 USA

Attention: Intellectual Property Enforcement
Telephone: 202-223-2400
E-mail: mailto:esa@copyright-compliance.com?subject=RE
8 Feb 2008 00:58:24 GMT

ISP: Rogers Cable Communications Inc.
ESA Reference Number: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Dear Rogers Cable Communications Inc.:

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is a trade association that represents the intellectual property interests of numerous companies that publish interactive games for video game consoles, personal computers, handheld devices and the Internet in the United States of America, in Canada, and in other countries (collectively referred to as ESA members). ESA is authorized to act on behalf of ESA members whose copyright and other intellectual property rights it believes to be infringed as described herein.

ESA is providing this letter of notification to make Rogers Cable Communications Inc. aware of material on its network or system that infringes the exclusive copyright rights of and is unlawful towards one or more ESA members.

ESA members are entitled to the full protection of Canadian intellectual property laws, including the Copyright Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-42, as amended, in such entertainment software products.

Based on the information at its disposal on 7 Feb 2008 23:47:26 GMT, ESA has a good faith belief that xxxxxxxx infringes the rights of one or more ESA members by offering for sale or download unauthorized copies of game products protected by copyright, or offering for sale or download material that is the subject of infringing activities. The copyrighted works that have been infringed include but are not limited to:

Title: Hellgate: London
Infringement Source: BitTorrent
Infringement Timestamp: 7 Feb 2008 23:47:26 GMT
Infringement Last Documented: 7 Feb 2008 23:47:26 GMT
Infringer Username:
Infringing Filename: Hellgate London
Infringing Filesize: 7382154331
Infringer IP Address: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Infringer DNS Name: xxxxxxxxxxxx
Infringing URL: XXXXXXXXXXXX

The unauthorized copies of such game product(s) or the material that is the subject of infringing activities appears on or is made available through xxxxxxxxx. Those items are listed and/or identified thereon by their titles or variations thereof, game-related listings/references/descriptions, or depictions of game-related artwork. Such copies, titles, game-related listings/references/descriptions, depictions, and material that is the subject of infringing activities, are hereinafter referred to as “Infringing Material.”

Accordingly, ESA hereby requests Rogers Cable Communications Inc. to immediately do the following:

1. Notify the account holder of the Infringing Material.
2. Remove, or disable access to, the Infringing Material detailed above.
3. Take appropriate action against the account holder under your Abuse Policy/Terms
of Service Agreement, including termination of a repeat offender.

Please inform us whether you will remove or disable access to the Infringing Material as requested. Rogers Cable Communications Inc. or the account holder may contact ESA at the above-listed contact details, with email preferred. Please include the above-noted Reference Number in the subject line of all email correspondence.

Thank you for your cooperation and prompt response in this matter.

Sincerely,

Intellectual Property Enforcement
Entertainment Software Association

What will usually occur is the ISP will send you a standard email or letter listing out the AUP which will invariably have a section about copyright infringement. The problem with this is that the ISP usually has a 3 strikes you’re out rule. So you get three infringement letters and you get cut off.

Those sneakier than I will have already realized that by figuring out your enemies IP address all you’ll need to do is send a handful of email to get someone cut off from the internet. There’s very little identification that goes on when it comes to the ISPs checking if you actually caused the infringement so next time you need get rid of someone search google for ‘copyright infringement letter’ and copy and paste the letter, making sure to include their IP address as the one you recorded. Do this a couple of times and you’re enemy will have to spend atleast a week getting a new internet connection setup. In some places he won’t even be able to get high-speed again because Comcast or COX or whomever might be the only players in town.

Update: You might want to actually spoof your email address before you send this. I won’t write an article about it because it’s so trivial but let me google that for you.

So I’ve been re-reading a favorite book of mine by Neal Stephenson, Diamond Age, or better known as “A Young Ladies Illustrated Primer” and as always I got the feeling to look up the OLPC. When I first heard about the OLPC I was very excited about the project. Having watched the project fall behind, cost twice as much as it was supposed to, pander to countries who want Windows XP for cheap and watch Intel come in and undermine the whole project I was delighted to hear about the $12 Computer for education. I heard about it over the summer and and promptly forgot about it. That was until recently I started thinking about the project again.

Yes that’s an NES

The project is called Playpower.org. The idea being that a Victor-70 (an NES with a keyboard and mouse) could be used to teach people at a fraction of the cost. The unit itself costs $12 USD. Since you can purchase a TV for $27 in idea (and most families already have one) it makes a lot more sense than giving kids a laptop for them lose, sell etc. It also harkens back to the days when your dad brought home the C64 and youlearned everything the hard way. I honestly feel this can succeed where OLPC has failed.

I’m not a programmer any longer, though I use to be; nor am I a hardware hacker, though I’d love to be. That’s the reason I’m posting here, to raise awareness for this project. The more people that are aware of this project and can help with it the better.

Since there’s no History section on their site I’ll thrown one together here (from what I’ve been able to gather on the internet, might not be correct at all): Back in the summer of ’08 Derek Lomas (See whole team here and others participated in what is known as the International Design for Development Summit. Dereks team posited that you could use the pirated Famiclones (Legal Pirate copies of the original Famicon with keyboard) to help teach children. Couple it with an internet connection (or a wireless connection) and they have access to a wealth of information and access. They wrote a lengthily article about the idea.

From their site:

Overview
The Playpower Foundation is creating a platform for 8-bit learning games in order to improve education for millions of children worldwide. We are using radically affordable TV-connected computers – public domain hardware clones of the Nintendo Entertainment System®/Famicom®, which are packaged with a keyboard and mouse for $12. Our goal is to create original 8-bit learning software and distribute it through low-cost hardware.

A Global Problem
There are millions of children around the world who are unable to afford the most basic education. This dampens economic growth, reduces political freedom, increases disease, and propagates ignorance and war. Computer-Aided Learning (CAL) is one solution that has been demonstrated to be an effective way of improving education in developing countries. However, even the most inexpensive computers cost more than US$100, making them unaffordable to the billions of people around the world who could most benefit from CAL.

An 8-Bit Solution
Playpower is creating an ultra-affordable educational computer using a 25-year old computer chip technology (currently in production for video games). “The $12 computer,” as the press has appropriately labeled it, is a keyboard, mouse, and processor that connects to a TV screen and takes 1980′s era 8-bit cartridges. Playpower’s goal is to discover and develop effective learning games for these $12 computers—games that help build the basic skills that can dramatically enhance a person’s economic opportunities. We have found that in countries like Ghana, skills as elementary as learning to type can mean the difference between making $1 per day to $1 per hour. And a child who learns computer programming skills—from any background and in any country—stands to have a world of opportunities available to them.

Our initial research shows that an 8-bit computer is powerful enough to be engaging and effective at building basic skills in reading, writing, mathematics, science and other subjects such as computer programming. With clever puzzles, traditional video games, and text-based simulations, 8-bit computers can additionally teach skills such as creative problem solving, critical thinking, logic, and entrepreneurship. So let’s go 8-bit!

Who We Are
Playpower is a non-profit organization composed of individuals from India, Ghana, Brazil, Canada and the USA. Our largest working group is based in San Diego, at the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, at UC San Diego. Playpower received substantial support at MIT, during the International Development Design Summit (IDDS) in the summer of 2008.

More About the $12 Computer
The Playpower platform is based on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), a 25-year old technology that now occupies the public domain (hardware patents expire after 20 years). Dozens of manufacturers are actively producing clones of the NES that come with a mouse, game controllers and a full keyboard.

These computers are commonly packaged with educational content such as BASIC programming as well as typing, math, and english language learning games. Cartridges often contain hundreds of software titles and plug directly into the keyboard (a self-enclosed unit which contains the processor and video card).

One of the major advantages of this platform is that it utilizes a TV as a monitor. This dramatically reduces costs for families whom already own a TV. Television sets are increasingly common in developing countries. Interestingly, in spite of the fact that two-thirds of India lives on less than a $1 per day, more than half own a set. Utilizing a TV for learning games also creates the potential for social learning experiences that are centered around groups of friends and family.

Why?
At Playpower, we know that education is vitally important for a prosperous and peaceful global society. Computer-aided learning holds a great deal of promise as a supplement to traditional teacher-based education. In many countries, public schools are in a very poor state. For instance, researchers have found that the teacher attendance rate averages seventy-five percent in India. This means that teachers often fail to show up to school! A a result, those families who can afford it are forced to pay for public schools or tutors but so many cannot. And in spite of great efforts to improve public schools, these efforts take enormous amounts of funding and the schools have often been resistant to change.

Computer-Aided Learning demonstrates the promise of supplemental education because it scales more effectively than training quality teachers. And since there is already a significant market for supplemental education, we intend to introduce a better product that will assist parents and ensure their children receives quality instruction.

Affordable, educational computers could provide significant value to millions of people around the world who currently have insufficient access to education.

A different unit hooked in to a TV

Someone who works on this project has said that the intent of the project is to get at the very least a machine with an included/built-in keyboard that can be used to teach basic (BASIC) programming to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access for one reason or another. From there it will be used as a platform for educational software by creating a relatively straight-forward tool-chain to create and publish content for the machine. Ideally the content would eventually be created primarily by and for communities that wouldn’t otherwise have access to a platform for software publishing.

Some questions that have come up was distribution of software. In the short term they’re talking about using flash drives. The first thought that comes to mind is the recently released PowerPak. It allows you to add NES software which can then be played using the NES/Famiclones.

There is one problem with using this item. It is prohibitvely expensive. At last check they wanted $135.00 USD for the unit plus shipping. Which is a little bit over board.

So, if you’re interested you can read more at their website: http://playpower.org

They have a wiki setup at: http://dev.playpower.org/tiki-index.php and a google groups setup.

How can you help? You can help by contributing in the following areas:

• Work on some aspect of our Current Task Breakdown
• Coding 8-bit games
• Making 8-bit Music
• Making 8-bit Graphics
• Designing 8-bit Learning Games (interaction design)
• Developing Reusable Game Frameworks
• Contributing to our Open-Source Development Environment
• Helping to Make this easy!

Honestly I hope this works out better than the OLPC project did. At least you can’t install windows xp on an 8bit machine (though you can install Lunix, yes Lunix not Linux) so this project won’t be bogged down by requests to ‘make it run windows’.

Last night I got a request from a friend for help dealing with someone sending harassing emails. He wanted to know how hard it would be to trace back someone’s IP to find out who they are. All I knew was the person used a hotmail address to send the email so I asked for the email headers from the original email. Email headers are a part of every single email and are basically a log of how that email got from that person to you. Luckily Hotmail adds something special to the email headers: X-Originating-IP.

X-Originating-IP: The IP address of the computer on which the email originated.

When you use a web based email service like Hotmail, Yahoo! Or Gmail they add the X-Originating-IP to the email headers. Most people think they can simply create a fake account on one of these web based email services and they are completely anonymous. There are ways to make it anonymous but I’ll get to those later.

With email headers in hand I went to my favorite web resource: Domain Dossier at CentralOps.net. It gives me a wealth of information while keeping my IP out of the logs, it also combines all the tools I would do by hand (nslookup, traceroute, whois, nmap etc) in one click.

<!–[if !vml]–><!–[endif]–>

It takes about 10 seconds to run through the whole search. After reading through the report I saw the person had a web server running on port 80 (Ubuntu if you must know). So the first thing I did was fire up Firefox and see if they have a website. I was hoping they would be hosting their own personal website and that would be the end of this. When the site loaded I was greeted with the words “Holder Page”. No formatting just those words. But having the server running gave me some hope. So I fired up my copy of Backtrack (I have a love hate relationship with Backtrack, see my previous entry) and ran the tool Nikto.

Nikto is an Open Source (GPL) web server scanner which performs comprehensive tests against web servers for multiple items, including over 3500 potentially dangerous files/CGIs, versions on over 900 servers, and version specific problems on over 250 servers. Scan items and plugins are frequently updated and can be automatically updated (if desired).

It gave me a plethora of lovely information. Not much at first but I just let it run for an hour.

<!–[if !vml]–><!–[endif]–>

After waiting for the scan to finish I noticed something interesting. The web server had a folder sitting off of root called pics. I went back to firefox, typed in the IP of our harrassers IP and added /pics/ to the end. Since indexing was still enabled on the server (which should really be turned off people) I was able to get a listing of all the pictures this person was “secretly” sharing with the rest of the world. I saved all the pictures to my hard drive and sent them off to my friend who was able to identify the person sending the harassing emails and confront him with the evidence I put together for him in.

How could all of this been avoided?

Its really simple to avoid this sort of thing and I’m just going to give a quick listing:

Use Tor. Tor, while slow, would have made it impossible to trace back.

Use the library or a school. While it would have given me the persons school or approximate location my searches would have ended there

Don’t run your own webserver on the same connection you’re sending harassing emails from. Doubly so if you’re going to store pictures on that server

Use a webservice that doesn’t log X-Originating-IP. I won’t tell you were you can find these. But Google is a good resource

Don’t send harassing emails to people you know

Update: According to my friend once he brought some of the evidence I sent him to the person who we suspected sent the email he confessed. Mission accomplished!

So a friend of mine sent me a link to a small article on ZD net. The article contained an interesting quip about someone setting up a website to rate auditors: ratemyauditor.com.

After thinking about it for a bit I realized how awful an idea it is. Rate my auditor is either the worst idea (if it is not an anonymous service) or the worst idea (if it does allow anonymous comments) I’ve ever heard. People hate being audited, no matter what. Especially IT audits. Why? Because IT people but a lot of blood sweat and tears into making sure a system works. The audit firm sends in a young 20 year old with a 10 page checklist
telling him exactly what to look at. There’s no context, no risk evaluation. Just a kid with a checklist and if one of those checks fail then, at best, the IT department has a meeting with the execs, at worst, it gets outsourced to
India. (I’m obviously going a little over board here). This also makes dealing with the IT department very difficult as they have to defend every decision made against a checklist. It shouldn’t be like this but this is what happens because a subject matter expert, who knows Unix cold, costs $250 an hour while intern only costs $80. So of course you get an IT guy, who already knows his way around the internet, pissed off because the auditors don’t know the difference between CONSOLE and FTPACCESS so what is he to do? He could complain to management but they likely wont listen. He can’t complain to the auditors. So what is he to do? He will go online and sound off on some website saying that the people at firm XYZ don’t know anything about Unix. If another company starts looking and they find out that firm XYZ doesn’t know Unix then how can that company faithfully
rely on a SAS70 performed which specifically tested Unix logical access controls.

This could go the other way too. A lot of IT folks, especially in smaller shops or shops that have grown organically, don’t understand what being audited means, why SoX matters to them and what controls are. All they know is that people have access, security is pretty tight and things just work. It can be very frustrating for them when they’re told that the lockout threshold should have been set to 3 instead of the 8 they have set now. They can’t argue against an the auditor. They can’t complain to management so they will go online and write that Firm ABC doesn’t understand how their IT works. Since it is all anonymous it doesn’t matter how long a diatribe they write.

Now the other side, non-anonymous comments (I.E. So and so from company GDC) wouldn’t work either, people are not going to complain because the second a partner finds out John complained he’s going to call his friend on the audit committee and John is going to be having a meeting with an executive. Now, executives probably wont complain because they would be concerned about the image it gives their company *and* the strain it would put on their relationships with partners.

Finally, I doubt it would ever contain any negative ratings because the second a firm finds out about the negative rating they’ll sic their lawfirm on them to get the comment removed. All in all I prefer the current method of allowing clients to review your performance in private and sending that to the partner level, which helps decide their bonus. This way crap auditors get to learn their crap (supposedly) and can learn how to improve instead of never hearing the complaint until they stumble on ratemyauditor.com