Articles

Poster of the Month
Steganography over converted channels
Security and privacy have been a concern for people for centuries. Whether it is private citizens, governments, military, or business, it seems everyone has information that needs to be kept private and out of the hands of unintended third parties. Information wants to be free but it is necessary to keep information private. That need has come about because governments have sensitive information, corporations send confidential financial records, and individuals send personal information to others and conduct financial transactions online. Information can be hidden so it cannot be seen. The information can also be made undecipherable. This is accomplished using steganography and cryptography.


Steganography and Cryptography

Kautilya
One liner about Kautilya - Kautilya is a toolkit which makes it easy to use USB Human Interface Device (like Teensy++), in breaking into a system. Now let’s understand what does that mean. First let’s understand Teensy++ (I will use Teensy for Teensy++ from now on). It is a USB HID which could be used as a programmable keyboard, mouse, joystick and serial monitor. What could go wrong? Imagine a programmable keyboard, which when connected to a system types out commands pre-programmed in it. It types faster than you and makes no mistakes. It can type commands and scripts and could use an operating system against itself, that too in few seconds. If you can program the device properly keeping in mind most of the possibilities and quirks it could be a really nice pwnage device.


Introduction

One liner about Kautilya - Kautilya is a toolkit which makes it easy to use USB Human Interface Device (like Teensy++), in breaking into a system. Now let’s understand what does that mean.

HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure)
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol where communication happens in clear text. To ensure authenticity, confidentiality and integrity of messages Netscape designed HTTPS protocol. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) with the SSL (Secure socket layer)/TLS (Transport layer security) protocol. It provides encrypted communication and secure identification of a network web server. HTTPS encrypts and decrypts the page requests and page information between the client browser and the web server using a secure Socket Layer (SSL). HTTPS by default uses port 443 as opposed to the standard HTTP port of 80. URL's beginning with HTTPS indicate that the connection between client and browser is encrypted using SSL.


Introduction

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol where communication happens in clear text. To ensure authenticity, confidentiality and integrity of messages Netscape designed HTTPS protocol. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) with the SSL (Secure socket layer)/TLS (Transport layer security) protocol. It provides encrypted communication and secure identification of a network web server.

Don’t Get Injected – Fix Your Code
When I began doing security review for web applications, one common issue that I encountered was ‘SQL Injection’. Developers used to pose several questions at me saying that their software is secure as they had followed several measures to mitigate this insidious issue. The main mitigation adopted was to use Stored Procedures or input validation. While this does reduce certain type of Injections, It doesn’t prevent all. In this article, I will explain what SQL Injection is and what one can do to prevent it.


When I began doing security review for web applications, one common issue that I encountered was ‘SQL Injection’.  Developers used to pose several questions at me saying that their software is secure as they had followed several measures to mitigate this insidious issue.

Section 66C - Punishment for identity theft
The term identity theft was coined in 1964. However, it is not literally possible to steal an identity so the term is usually interpreted with identity fraud or impersonation. Identity Theft is a form of stealing someone's identity by pretending to be someone else typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits in that person's name.


Introduction

The term identity theft was coined in 1964. However, it is not literally possible to steal an identity so the term is usually interpreted with identity fraud or impersonation.

Identity Theft is a form of stealing someone's identity by pretending to be someone else typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits in that person's name.

SOME OF THE INCIDENTS

Local File Inclusion
What is Local File Inclusion? Local File Inclusion is a method in PHP for including Local files from the Local web server itself. This becomes vulnerability when the pages to be included from web servers are not sanitized properly and to exploit this vulnerability attacker can send modified http request to the server using a web browser.


What is Local File Inclusion?

Local File Inclusion is a method in PHP for including Local files from the Local web server itself.  
This becomes vulnerability when the pages to be included from web servers are not sanitized properly and to exploit this vulnerability attacker can send modified http request to the server using a web browser.  

Poster of the Month
XSS – The Burning issue in Web Application
One of the largest portals was in news recently when their website was exploited by targeting XSS vulnerability. The person who compromised the website has also notified the portal with screenshots proving successful attack. Information Security chief called an urgent meeting to discuss the issue with his entire team. He asked that we have got application security audit done form third party before going live, we have also trained our developers with secure coding practices, then why this incident happened!! They went to other third party vendor and appointed them to audit the application.


Sysinternals Suite
Sysinternals utilities are one of the best friends of administrator.Sysinternals was original created back in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell and was bought by Microsoft in 2006. Since then the company has continued to release new tools and improve the existing ones. The Sysinternals suite consists of the following different categories: File and Disk Utilities Networking Utilities Process Utilities Security Utilities System Information Utilities Miscellaneous Utilities  


Decoding ROT using the Echo and Tr Commands in your Linux Terminal
ROT which is known as the Caesar Cipher is a kind of cryptography wherein encoding is done by moving the letters in the alphabet to its next letter. There are 25 possible ROT settings which covers the scope of letters A-Z. Thus in ROT-1, A is equals to B and B is equals to C and so are the next letters but Z would go back to A. And so the ROT-1 cipher of ‘ProjectX‘is ‘QspkfduY‘. Thus, ROT = rotation. In this short write up we will be using the echo and tr bash commands in your Linux terminal to encode or decode letters using ROT cipher. The ‘echo’ command is a built-in command in Bash in C shells which repeats the letters of words after it.


How to enable WiFi on Matriux running inside VMWare
One of the most commonly asked question on Matriux forums and IRC is how to enable and work with WiFi on a Matriux instance running inside VMWare or any other virtualization software. This tutorial will take you step by step on how to do that. For this tutorial, I am running VMware® Workstation on a Windows 7 Enterprise N Edition which is my Host machine.  The Matriux is (obviously) my guest operating system running "Krypton" v1.2. I am using a D-Link DWA-125 Wireless N 150 USB Adapter for this tutorial.


Provisions of Sec. 66B
Punishment for dishonestly receiving stolen computer resource or communication device As we have discussed in the earlier articles, under the amended Information Technology Act, Section 66 has been completed amended to remove the definition of hacking. Amendments also introduced a series of new provisions under Section 66 covering almost all major cybercrime incidents.


EtherApe – Graphical Network Monitoring
Hello readers, we are back again with a new release, Matriux Krypton v1.2 at nullcontritiya,Goa 2012. Thank you for your support throughout these years that we are able to bring in the bigger and better security solutions. This version includes some great features with 300 powerful penetration testing and forensic tools. The UI is made more elegant and faster. Based on Debian Squeeze with a custom compiled kernel 2.3.39-krypton Matriux is the fastest distribution of its kind and runs easily on a p-IV with as low as 256MB RAM and just 6GB HDD. Included new tools like reaver-wps, androguard, apkinspector, ssh server and many more.


Poster of the Month
Section 66A - Sending offensive or false messages
From this article onwards we will look at those sections. With internet and telecommunication virtually controlling communication amongst people, amendments in the Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act) have made it clear that transmission of any text, audio or video that is offensive or has a menacing character can land a sender in jail. The punishment will also be attracted if the content is false and has been transmitted for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger or insult.


Protect your privacy online with ’TOR’
Let’s begin with what Tor means: The Onion Router. A router is a device that handles your request to go from your home, office, mobile connection to a website or a web service. If you write in your browser URL bar http://chmag.in and hit return, you’ll send your request to your ISP router, which will send the request to another router and so on, until you reach the CHmag ISP router, and finally get your page back. Every one of these steps is called a “hop”.


Who wants to be a Millionaire
Everyone wants to be Millionaire and this article is just going to tell you how you can become one. The Web 2.0 has opened lots of opportunities and possibilities along with lots of security issues. One of the popular technology is “Flash” along with its never ending security issues. People laugh when they hear the terms “Flash” and “Security” together. Industry experts say that Flash is actually moving the ball towards ease of use and functionality and thus compromises on security.


Network Security
Computer Networks are the back bone of all organizations which rely on Information Technology (IT) and are the primary entry point for users to access the Information resources of an organization. Networks today are no longer limited within the physical location of an organization, but are required to be accessible from anywhere in the world which makes it vulnerable to several threats.


Poster of the Month
Introduction to Skipfish
Skipfish is an active web application security reconnaissance tool written and maintained by Michal Zalewski (@lcamtuf). Skipfish is one of the fastest webscanners available which spiders using the wordlists, a very powerful web scanning tool with a simple implementation. In Matriux Skipfish can be found in the arsenal under Arsenal ->Framework -> Skipfish


Liability of Intermediaries under the Information Technology Act
Recently Delhi high court has summoned Google, Facebook and Twitter to remove objectionable content from their website within the prescribed time period failing to which may result into blocking of the websites in India. So the question which triggers is What is the liability of the intermediaries like Google, Facebook and Twitter under Indian law?


Firewall 101
Today we are exposed to innumerable threats online. Firewalls act as the first line of defense for securing our network against these threats. Firewall could be a program or a device or group of devices used to control the traffic flow. The basic principle that Firewall uses to control this communication is ‘Access Rules’. It maintains an access rule table and every time a packet comes in or goes out, Firewall refers to this table. It only allows authorized traffic and blocks the unwanted packets.


Cain and Abel: The Black Art of ARP Poisoning
Cain and Abel is windows based password recovery tool available as a freeware and maintained by Massimiliano Montoro. It supports wide features to recover passwords varying from Local Area Network to various routing protocols as well as provides intelligent capability to recover cached passwords and encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks.


Exploiting Remote System without Being Online
This paper demonstrates unique kind of communication technique between attacker machine and victim machine during the exploitation of any victim system. Usually, while an attacker exploits the remote system and gets the remote command prompt (remote shell), attacker is only able to execute commands till the session from the remote machine is opened (established). While exploiting the system in a normal way, attacker and the victim system both should be online, if attacker wants to execute some commands in remote machine (Victim Machine).