average admins

All about Linux has written a great article about getting the new Adobe Flash working in Linux.

http://linuxhelp…./adobe-flash-player-90-beta-version-for.html

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This was my how-to of the day…Anyone tried this stuff??

In the U.S., it can be easier to end a marriage than to leave a loveless relationship with Verizon or Cingular. No, you don’t have to move to SIM card swapping Europe. Try these guerrilla tactics to get out of your service contract.

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So Chris came in today with a lo-carb Monster energy drink (affectionately known as “power drinks” to folks around here), and we got to noticing the ingredients of it. I didn’t know either of these things were lo-carb, but…ok.

You’re gonna hate me after you play this game. Someone was complaining about it in the #Debian channel so I had to see what the fuss was all about.

A quick apt-get install xmoto and 2 seconds later I was playing the game.

The game is based entirely on a very loose set of physics. The goal is to simply get from one side of the level to the next. That can’t be too hard, right? WRONG!!!

The game is very addicting, however, so you might hate me, but you’ll love the game.

http://xmoto.sourceforge.net/

The game works on Windows, Linux, and who knows, maybe Mac, too!

I am heading to Plano, TX this weekend to handle some personal business. While there, I will be glad to pick up a case (12 bottles) of Bawls for anyone around here (Texarkana USA area) who is interested.

If you would like to make an order with me, I need $17.00 per case (12 bottles) that you want me to get in my hand by 3:00 PM tomorrow afternoon. E-mail me at jeff[dot]cross[at]averageadmins[dot]com, or if you know my cell phone number, give me a call and let me know you’re interested.

Until next time…

Let’s say you send a confidential document to a client and on the off-chance that your client sends that document to someone else, you want to be notified.

There are only two ways that I can think of to “notify” someone: email and http.

If you can program the document to email you when it’s open, then your chances of getting more information are greater. You can potentially get the sender’s name, email address, mail client, and obviously the IP address of his machine. But you run a greater risk of detection. What if his email client asks for confirmation before sending the email? Or what if he doesn’t have a mail client on his machine? How will you pull the SMTP server you need to use if there’s no mail client configured? I suppose you could setup your own SMTP server and script a telnet session to send the email.

On the other hand, you could use a simple HTTP GET request that grabs a 1×1 image from a web host. This would be more likely to work unless there’s a software firewall in the way popping up with a “Excel is trying to communicate with the Internet. Do you want to Allow or Deny this connection?” However, at the most you’ll get his browser agent and IP address. I wonder if there’s a way to grab configuration information from his mail client and use it in the HTTP headers somehow? Like set his browser agent to his email address or something. I guess you could program a PHP app that accepts email addresses as arguments and then your URL could be something like: http://site/?address=me@myaddress.com.

This is extremely back burner stuff that I’m not going to put any effort into. I’m more interested to know if it can be done or not. I’m sure it could using some VB macro, but can you auto-run macros? I know there are macro viruses that auto-run so maybe it is possible.

Anyone out there have any idea of how this can be accomplished? I did a few Google searches and came up blank.

Hey I am looking to contract someone for 3 to 4 weeks to help deploy new desktops and move old ones to our domain. If you guys know anybody who is seeking employment right now please have them contact me. I don’t need a rocket scientist just someone who knows their way around a desktop….

Jason

I know that many people on this site lead dual-lives. As technology people, we are often called on to work on a person’s computer after-hours, or maybe help an individual troubleshoot a faulty home network. For me, I am a musician on the side, and need to keep up with what I’m doing. This is especially important for tax purposes, as I claim all of the work I do (I do too much of it NOT to claim it).

Thus far I’ve been using the Google Calendar to keep up with everything, but it is just a calendaring app, and doesn’t do any of the business end of things. Today I stumbled across a neat web-based application on Lifehacker called Side Job Track. This looks like a promising application for keeping up with invoicing, scheduling, and other petty details that often go along with leading a double life.

Josh

Honestly, I wasn’t aware that fgdump even existed. I’m definitely adding it to my toolbelt now, though.

http://www.darknet.org.uk/….

New versions of the ultracool tools pwdump (1.4.2) and fgdump (1.3.4) have been released.

Both versions provide some feature upgrades as well as bug fixes. Folks with really old versions of either program should definitely look at upgrading, since there are numerous performance improvements and full multithreading capabilities in both packages.

If you don’t know..what are pwdump6 and fgdump?

pwdump6 is a password hash dumper for Windows 2000 and later systems. It is capable of dumping LanMan and NTLM hashes as well as password hash histories. It is based on pwdump3e, and should be stable on XP SP2 and 2K3. If you have had LSASS crash on you using older tools, this should fix that.

fgdump is a more powerful version of pwdump6. pwdump tends to hang and such when antivirus is present, so fgdump takes care of that by shutting down and later restarting a number of AV programs. It also can dump cached credentials and protected storage items, and can be run in a multithreaded fashion very easily. I strongly recommend using fgdump over pwdump6, especially given that fgdump uses pwdump6 under the hood! You’ll get everything pwdump6 gives you and a lot more.

Darknet definately DOES recommend fgdump, super cool update of the old favourite pwdump.

fgdump was born out of frustration with current antivirus (AV) vendors who only partially handled execution of programs like pwdump. Certain vendors’ solutions would sometimes allow pwdump to run, sometimes not, and sometimes lock up the box. As such, we as security engineers had to remember to shut off antivirus before running pwdump and similar utilities like cachedump. Needless to say, we’re forgetful sometimes…

So fgdump started as simply a wrapper around things we had to do to make pwdump work effectively. Later, cachedump was added to the mix, as were a couple other variations of AV. Over time it has grown, and continues to grow, to support our assessments and other projects. We are beginning to use it extensively within Windows domains for broad password auditing, and in conjunction with other tools (ownr and pwdumpToMatrix.pl) for discovering implied trust relationships.

fgdump is targetted at the security auditing community, and is designed to be used for good, not evil. Note that, in order to effectively use fgdump, you’re going to need high-power credentials (Administrator or Domain Administrator, in most cases), thus limiting its usefulness as a hacking tool. However, hopefully some of you other security folks will find this helpful.

Get pwdump here

Get fgdump here

I came across this video and thought you might all enjoy it. Check it out! I didn’t get on the ‘net until but 1996, but I’m sure a few of you hardcore hackers remember these days. Enjoy!

Internet of 1993

jason