average admins

This is a nice little YouTube video that caught me odd, on how to charge your Ipod. Hopefully, it hasn’t been posted here before. Anyway, check it out here.

http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Reverse_Engineering_Mentoring

Wow, this is very cool!

Didier Stevens has started a mentoring program to teach newbies how to reverse engineer software. The instructions are very well written and very easy to follow.

If you’re interested in RE, then this is a great place to start.

http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/

Have you ever wanted a Windows CD that would install Windows by automatically putting in your name, product key, timezone and regional settings? And have it merged with the latest Service Pack to save time? Followed by silently installing all your favourite applications along with DirectX 9.0c, .Net Framework 1.1 and then all the required hotfixes, updated drivers, tweaks, and a readily patched UXTheme without any user interaction whatsoever? Then this guide will show you how you can do just that!

Through the course of this guide, you will create a CD that does all the installing for you. The CD will be fully updated with the latest hotfixes, and install all your programs for you.

This guide has been broken up into three parts: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced. It has been done so, to help you understand what you’re doing and not to get over your head too fast. There are pages upon pages of information on this subject, and this guide only covers the tip of the iceberg.

I figured with all of the talk lately about mobile phones, I might as well post this. It was my how-to of the day. Might come in handy one day.
Ever dropped your cell phone in the sink, or even worse the toilet? Did you ever leave it in your pocket and run it through the washer? It usually means you have to replace your phone, but sometimes if you’re fast you can save the phone.

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Upon receiving my unlocked Nokia E61 smartphone from MyWorldPhone.com I had a lot of customizing I wanted to do to the phone. However, for some reason, there was some “Planet3″ branding on the phone which disallowed some configuration changes, like customizing the soft keys and the active standby applications on the phone’s standby screen. After Jason and I did some research, here is what we came up with.

The Nokie E61, when shipped from MyWorldPhones.com, has a firmware installed on it with some “Planet3″ branding. Since this firmware is the most recent release from Nokia, I was unable to reflash it with the Nokia firmware because Nokia’s firmware updater recognized my installed version as the latest version and there were no upgrades available. I was unable to format and reinstall the phone to the defaults since the installed firmware had the “Planet3″ software built-in. I found a way around this by doing some digging and it all started at ,e-series.org.

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This is rather interesting … someone has written a script (an open-source one, at that) that will remove all of the junk that’s installed on a new PC.

Here’s the link from TinyApps.org.

And the author’s page: http://www.yorkspace.com/pc-de-crapifier/

Currently Uninstalls

The user can select exactly what is uninstalled from the list below

* QuickBooks Trial
* NetZero Installers
* Earthlink Setup Files
* Corel Photo Album 6
* Tiscali Internet
* Wanadoo Europe Installer
* Get High Speed Internet!
* Internet Service Offers Launcher
* Dell Search Assistant
* Norton Ghost 10.0
* Symantec Live Update
* MS Plus Photo Story 2LE
* MS Plus Digital Media Installer
* McAffee
* Norton Internet Security
* Google Desktop
* AOL US
* AOL UK
* MusicMatch Jukebox
* MusicMatch Music Services
* Wild Tangent Games
* Norton AntiVirus 2005
* Norton Security Center
* Norton AntiSpam
* PC-cillin Internet Security 12
* Run Registry Entries
* Desktop Icons
* Corel WordPerfect
* Roxio RecordNow
* Sonic DLA
* Sonic Update Manager
* Sonic RecordNow Audio
* Sonic RecordNow Copy
* Roxio MyDVD LE
* Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003
* Quicken 2006

THE Visual Guide To Penetration Testing

As posted on one of my favorite blogs, A Day in the Life of an Information Security Investigator

What’s that? You really want a visual guide to penetration testing? Something that covers:

- Enumeration tools (nmap, firewalk, amap, nbtscan, hping, scanrand, sinfp, etc.)

- General Vulnerability Scanning Tools (nessus, typon, NGS Squirrel, MatriXay, SARA)

- Exploit Engine Tools (metasploit, manual SQL injection, etherape, netwox, hijetta)

- Pre-inspection visit steps (EVERYTHING!)

- Password Cracking (JtR, L0pht, Rainbow, pwdump)

- Network Recon (whois, samspade, google, social engineering, dumpster diving, zone transfers)

- Enumeration results steps (what if a certain port IS open?)

- Command line examples of each tool

Something that could be printed out and be your all-in-one guide to penetration testing?

SHAZZAM!

Behold, your wish has been granted.

This is a must see!

Chief

I bought a 2006 Honda Civic a few weeks ago and since my wife and I have thouroughly enjoyed the GPS navigation unit in her car, we decided to hunt down (more on this later) a 2006 Civic with GPS navigation as well. Today, while trying to find out how to pipe DVD video to the in-dash GPS navigation LCD screen, I ran across a link on how to hack the splash screen for the Acura/Honda factory GPS navigation units.

It all started with this link. Hack-a-Day covered the original hack by a hacker/coder named Bysin (supposedly has been sent to jail for developing SPAM software and selling it… it is unknown if this is the same guy or not) and posted a link to this page. This page then linked to a thread on the AcuraZINE TSX Forums. And from the AcuraZINE thread I found this link that shows how to hack my car specifically.

I did a lot of reading through the different links and saw a lot of successes as well as a number of screens available for download for the Acura system (well, they actually work on the Honda system, too, but I don’t want to sport an Acura logo in my Civic… even though Acura’s are very, very nice cars!). Guicide posted a very good how-to on hacking the 2006 Honda Civic’s GPS navigation splash screen.

My first attempt at doing this was successful. I am extremely excited about this and hope to be more creative in the future. Here is the original image:

And here is my first attempt at a hacked splash screen. Like I said, I hope to get more creative with this in the future.

The image is a little grainy, but hey, it’s a 256 color bitmap image. That’s the way Honda wanted it. I am assuming the images posted in some of the links above are the original JPEG images and won’t look that clear once they are converted to an 8 or 16-bit, 256 color image. Anyway, I’ll post more images in the future if I can come up with something more clever than what I have posted here.

The image looks really cool in the car. I don’t know if it is because it is different than the original image or if it actually looks kind of cool. Whatever it is, I like it! Below is a photo of the image on my in-dash GPS navigation LCD screen.

Until next time…

You may remember that shortly after AA was started, Tommy from TISD posted about Linux on a Schtick. I made a post in that string about instructions I found at Tom’s Hardware, http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/09/windows_in_your_pocket/, that showed how to put a BART PE version of WinXP on a stick. I later found a 1gb Cruzer for $29 at Office Depot and tried it.

I followed the instructions to a tee and the screen caps on Tom’s were exactly what you will see if you give it a whirl.

It seemed to be a tool with potential, but didn’t seem all that usefull out of the box. Since I was coming up on a time when I was trying to tie up some work before I left TISD I didn’t try to tweak it much. That is coming in the near future.

The Bart PE had a very watered down Windows feel, but does come with a variety of add-ins that could be usefull. The one thing I didn’t like was there was no flexibility to make an all-around usefull tool. It was a made-for-a-reason solution. Once the stick was loaded I didn’t see any way of customizing it with out reloading the whole OS back to the Stick, but like I said I had other bigger fish to fry at that point of my life.

Post questions/comments on AA or e-mail me at kevin.chancellor@gmail.com. I might have left the great city of Texarkana, but I’m not out of contact.

We have been looking at alternative means of surveillance for a while now. We have solutions deployed currently that are provided by Diebold but have found the solutions to be expensive and not very flexible. Our goal is to be able to produce images captured from cameras throughout our branch locations, storage facilities, and remote ATM machines, that are high quality and could be used in an internal investigation or provided as usable evidence to law enforcement if necessary. Our current solutions obviously work, but my superiors have requested larger, better quality images than what we are currently capturing.

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