Image by Vítor Baptista via Flickr

Kevin Mitnick was a man who had witnessed his reputation preceded him in ways that he could not have ever imagined.  His past reputation was so prolific in unbelievable manner which had myths built higher in stack, and the myths were about how he had stolen software worth more than $300 million, secrets from covert agencies, and much more.  In fact, he was more of a hacker who had taken the challenges to hack into various phone companies and big tech companies, and the successful penetrations of their servers and networks would most likely be his greatest trophies.  Instead of selling his trophies of source codes of various software he had siphoned away from various well known corporations, he kept them as proofs for how he had hacked into what thought to be digital fortresses.

Even after Kevin Mitnick was able to walk out of the prison, he was forbidden by law not to use any communication technology.  According to Wikipedia and I quote, “Mitnick fought this decision in court, eventually winning a ruling in his favor, allowing him to access the Internet.”  – source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick.  Now Kevin Mitnick is living a lifestyle which in a way is way better than how he had lived before, but he can go on hacking without getting into troubles with the law and getting jailed for.  How?  He is making more money by consulting various companies on computer security and ethically hacking into the companies that hire him for his knowledge.  He is currently running Mitnick Security Consulting LLC as a computer security consultancy company.

Kevin Mitnick has a book out which he tells all about his past experiences of avoiding the law and on the run while he was deeply into hacking phone companies and various other tech giants.  Ghost in the Wires was written by two men team.  Kevin Mitnick had teamed up with bestselling author William L. Simon for the writing of Ghost in the Wires.  In the acknowledgements section, Kevin Mitnick called William L. Simon as Bill Simon if I’m not mistaken.  Within this book, Kevin Mitnick described how he was able to social engineer just about anybody on the other end of the phone so he could gain valuable information to further his hacking activities.  With quick thinking and was able to be uncanny in remembering long phone numbers, Kevin Mitnick had no trouble in combining his social engineering and computing skills together to successfully hack into well known phone companies and tech giants.  In fact, Kevin Mitnick was so successful at social engineering and computer hacking, he was able to manufacture his own fake identities.  The book goes on describing how Kevin Mitnick had to hack social security administration, department of motor vehicles, and others so he could manufacture his own fake identities.  Even fake birth certificates were within Kevin Mitnick’s reach.

Ghost in the Wires has some funny moments that describe how naughty Kevin could be with his hacking skill.  I don’t want to spoil such funny moments for you, and so it’s best that you read his whole book on your own and laugh at how naughty Kevin Mitnick was with his social engineering and hacking skills.  Besides the few hilarious moments, I have to admit Ghost in the Wires shows us that determined hackers can accomplish digital magics which we like to think such tricks cannot be done.  Fortunately for those entities which Kevin Mitnick had hacked into while he was living the life of a fugitive, Kevin Mitnick wasn’t out to sell their secrets and made big profits for himself.  Nonetheless, can we say the same for some hackers of today?  Of course, there might be few hackers who have the same spirit as the old and the new Kevin Mitnick, but I think there might be more crackers than hackers.

In summary, Ghost in the Wires was a great read for me.  The writing style was down to earth.  I’d moments of laughter as how Kevin Mitnick had coyly tricked the adversaries through his social engineering and computer hacking skills.  The book was written with everyday people in mind, and so even the readers who could not understand the technical details might not have to miss much.  In fact, reading Ghost in the Wires, I thought I was reading a thriller novel or watching a thriller film.  Honestly, it was great to finally read what Kevin Mitnick had to say for himself in his very own book.  I found his details were riveting.  Especially how he had described his encounters with law enforcement.  Hard to forget moments were how law enforcement officials convinced the judge that Kevin Mitnick could start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone and how Kevin Mitnick himself would think the judge at one point thought he could connect to the Internet in prison through a laptop which had not a connection to the Internet (she did not allow Kevin Mitnick the use of a laptop to review the evidences that pertained to his case with a lawyer).

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Image via Wikipedia

As financial instruments that keep nations stay healthy find to be less effective, nations are facing direr prospects of having to see their economies slowly inch closer to unsustainable conditions.  Imagine China continues to see United States prints more dollars out of thin air to devalue the dollar so United States’ exports can be competitive against the rest of the world, and China will face higher import costs to produce lesser profitable export goods since Chinese yuan is pegging against dollar.  As China isn’t so willingly to revalue yuan and allowing yuan to appreciate against dollar, China forces United States to print more money than ever to devalue the dollar so United States can stay competitive in exporting its goods.  United States knowing that exporting more will create jobs at home, consequently taming the wild beasts of deflation and unemployment that will lead to a healthier economy in near term or however long the United States can print money and China won’t scream foul.

Let assume China and United States are going to be locked in a currency war for a long time to come, and the financial instruments of both sides aren’t that effective since both sides might be able to dish out comparable damages, a tic for tac kind of things.  Seeing from this perspective, one can see why United States is so concerning about cyber security.  Once the usual financial instruments aren’t that effective, an oppose entity (e.g., nation, country, faction, coalition, and so on) can try to use a stealthier and more malicious mean to gain some advantages in regarding to world trade and a nation’s financial matters, and we’re talking of hacking.  Of course, there are many other means that might be as vicious as hacking or even more vicious than hacking such as intentionally manipulating an opposing nation’s derivative market to a point that such market would crash and create havocs within a nation’s economy.  Nonetheless, hacking is probably one of the easiest maneuvers which one nation can carry out against another nation.

Hacking can be inexpensive for the hackers and yet sometimes hackers can get more than what they want.  Hackers can also stay anonymous if they’re good, therefore hacking can be stealthy if stealth is important to the hackers.  Knowing hacking can be carried out with precision and with almost no consequence at state sponsor level, I don’t see why hacking is not one of the desirable methods in acquiring financial information and gaining sensitive data to manipulate another nation’s economy.  This is why it’s not unimaginable for the United States to consider hacking as an act of war and might lead to military actions.  As more facets of an economy come online or digitize, hacking can become an evermore dangerous and powerful instrument among other financial instruments to be used by nations.  Of course, hacking isn’t always motivating by financial means, sometimes it’s more about gaining military advance weaponries.  This is why hacking can become even more important than just a covert financial instrument for any nation.

So, I guess we can expect China and United States to continue playing a game of blaming each other on how they got hacked by the opposing nation.  I suspect that the United States and China won’t go as far as declaring war on each other if indeed they find out that the opposing party is hacking them, but I can see United States and China won’t be hesitating in punishing weaker opposing enemies in all means, even things has to boil down to carrying out some military actions.  Don’t be surprised to see more headlines of how one nation is hacking another in the news, because hacking can be quite a useful financial instrument and more.  It’s that serious!

Source —  Currency Wars:  The Making of the Next Global Crisis by James Rikards (book).

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Perhaps the only way to protect oneself from getting phish by being paranoid about what webpages you’re landing on.  Let say you’re trying to visit a well known website, but the website address looks a little funky, then you should not enter any credential of yours onto such website/page until you have verified and sure that you’re on a legitimate website/page.  Sometimes, you have to make sure the IP address of such a website is from the institution that it claims to be.

Finding a website’s IP address is pretty easy.  Just open up a Window shell (i.e., cmd) or a unix-like terminal and ping the website’s domain name such as using this command [ping Yahoo.com], then comparing the legitimate website’s IP address with the URL’s IP address (i.e., using ping command also) to see if both IP addresses of the two slightly different URLs are the same.  If both IP addresses of the two slightly different URLs are the same IP address, then you might be on the legitimate website.  Sometimes a well constructed misleading URL can mislead users to ping the wrong part of the URL, consequently will not help users avoid the phishing scheme.  This is why make sure you understand which part of the URL inside your web browser’s address bar is the actual top level domain name and not otherwise.

I’m not sure if I’m entirely right, and you can correct me in the comments below this blog post if you think I’m wrong that verifying IP address of a legitimate website can be DNS hack proof.  After all, don’t hackers have to take over a DNS control panel of a domain account or registrar and entered their malicious IP addresses that point to their malicious domain names so legitimate web traffics can be redirected to the malicious web destinations?  If that is the absolute case/way, then verifying the IP address of a legitimate website is one absolutely best way to confirm if you are on a benevolent web destination.

OK, I’ve to admit that even though you have confirmed the IP addresses of slightly different URLs are the same IP address, it does not mean that you’re on the legitimate website/destination.  Why?  Perhaps, that very IP address is the only IP address that the hacker(s) is using and not of a legitimate website.  Sometimes, it helps to make sure the IP address of a legitimate website you’re trying to reach is made available through search engines or some reputable web services so you can comparing the IP addresses from such sources with the ones that you’d pinged.  Doing reverse IP lookup or domain lookup helps too!

Another thing, you can avoid a lot of troubles by protecting your email accounts at all cost.  Hackers love to have access to your email accounts so they can reset your web accounts’ passwords.  Many websites allow users to reset web accounts’ credentials by simply click on confirmation links within emails.  This could be why it’s a goldmine for hackers to be able to penetrate their targets’ email accounts.  So, using unconventional passwords, different password for every email/web account, is best to protect one’s  email/web account, especially true for the email accounts.

Obviously, don’t try this at home if you don’t really know how to fly an aircraft with a remote control or computer.  I think it’s rather dangerous, because someone can be seriously hurt if the aircraft turns evil.  Oh, it’s already evil in digital mean, but it can also be physically evil too, I guess.

The question is, how can Amazon monitor its cloud services so it would be harder for hackers to use Amazon as launchpad? As in Sony case, let assume the story is correct, hackers slipped through Amazon’s security radar with ease. If this proves to be one of the easiest, the fastest, and the best ways to hack large corporations and other business entities, even against the governments, you can expect more of the same from hackers.

According to Yahoo News, Amazon and Sony have not yet confirmed the validity of this story. Nonetheless, my gut instinct tells me that this could be true. We all know Amazon’s cloud services are robust enough to allow the hackers used Amazon’s servers as their launchpad. Either this or hackers had used a botnet that was powerful enough to hack Sony’s server security. Let say both of the cases above are false, then Sony’s servers definitely need to be protected better against remote computer attacks. One last scenario could have aid hackers to break into Sony’s PSN is that someone at Sony either bad at protecting sensitive computer information, or this person had leaked out such information so hackers could slip inside Sony’s servers without being detected early. At this point in time, without having enough insights into this whole Sony drama, everything is up in the air.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/20110514/tc_digitaltrends/hackersmayhaveusedamazonserverforsonypsnbreach

Quoting directly from OWASP:

When an attacker executes SQL Injection attacks, sometimes the server responds with error messages from the database server complaining that the SQL Query’s syntax is incorrect. Blind SQL injection is identical to normal SQL Injection except that when an attacker attempts to exploit an application, rather then getting a useful error message, they get a generic page specified by the developer instead. This makes exploiting a potential SQL Injection attack more difficult but not impossible. An attacker can still steal data by asking a series of True and False questions through SQL statements.

To the best of my knowledge, even a server administration has firewall to block MySQL databases’ open ports, it probably won’t matter in stopping hackers from attacking MySQL since hackers can use SQL Injection or Blind SQL Injection from browsers and bots (scripts that query HTTP and HTTPS protocols).  Furthermore, hackers can use Timing Attack, a method of SQL Injection, to guess passwords, because as the SQL injection code requests the server to delay the response if the answer is true.  By reading the delay responses from the servers and patiently querying the servers, although Timing Attack is time consuming SQL injection method, it does produce result sometimes.

Many web servers are using MySQL, because MySQL is free, open source database that is so powerful that sometimes you can basically compare it against Oracle 11g.  Oracle 11g is the current database version of the software maker Oracle.  Anyhow, Oracle 11g is proprietary software and so it costs dearly to be licensed from it.  MySQL is the saver for many website owners and big corporations since the price for using MySQL is zero, unless you want to use the enterprise version of MySQL where you can get technical supports and so on.  As we speaking, MySQL is vulnerable to SQL Injection as the hackers have shown they had compromised MySQL.com and Sun.com through the use of SQL Injection.  It’s truly indeed a scary time for many MySQL users, but hopefully MySQL can roll out patches to address the problem(s).

In the mean time, if you’re using MySQL, you can try installing ModSecurity and adding correct rules for this particular software to act as firewall for your web applications such as MySQL databases.  Sometimes, ModSecurity is set to be too strict to even allow valid applications to function, this is why it’s may be just good enough for deterring hackers from successfully compromising your MySQL while you’re waiting for patches from MySQL developers.  The question is that was MySQL.com and Sun.com were lack in web security or MySQL database software itself had unaddressed bugs that allowed hackers to exploit the sites?  I’m fearing for the latter!

Source:  http://www.infoworld.com/t/hacking/analysis-how-mysqlcom-and-suncom-got-hacked-909?source=rss_infoworld_top_stories_

In our time, I think cyber attacks are going to scale up ever more.  Cyber attacks are somewhat convenient and covert since nobody will know about the attacks until something go very wrong, but even then it’s a lot harder to put faces on hackers than let say the terrorists that got captured by a camera or identified by witnesses.  One man’s hackers are another man’s terrorists.  So the battles that we don’t see at all may actually happen at we speak.  These battles sometimes involve with massive amount of zombies (i.e., infected computers) and launchpads (i.e., infected computers to use as points of delivering attacks).

The appealing nature of hacking is very Hollywood-like, and the consequences of having been compromised are very unpleasant.  Thinking of a top secret weapon that is leaked to the enemy, it’s something that extremely distasteful since the enemy doesn’t have to spend a cent to acquire the knowledge while we waste billions of dollars to develop such knowledge.  It’s a hypothesis scenario, but who dare to say it can never happen unless we have bulletproof cyber security.  I don’t think there is such a thing, because someone out there always has a way to work around certain cyber security measures.

Source:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110307/tc_afp/
franceitinternetsecurityespionageg20

I’m even more astounding about certain open source tools made available so curious minds can use them to hack decent routers easily.  Talking about not yet patched Windows 7 can be taken over almost instantly.  This is scary, don’t you think?

The topic of the day is how can one acquire any tool to do any penetration test for your home network.  To tell the truth, I’m also a beginner in this very subject, but I’m picking it up as we speak.  So far, I know you can install BackTrack Linux onto a virtual machine or onto a real machine so you can do some penetration testing of your network.  BackTrack Linux is a Linux version which dedicates in making penetration testing tools available to average users like all of us.  Do I even have to mention that BackTrack is free?  Apparently, you can have the cake and eat it too.

BackTrack has included inside its distribution an amazing penetration testing tool which is known as Metasploit.  I’m still experimenting with this tool myself and so I can’t really say much, but on the surface it seems this tool can really aid you to deploy certain payloads to targeted test machines for testing purposes.  An example, I see a video demo on Hak5 shows how one can use Metasploit on BackTrack to take over a not yet patched Windows 7 machine easily.  The hacker then can browse the Windows 7 machine without any resistance.  Downloading and uploading files of the compromised machine are simple as typing in command lines or clicking some more.

Talking about that specific Hak5 show which you can view it here, this video mentions of Armitage and demos its capability.  Albeit, any penetration test is going to scale from being difficult to hardcore, but to my astonishment, it seems Armitage can really facilitate a user in learning how to do some major penetration tests.  I bet evil doers out there know this tool is going to be a major help for them too.  Armitage is the GUI (Graphical User Interface) for Metasploit.

If you’re not timid with command lines, you can get BackTrack and Armitage to install and run with ease; after all of that, it’s time to fire up MySQL server and Metasploit RPC daemon (a process that always runs in the background).  The last step would be navigating to Armitage’s directory to launch a shell script which subsequently launches Armitage.  The procedure of doing all of that isn’t that scary, because it’s more of copy and paste process inside your terminal/shell.  The instruction to get Armitage going is here.

So now you know that you can always installing BackTrack and Armitage to begin do some penetration tests for your home or office network.  I do not condone you to do any penetration test on the network that you’ve no authorization.  It’s obviously illegal for you to use these penetration testing tools to hack someone, and so with great power comes great responsibility (Spider Man’s catchphrase) — be sure not to abuse such power you have attained.

Brute force hacking technique cannot rely on a normal computer, or else it could take forever to crack a password.  Thomas Roth figures out how to use the cloud to do his bidding (experiments).  I think it’s safe to say that Thomas Roth can use the cloud to hack passwords from devices such as router.  Maybe your router isn’t safe anymore when a real hacker with an evil purpose knows how to use Thomas Roth’s technique?  Still you have to be a target for an attack, because no hacker is willing to brute force attack the whole web.  Mission impossible?

Amazon is not please to know their service can be used for hacking, but Thomas Roth is only researching for possible exploits and not really carry out the hacking against anyone.  So now we know maybe there are hackers out there are trying to do the same, what are they going to think up next?  Take over the world by force?  Invade an alien planet?  OK, maybe those ideas are outlandish, but something more practical and of the same, I don’t see why hackers aren’t thinking about using Amazon EC2 or similar cloud service to do even more damage besides brute force attack.  Definitely, it’s not a good thing unless Amazon and other similar companies who provide cloud based services can tighten up their service policies and actively monitor/prevent the evil doers from relying on their services to hack.  Anyway, here is the source.