How to use the Web to look up information on hacking

 How to use the Web to look up information on hacking

Want to become really, really unpopular? Try asking your hacker friends too many questions of the wrong sort.

But, but, how do we know what are the wrong questions to ask? OK, I sympathize with your problems because I get flamed a lot, too. That's partly because I sincerely believe in asking dumb questions. I make my living asking dumb questions. People pay me lots of money to go to conferences, call people on the phone and hang out on Usenet news groups asking dumb questions so I can find out stuff for them. And, guess what, sometimes the dumbest questions get you the best answers. So that's why you don't see me flaming people who ask dumb questions.

Newbie note: Have you been too afraid to ask the dumb question, "What is a flame?" Now you get to find out! It is a bunch of obnoxious rantings and ravings made in email or a Usenet post by some idiot who thinks he or she is proving his or her mental superiority through use of foul and/or impolite language such as "you suffer from rectocranial inversion," f*** y***, d****, b****, and of course @#$%^&*! This newbie note is my flame against those flamers to whom I am soooo superior.

But even though dumb questions can be good to ask, you may not like the flames they bring down on you. So, if you want to avoid flames, how do you find out answers for yourself?

This Guide covers one way to find out hacking information without having to ask people questions: by surfing the Web. The other way is to buy lots and lots of computer manuals, but that costs a lot of money. Also, in some parts of the world it is difficult to get manuals. Fortunately, however, almost anything you want to learn about computers and communications is available for free somewhere on the Web.

First, let's consider the Web search engines. Some just help you search the Web itself. But others enable you to search Usenet newsgroups that have been archived for many years back. Also, the best hacker email lists are archived on the Web, as well.

More how to search for hacker knowledge...

There are two major considerations in using Web search engines. One is what search engine to use, and the other is the search tactics themselves.

I have used many Web search engines. But eventually I came to the conclusion that for serious research, you only need two: Alavista (<http://altavista.digital.com/>)and Dejanews (<http://www.dejanews.com/>). Altavista is the best for the Web, while Dejanews is the best one for searching Usenet news groups. But, if you don't want to take me at my word, you may surf over to a site with links to almost all the Web and Newsgroup search engines at <http://sgk.tiac.net/search/>.

But just how do you efficiently use these search engines? If you ask them to find "hacker" or even "how to hack," you will get bazillions of Web sites and news group posts to read. OK, so you painfully surf through one hacker Web site after another. You get portentous-sounding organ music, skulls with red rolling eyes, animated fires burning, and each site has links to other sites with pretentious music and ungrammatical boastings about "I am 31337, d00dz!!! I am so *&&^%$ good at hacking you should bow down and kiss my $%^&&*!" But somehow they don't seem to have any actual information. Hey, welcome to the wannabe hacker world!

You need to figure out some words that help the search engine of your choice get more useful results. For example, let's say you want to find out whether I, the Supreme R00ler of the Happy Hacker world, am an elite hacker chick or merely some poser. Now the luser approach would to simply go to http://www.dejanews.com and do a search of Usenet news groups for "Carolyn Meinel," being sure to click the "old" button to bring up stuff from years back. But if you do that, you get this huge long list of posts, most of which have nothing to do with hacking:

CDMA vs GSM - carolyn meinel <cmeinel@unm.edu> 1995/11/17

Re: October El Nino-Southern Oscillation info gonthier@usgs.gov (Gerard J. Gonthier) 1995/11/20

Re: Internic Wars MrGlucroft@psu.edu (The Reaver) 1995/11/30
shirkahn@earthlink.net (Christopher Proctor) 1995/12/16

Re: Lyndon LaRouche - who is he? lness@ucs.indiana.edu (lester john ness) 1996/01/06

U-B Color Index observation data - cmeinel@nmia.com (Carolyn P. Meinel) 1996/05/13

Re: Mars Fraud? History of one scientist involved gksmiley@aol.com (GK Smiley) 1996/08/11

Re: Mars Life Announcement: NO Fraud Issue twitch@hub.ofthe.net 1996/08/12

Hackers Helper E-Zine wanted - rcortes@tuna.hooked.net (Raul Cortes) 1996/12/06

Carolyn Meinel, Sooooooper Genius - nobody@cypherpunks.ca (John Anonymous MacDonald, a remailer node) 1996/12/12

Anyhow, this list goes on and on and on.

But if you specify "Carolyn Meinel hacker" and click "all" instead of "any" on the "Boolean" button, you get a list that starts with:

Media: "Unamailer delivers Christmas grief" -Mannella@ipifidpt.difi.unipi.it (Riccardo Mannella) 1996/12/30 Cu Digest, #8.93, Tue 31 Dec 96 - Cu Digest (tk0jut2@mvs.cso.niu.edu)
<TK0JUT2@MVS.CSO.NIU.EDU> 1996/12/31

RealAudio interview with Happy Hacker - bmcw@redbud.mv.com (Brian S. McWilliams) 1997/01/08

Etc.

This way all those posts about my boring life in the world of science don't show up, just the juicy hacker stuff.

Now suppose all you want to see is flames about what a terrible hacker I am. You could bring those to the top of the list by adding (with the "all" button still on) "flame" or "f***" or "b****" being careful to spell out those bad words instead fubarring them with ****s. For example, a search on "Carolyn Meinel hacker flame" with Boolean "all" turns up only one post. This important tome says the Happy Hacker list is a dire example of what happens when us prudish moderator types censor naughty words and inane diatribes.

Newbie note: "Boolean" is math term. On the Dejanews search engine they figure the user doesn't have a clue of what "Boolean" means so they give you a choice of "any" or "all" and then label it "Boolean" so you feel stupid if you don't understand it. But in real Boolean algebra we can use the operators "and" "or" and "not" on word searches (or any searches of sets). "And" means you would have a search that turns up only items that have "all" the terms you specify; "or" means you would have a search that turns up "any" of the terms. The "not" operator would exclude items that included the "not" term even if they have any or all of the other search terms. Altavista has real Boolean algebra under its "advanced"" search option.

But let's forget all those Web search engines for a minute. In my humble yet old-fashioned opinion, the best way to search the Web is to use it exactly the way its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, intended. You start at a good spot and then follow the links to related sites. Imagine that!

Here's another of my old fogie tips. If you want to really whiz around the Web, and if you have a shell account, you can do it with the program lynx. At the prompt, just type "lynx followed by the URL you want to visit.

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Protecting Firewalls -Part3

Protecting Firewalls -Part3

NetBIOS and Other Services?

The NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NBT) which is sometimes loosely called "NetBIOS", is a service which has some security problems with it. It is enabled by default in Windows default installations, and it is very common to see that a firewall does the job of preventing the efforts to get access to your computer via NBT. Yet, in almost all cases, this service is not needed, and thus can be disabled. To disable NBT in Win95/98/ME is not as simple as it is in Win2K/XP, but can still be done reliably. We explain how to do this in another article (#to be written soon). It is needless to say, that if NBT is disabled, there is no need for a firewall to block communication to it. Also, in the case of other services, such as RPC services, and others, in many cases you simply don't need those services and better disable them from within Windows rather than use the firewall to block them. There are various ways to know which services are running on your computer, and which of them are listening for communications from the outside. If there are ones that you don't need, they should be disabled.

Hiding the Computer?
In web sites of many personal firewall companies, they are putting a lot of weight on the ability of their firewall to hide the computer on the Internet. Yet, exposing your home computer on the Internet is by itself, neither a security nor a privacy threat. If you provide some services to the Internet on your computer, for example, you put a web server on your computer to allow other people to view web pages, then you might get rid of some of the crackers, by setting your firewall to unhide only this type of communications. Some attackers will not make a full scan of your computer, but only a partial scan, and if they did not scan for the specific service that you provided, they will not see your computer. Yet, if the service is a common one, there is a good chance for many of them to scan it and thus find the existence of your computer. If they "see" the existence of your computer, they might decide to scan it further, and find out the services you are providing, and scan it for security holes to use. Yet, there is no much meaning to it when we speak about simple home computers.

What a Firewall Cannot Do!

Another misconception about personal firewalls is that they are incorrectly thought as if they claim to give an overall protection against "hackers" (i.e. intrusions). They are not.

Defense Against Exploitation of Security Holes
A firewall can allow or deny access to your computer or from your computer according to the type of communication, its source and destination, and according to the question which program on your computer is handling the communication. Yet, its ability to understand the details of the communication is very limited. For example, you may set the firewall to allow or to deny your e-mail program from getting and/or sending messages. It may allow or deny your web browser from browsing the Internet. But if you allowed your e-mail program to communicate with the e-mail servers for sending and receiving messages, (and you are likely to allow it if you want to use your e-mail program), or if you set the firewall to allow your web browser to communicate with web sites, the firewall will not be able to understand the content of the communication much further, and if your web browser has a security hole, and some remote site will try to exploit it, your firewall will not be able to make a distinction between the communication that exploits the security hole, and legitimate communication. The same principle goes with e-mail program. A personal firewall may block you from receiving or sending e-mail messages, but if you allowed it to receive messages, the personal firewall will not make a distinction between a legitimate message and a non-legitimate one (such as a one that carries a virus or a Trojan horse). Security holes in legitimate programs can be exploited and a personal firewall can do practically nothing about it.
I should comment, however, that some personal firewalls come combined with some Trojan horse detection, or intrusion detection. This is not part of the classical definition of a firewall, but it might be useful. Such tasks are usually taken by other tools such as antivirus programs or antiTrojan programs.
Tricks to Bypass or Disable Personal Firewalls
There are also various ways to disable, or bypass personal firewalls. During the time a few tricks to bypass or disable were demonstrated by various programs. Especially, tricks for an internal program to communicate with the outside bypassing or tricking the firewall. For some of them such as the one demonstrated by the Leaktest, and in which a non-legitimate program disguises itself as Internet Explorer, practically today, all personal firewalls are immuned. For other tricks, such as a one demonstrated by Outbound, which uses some non-standard type of communication directly to the network adapters bypassing the components of the operating system which are suppose to deal with Internet communication, and by that bypassing the firewall, are only now being patched against by the various firewalls, and yet other methods, such as the one demonstrated by Tooleaky, which uses Internet Explorer as a messenger to communicate with the outside, and is thus identified as a mere legitimate browsing, are still waiting for most of the personal firewall to find a fix.
Firewalls CANNOT Decide for You What is a Legitimate Communication and What is Not
One of the main problems with personal firewalls, is that you cannot simply install them and forget them, counting on them to do their job. They can deny or permit various types of communications according to some criteria, but what is this criteria, and who decides what is the criteria for whether they should permit or deny some communication?
The answer, is that it is the computer user's job to define the exact criteria when the firewall should allow a communication and when it should block it. The firewall may make it easier for you, but it should not take the decisions. There are too many programs, too many versions, and it is not possible for the firewall to decide accurately when a communication is legitimate and when it is not. One person might think that it is legitimate for some program to deliver some information to the outside in order to get some service, while another will think that it is not. One version of a program might communicate with its home server in order to check whether there is an upgrade, and another version might also install the upgrade even if you do not wish. Some firewalls will try to identify communication efforts which are largely considered as legitimate, and will let you the information so that it will be easier for you to decide whether such should be allowed. Others will suffice with more basic information, making no suggestions (and thus - no incorrect recommendations). One way or another, once you installed a firewall, you will have better means to understand what types of communications are running on your computer, but you will also have to understand them in order to be able to configure your firewall so that it will correctly know which communications to allow and which to block.
Common Problems and Deficiencies Regarding Personal Firewalls
A personal firewall might be a good contribution to security. Yet, if you do not understand much about the topic, then you are likely to be confused and misled by its alerts and queries, and thus find yourself spending hours in chasing after imaginary crackers, fear from imaginary threats, and misconfigure it due to misunderstanding. You may find yourself blocking legitimate and important communication believing it to be cracking efforts, and thus surprised to see why things work slowly or why you are disconnected from the Internet, or you might be misled to allow a non-legitimate communication by some software that tricked you to believe that it is a legitimate one. On the other side, if you are quite knowledgeable on computers and security, then you are likely to effectively defend your computer even without a firewall (by means discussed in section II.4) and it is thus that the role of personal firewall in securing your computer, is extremely small and not much important. We discuss here in brief some of the problems that personal firewalls may generate.
A False Sense of Security
As we've already learned here, a firewall is limited in its ability to secure your computer. Yet, many people believe that if they will install a personal firewall they will be secured against the various security threats. I was even surprised to find out that there are people who believe that give much higher priority in installing a personal firewall than in installing an antivirus program. An always updated antivirus program plays a much more important role in the security of a personal home computer than installing and maintaining a personal firewall. A personal firewall should not come on account of any other security measure that you use.
A False Sense of Insecurity

When you install a firewall and you look at all the communication efforts through it, you might be surprised at the amount of communication efforts from the Internet to your computer. Most of them are blocked by a typically configured firewall. There are all the times efforts to try to communicate with various backdoor Trojans on your computers. If you are not infected, there will be nothing to listen and to respond to those communication efforts, and they are thus practically harmless. There are efforts to communicate with your NBT driver, to see if your computer by mistake allows file sharing. There are other types of probes to see if your computer exists, or various efforts of servers to probe your computer in order to find the best path for legitimate communication to it. There are sometimes remnants of communications that were supposed to go to other computers, but made their way to yours (for advanced readers: because the IP number that your computer uses, were used by some other computer earlier). Those communication efforts are blocked even without a firewall. If your computer is not infected with a RAT, and if your computer don't have NetBIOS over TCP/IP enabled or even it does not have file and print sharing enabled (and on most computers this is disabled by default), then none of these pose any security threat. If your computer is not infected with a SubSeven Trojan, then no matter how often there will be efforts to communicate with it, they are all doomed to be failed.

Yet, some personal firewall (such as Norton Personal Firewall or ZoneAlarm) by default proudly announce that they have just blocked an effort to crack into your computer. Norton may even define those efforts that were blocked as "high security threats" while they were not a threat at all even if your computer didn't have a personal firewall at all. Such firewalls give you the false impression that they save your computer again and again from extremely dangerous threats on the Internet, so that you wonder how did you survive so much time without noticing any intrusion before you installed the firewall. I usually say, that those personal firewalls are set their "report level" to "promotional mode". Namely, the personal firewall is set to give you the false impression that it is much more important than it really is.

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Hacking Password Protected Sites

There are many ways to defeat java-script protected websites. Some are very simplistic, such as hitting [ctl-alt-del ]when the password box is displayed, to simply turning offjava capability, which will dump you into the default page.You can try manually searching for other directories, by typing the directory name into the url address box of your browser, ie: you want access to www.target.com .

         Try typing www.target.com/images .(almost ever y web site has an images directory) This will put you into the images directory,and give you a text list of all the images located there. Often, the title of an image will give you a clue to the name of another directory. ie: in     www.target.com/images,    there is a .gif named gamestitle.gif . There is a good chance then, that there is a 'games' directory on the site,so you would then type in    www.target.com/games,   and if it isa valid directory, you again get a text listing of all the files available there.

          For a more automated approach, use a program like WEB SNAKE from anawave, or Web Wacker. These programs will create a mirror image of an entire web site, showing all director ies,or even mirror a complete server. They are indispensable for locating hidden files and directories.What do you do if you can't get past an opening "PasswordRequired" box? . First do an WHOIS Lookup for the site. In our example, www.target.com . We find it's hosted by www.host.com at 100.100.100. 1.

     We then go to 100.100.100.1, and then launch \Web Snake, and mirror the entire server. Set Web Snake to NOT download anything over about 20K. (not many HTML pages are bigger than this) This speeds things up some, and keeps you from getting a lot of files and images you don't care about. This can take a long time, so consider running it right before bed time. Once you have an image of the entire server, you look through the directories listed, and find  /target.  When we open that directory, we find its contents, and all of its sub-directories listed. Let's say we find    /target/games/zip/zipindex.html .  This would be the index page that would be displayed had you gone through the password procedure, and allowed it to redirect you here.By simply typing in the url    www.target.com/games/zip/zipindex.html   you will be onthe index page and ready to follow the links for downloading.

Not:I may Not be the responsible person if you do anything bad or wrong or results obtained........

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