Tracing a Hacker is a article aimed at beginners that want to learn the basics of finding out if there is someone connected to their system who should not be connected to it. It gives a rough introduction to some basic concepts like tcp/ip, ports and how hackers find their targets. This is a good read if you don´t know what they are about. After that Omar starts of by explaining the netstat command which lists all the sources that are connected or currently connecting to your computer. If you are running p2p software this can be a lot of connections. I suggest you start of by disabling most tools that you might be running while on the internet. So, no p2p, no messengers aso.
The article essential utilities at laptoplogic.com lists several freeware utilities that should be useful to everyone who owns a notebook (with an intel cpu that is, a guide for amd will follow). All tools mentioned can be desribed as system tools that either show system information, test hardware or tweak it. For example tools to test the notebooks memory (Memtest86) are included as well as dead pixel tester for the lcd screen.
This is the follow up to the proxy filtering program Calamity. It provides a fully customisable way of filtering out unwanted proxies via control files, a proxy tester to check anonymity - and a fully functional search engine crawler to find lists of posted proxies. Included within the kit is a php checker which can be uploaded to your own webspace to spread the processor load and bandwidth of the actual testing. This is fully integrated into Charon where it will simply send your pages lists of proxies and harvest the results
So you have installed that nifty messenger and have not used it for some time. Now is the time to use it again, there is just one little problem: You can´t remember your password. Creating a new account would be an idea but what if you want to keep your contacts ? Messenpass reveals the password for various instant messengers, among others are: MSN Messenger, Trillian, Miranda, Gaim and AOL Instant Messenger.
I want a freeware utility to do the following. Did you ever say that to yourself and wondered if a freeware or open source application existed that did exactly what you wanted ? It seems the natural way to sort freeware applications in this way, describe what you want to do and link to a freeware application that does exactly that.
Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement) for Microsoft Windows personal computers. The freeware application supports many programming languages like C, C++, Java, C#, XML, HTML, PHP and Javascript. It has many useful features that Notepad is lacking, some worth mentioning are auto completion, the ability to work with more than one document and a multi-view feature that shows two documents at the same time. (that you can edit of course).
A new version of the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool has been released as well yesterday. The new version is able to remove infections by specific prevalent malicious software. It´s able to detect 64 infections, that´s three more than the previous version. The three new infections that are detected are Locksky, Reatlle and Valla according to the german newsmag pcwelt.de.
Lots of people are demanding more proxy sites because many have already been banned by their school or workplace. It´s not easy to find new ones but maybe the list from econsulting might help you. They have a list of 250 web proxies that might not be banned. I think it´s worth a try if you are that desperate.
Angry Ip Scanner is a small open source application that lets you scan IP addresses and ports, you can even specifiy the range of the scan by yourself. After pinging the target IP it is able to resolve other data like hostname, MAC address and open ports.
Coolmon is a great little freeware application that monitors and displays various windows settings. Among the information that can be displayed are Processor usage (up to four CPU's) , Number of Processes , Number of Threads, Process using the most CPU time , Processor type , Used/Free/Total page file , Used/Free/Total RAM , Free/Total/Grand Total Disk space (up to sixteen disks, also mapped network drives) , Computer Uptime , Date & Time , Computer name , User name , All IP addresses , Network read and write speed (up to four NICs) , Total Bytes sent and received and Battery status.
Notify is a small freeware application for windows that monitors files and directories that you specify and notifies you when those are changed. The small size of 15 Kb makes it an ideal background task, it uses almost no cpu time and little memory.
Most people think it takes lots of work to encrypt files. The freeware click crypt 2.6 allows to encrypt and decrypt files with just one click. It´s unfortunatly only available in german but that does not matter a lot because the interface is simple and easy. Click on Download Sofort ausführbares Setup which starts the download. After that install the software on your system and start it. This opens a configuration window which is named Verschlüsslungsmethoden. You select the encryption algorithm that you want to use, you have three options, those are: MD2 (128bit), MD5 (128bit) and SHA (160 bit).
Todays world is becoming a wireless one. If you signup for a new internet provider you have most of the time the choice of a modem that uses cables and one that is wireless. Now, most people tend to chose the wireless one because their homes don´t look that messy after all, cables everywhere seems to turn certain people off quite a bit.
Lot´s of people complain that webproxys are not working at their works / schools computer because they have been banned by administrators. A way around this would be to setup your very own proxy server that is being hosted a) by a free webhosting service that supports either php or cgi or b) your own website that is being hosted by a webhosting company.
I don´t think a lot of my visitors are still using the Microsoft Internet Explorer but there are some that do. My first advice would be to change the browser immediatly to firefox or opera, for those who are to lazy or have other reason to keep the insecure browser the IE Proxy Changer is a nice little addition to the internet explorer.
Igowerf from the anandtech forum posted a rather large list of freeware that can replace commercial products from the same category. For example a replacement for Microsoft Office would be of course Open Office which is free to download and use. It is a great list with lots of different categories that include Office, Internet / Networking, Graphics, IDE's and editors, Audio/Mp3/CD, System tools, Video encoding/decoding/etc, 3D Modeling/Animation/etc and Misc suggestions.
Now this is an interesting analysis of password recovery speeds. It compares password length and chars used to the time different computers need to bruteforce the password, ranging from Class A (speed of a pentium 100) to Class F (supercomputers, large scale distribution) computers.
JDiskReportenables you to understand how much space the files and directories consume on your disk drives, and it helps you find obsolete files and folders. The tool analyses your disk drives and collects several statistics which you can view as overview charts and details tables. This is a great tool if you are looking for a program that analyses your hard drives content. Shows lots of useful information like which filetypes use the most space on your hard drives, file modification and folder size.
I´ve written about virtual computers before and found a nice way program to make the same method available for virtual software installations. Altiris Software Virtualization Solution lets you install every kind of software in a protected environment that prevents access from this software to your core system. This is great if you want to try out some new alpha / beta software or software that you are suspicious about.
I´am back. I finished moving to my new apartment and can again write article and entertain you. Autohotkey is a nice little freeware application that has many purposes. Take a look at its features:
UltraShredder deletes sensitive files by overwriting them with random characters, saving it to disk each time, and then bypasses the recycle bin, thus acting as your personal, portable file shredder. If the file were to be recovered by a data recovery program, they would only be able to see unintelligible characters on disk where the file used to be. The program is a great tool to destroy sensitive data, and is very small with a minute memory footprint, and makes no changes to your system whatsoever.
I know I have some freaks among my readers that like to use an usb stick to have some of their beloved applications at hand or start them from their for security reason. Wikipedia.org has a nice list of portable applications that can be run from a portable device. Every application is sorted into one of nine categories like Networking and Internet, Password management and Document editing .
XSite will load and parse any webpage into a simple structured view for displaying images, email addresses, and all links. Generate a result report that section out all the links, images, and email addresses. Easily grab all images in a web page by downloading them to a local folder. Export lists out to CSV format which makes it easy to push the information into any database.
The question that many people ask is why would someone want to surf anonymously in the first place. Why would someone who does not do something illegal want to surf anonymously at all ? I can think of lots of reasons, here are a few:
The guys of darknet.org.uk have posted a new article that lists the 10 best security live cd distros. Each distribution is introduced in a small paragraph and features links to the distributions homepage.
I found a new list of proxy sites, 300 in total. Should be something for everyone and I suppose you find some that work in your environment. Head over to proxylist.wordpress.com to check them out.
The little freeware application Windows Worms Door Cleaner has a very strange name if you ask me. It´s purpose is to disable certain services that worms rely on to attack your system.
Bulk Rename Utility is a utility which allows you to easily rename files and directories, based upon extremely flexible criteria. Add date-stamps, replace numbers, insert strings, convert case, add auto-numbers, process folders and subfolders.
A cert.org guide that helps you configure your web browser for safer surfing. It starts with the question why you should secure your web browser and explains common web browser features like Java, ActiveX and Cookies. After that introduction the important part of the article begins with chapter 3 Vulnerabilities and Attack Vectors. Common vulnerabilities like Cross-Site Scripting, Spoofing and Cross-Zone and Cross-Domain Vulnerabilities. The article does not explain everything in great detail but provides links to a in depth explanation.
Dial-a-fix is a collection of 'known fixes' that have been compiled over the past year that really knock out some serious Windows problems, all with one or two clicks. It tackles issues with SSL/Cryptography, Windows Update, Microsoft Installer, and many miscellaneous shell problems. Most of the fixes it uses are found in various Microsoft Knowledgebase articles, and articles written by Microsoft MVPs. When you see a list of DLLs that need to be registered using REGSVR32.EXE, chances are they are already listed in Dial-a-fix. Mouseover a checkbox or button to obtain more information about what will be executed, or what DLLs will be registered.
Most of us are geeks. We work many hours a day nonstop using computers and notebooks and seldomly take breaks in that time. Well, unless we stand up to get another coffee. So, most of us work in an unhealthy environment.
CDs don´t last forever. They get scratches for instance and sometimes these make the CD or some sectors become unreadable. Now, what can you do if you desperately need the data on the CD ? The article Recovering Scratched CDs from hardwaresecrets.com tries to answer this question.
A good extensive list of freeware alternatives can be found at the neowin forum. The applications are sorted in categories like Cd/DVD Burning, Encryption and Data Security and Instant Messengers. All in all more than two hundred applications in 43 categories. If you are looking for a special freeware tool make sure you take a look at the neowin forum. Worth a visit.
Some weeks ago Sony made the attempt to protect the music from some of the cd´s they distribute by adding a rootkit software which would be installed if the user wanted to play the cd on his personal computer. The technique had its flaws and was only working on windows but it still ment that a rootkit was installed on the pc and other scripts could use this rootkit for malicious purposes. After a large outcry from the web community Sony decided to pull the cd´s from the shelves and offer a tool to uninstall the rootkit. (which you would only get through a long process)
Forcevision is an image viewer and image manipulation tool that is available free for non commercial purposes. It supports 46 different image formats and is able to convert single images or multiple ones in batch mode.
Breaking news from the electronic frontier foundation website which warns users to use a feature called Search Across Computers of the google desktop software. This feature apparently stores copies of documents, such as word, pdf or text, on googles own servers.
Muzip is a freware packer that supports formats like zip, gzip and tar. It´s only 460K in size and offers an explorer like interface. It also offers the possibility to backup files on your harddrive and even schedule them using the windows scheduler.
If you are using linux you might know the symbolic link functionality which allows you to create a (symbolic) link between two directories. A little freeware tool called junction from sysinternals adds this functionality to windows.
I´d like to present five freeware tools that everyone should at least take a look at and try out. They are not the "normal" freeware applications that you find in every top ten list like firefox and open office. I write about tools that many users don´t know but would be grateful if they knew they existed. Please be aware that this is my top ten list and that your´s most likely would have different applications in it.
Most people tend to use passwords that they can rememeber easily. If you take a deeper look many use the same password for most of their password protected activities which is a high security risk. Break one, get access to all.
