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Session Hijacking Tutorial

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the Firesheep plugin for Mozilla Firefox that allows users to easily perform a session hijacking against victims on the same LAN. The news spread fast and wide, and reporters were deeming Firesheep extremely dangerous.  I am not going to play down the fact that this does pose a serious threat to people’s privacy; however, this is nothing more than an old trick with a new face. Session hijacking has been around for ages, and performing a session hijack is actually quite simple. Today I will demonstrate one way to perform a simple session hijack without Firesheep!

What is Session Hijacking?

I am not going to waste time trying to explain session hijacking; instead I will just give you a blurb from Wikipedia:

In computer science, session hijacking refers to the exploitation of a valid computer session—sometimes also called a session key—to gain unauthorized access to information or services in a computer system. In particular, it is used to refer to the theft of a magic cookie used to authenticate a user to a remote server. It has particular relevance to web developers, as the HTTP cookies used to maintain a session on many web sites can be easily stolen by an attacker using an intermediary computer or with access to the saved cookies on the victim’s computer (see HTTP cookie theft).

How to Perform a Session Hijack

For this simple example using Windows, I am going to target Twitter (as this seems to be one of the two big targets of Firesheep, and since I refuse to use Facebook). Here are the following things that will be needed for this example:

1. LAN with Internet connection.
2. Two computers (technically you could just use one, but it’s more fun to see it work with two).
3. Wireshark
4. Mozilla Firefox
5. Add N’ Edit Cookie Editor add-on (or another cookie editor of your choice)

Read the rest of this entry »

The Windows 7 Whopper

For the release of Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft paired up with Burger King Japan to create the Windows 7 Whopper. This Whopper contains 7 beef patties and over 2,000 calories. Even though I don’t eat fast food, nor do I ever get the cravings for a Whopper/Big Mac; I found myself wanting to fly to Japan to attempt to take down the Windows 7 Whopper.

Quick Tips for Administering Windows Server Core 2008

I recently added a Windows Server Core 2008 server to my fleet of servers. There is a huge difference between Server and Server Core, and that difference is that Server Core doesn’t have a graphical user interface. Since most people who administer a Windows network are used to a point and click environment, I wanted to share some quick tips on some command line administration that may be helpful for those Windows System Admins out there. The six main areas that I would like to talk about are: Windows Updates, Restarting the Server, Logging Off, Setting a Static IP Address, Joining a Domain, and Promoting the Server to a Domain Controller. Read the rest of this entry »

Cracking Windows Passwords

Working in IT always seems to have fun and interesting projects or tasks; recently I was tasked with cracking passwords in Windows XP. Since cracking passwords in Windows XP is a simple and easy task to accomplish, I decided that I would document and describe the process. As a perlude, I am not encouraging people to crack passwords for accounts that they do not own.

Brief Understanding

It’s important that you have at least a basic understand of what we are going to attempt. When you set a password on a Windows XP User Account that is fewer than 15 characters it is stored in a Lanman Hash (LM Hash). To the everyday user, this just means that your password is stored in an encrypted format; for example if your Administrator account had the password “computer”, then the hash of that would be:

Administrator:500:AE6E1B1FCCB24D5B944E2DF489A880E4:
2B2AC2D1C7C8FDA6CEA80B5FAD7563AA:::

In order to crack a password in Windows, we are going to use the hash to determine what the password really is. Read the rest of this entry »

Certified!

Not too long ago I got on a Certification Kick; the certifications that I became interested in acheiving were within the field of IT Security which is where the underlaying mindset was when I wrote my last post on Creating a Strong Password. To start my IT Security certification track I decided to first take my CompTIA Security+ exam since CompTIA is vendor neutral and a great first step; additionally, passing is a great confidence booster. I would like to report that I passed the CompTIA Security+ exam, and will be continuing my certification kick with either the Certified Penetration Testing Specialist and the CISSP. However, I wanted to inform people of what I found most helpful when taking the CompTIA Security+ exam.

Highly Recommended Study Material for the CompTIA Security+

To study for the CompTIA Security+ exam I ended up using CBT Nuggets, SelfTest Software, Pass4Sure, and Microsoft Press Security+ Book; of those four, the only thing that ended up being close to useless was the SelfTest Software: not to say that SelfTest is bad, because they are great for studying for the Microsoft Exams. However, for the CompTIA Security+ using the Pass4Sure test engine is much more effective.

Creating a Strong Password

It’s 2009, and I would be safe to assume that a vast majority of people have secure websites that they go to; some may be considered highly confidential (banks or investments) while others are not (social networking sites). Regardless of how you classify the importance of the sites you go to and the systems that you log into, it is important that you protect your accounts: this is where creating strong passwords comes into play.

Weak Passwords

To appreciate strong passwords, we can first take a look at some weak passwords and why they are weak; hackers will attempt to break into accounts by guessing weak passwords. We’ll start with the famous FIRST NAME password or the FIRST NAME plus #, for example ‘aaron’ or ‘aaron1’; with over 6 years of IT experience, there have been countless times where I would have to log in as a specific user to troubleshoot a problem and over half of the time I successfully logged in by typing in a user’s first name as the password. The FIRST NAME password can be extended to also include the first name of a spouse/significant other, child, pet, relative etc. Read the rest of this entry »

Certification Kick

I am back on a certification kick, this time focusing on IT Security; and since it is related to technology, I figured I would share my methods and secrets of what I do to prepare myself for the big day. There are 5 milestones that I will follow for every certification exam that I take: selecting a book, setting up a lab environment, searching for online video training, taking practice tests, and finding an exam voucher. Now you may find some of my techniques overkill or a waste of time, but this is just my way of approaching certifications. Take what you want and throw away what you don’t. Read the rest of this entry »

Tis The Season….For Scams

As some of you may know, I am a big fan of selling online; especially venues such as Half.com, Craigslist, and eBay. The ability to sell and purchase online opens more possibilities for everyone; however, there is an opportunity that is opened that most may not be aware of: that being the opportunity to scam somebody. The best way that I can help explain what I mean is through an example, which just recently happened to me.

This Black Friday, I ended impulse buying an HDTV (at a great price) with every intention on selling it. One of the first things I did when I got home was write up a description to post on Craigslist. After I had my write up, I went online to find some of the TV’s specs and a nice picture to post with it. As always, I put my Craigslist ad up and setup an e-mail filter to make sure I won’t miss an offer. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Chat Adds Video and Voice

On Tuesday, November 11th, Google decide to add Voice and Video to their Gchat. I was unable to play with it until today and I must say that it is very impressive. Of course, all Google products that come to market seem to impress me, but the voice and video really take the cake. 

Quality

When using the voice through Google Chat, I was expecting that there would be some chatter or grainy sound quality. I was completely wrong! The sound quality was great, very smooth. I would go as far as putting it on par with Skype, if not better. Moreover, the video quality matched that of the sound quality. Very smooth graphics, not choppy at all. However, when enlarging the video to full screen, you will start to see some problems. But what would you expect when you are broadcasting from a webcam. Read the rest of this entry »

Computer Ethics Guest Post

As some of you may know, I am a guest writer for WNY Tech Blog. I recently wrote a post about Computer Ethics that I feel everyone should read. Computer Ethics is an important subject, and should be taken seriously.

Please take 5 minutes to head over to the Computer Ethics post at WNY Tech Blog and give it at least a quick once over. And as always, comments are appreciated.