I had hoped to do an article on metasploit in the not too distant future, but not as early as tonight…. However, I’ve made a couple of references to it in previous posts which, well, it would be nice if I’d already given a bit of information about metasploit in general. For starters, metasploit is considered a “framework” for exploit modules and payload modules. Much like real weapons, knives, guns…. there are good uses and there are bad uses. It can be used by a network/security auditor to check for vulnerable systems. It could also be used by a cracker to exploit systems remotely. There’s a fine line.
Tag: hosting
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Takedown phishing sites
Sunbeltblog has a good post on a group that helps “take bad guys out”. The Internet Crime Provention and Control Institute (Link expired). Basically, they will take submissions of complaints and assist in getting sites taken down. A good example would be phishing sites, maybe servers hosting illegal content, stolen information, etc. etc.
Or, perhaps a machine is spewing out viral, nigerian 419 scam or other material. That’s what the ICPCI is there to receive complaints on and coordinate “takedowns”. According to the sunbelt entry (a tip from a reader), they’re pretty effective at the takedowns (even when the site is hosted in places you would think makes it tougher.)
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Self destructing messages
Good luck Jim… this message will self destruct in 40 seconds… A UK mobile (cell) company says it’s developed self-destructing text messages. In the spring they hope to introduce self destructing email/photo and voice messages. The recipient receives a link to the message and once viewed the message “self destructs” in 40 seconds. The good things they claim from this…
ultimately no one will ever have to worry about their messages or pictures ending up in the wrong hands ever again,
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F-secure list of sober virus urls
When the news was first out that an antivirus firm (f-secure) had cracked the psuedo-random algorithm that the sober worm uses to determine where to download “updates” from, they said that they had previously notified German authorities where the free hosting sites were located so that they could deal with the sites. I did find that they have announced a list of the addresses for the January 5th update (and the January 6th as well.)
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Interesting vector for browser vulnerability exploit…ebay
incidents.org has received a tip on an ebay item that contained some malicious script…
ISC reader Gareth Attrill pointed us to an eBay auction that has some escaped HTML code that sneaks in a link that tries to get a trojanized .jar (usage.jar) file loaded on anyone who loads the listing. The latest .dat for McAfee immediately detected (and deleted) the code as Exploit-ByteVerify. The lister most likely managed to bypass other protections that otherwise prevents this kind of code from being inserted into item listings. Both eBay and the ISP that is hosting the malware have been notified.
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Google Adsense changes
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I use Google adsense on these pages. Now obviously I can’t give statistics on how it does, but frankly what I’ve seen in the short time I’ve used it beats any other affiliate-type program I’ve used before. Yes, I’ve received checks from Amazon’s associates program before, but initially there you had to have a different account for each site, so I’ve got several dollars there in each of 8-10 different profiles left over from the “dark ages”…
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Backing up and restoring MySQL databases
In the past few days I’ve been working on an automated backup system for both my site databases and a few others. I thought I’d take a bit to go through what I’ve done. It’s really simple, but I suspect there are some that either don’t realise it’s this simple, or will think this is rocket science. If you are well versed in command-line MySQL interaction you probably already know this….
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Linux/Unix Bash scripted weblog
Oh my some people have time on their hands. I just found Linux, Unix, /etc/: Unix Weblog Hacks where the writer says they wanted to do a weblog, but didn’t want to go with a big blog hosting service, or have to deal with a hard to install blogging script. So their solution was to write their own weblog tool in the bash scripting language.
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