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Sorry for a late update folks..My final exams are here and hence I was a bit busy in studies (and playing Metal Gear Solid 2 if anybody cares :D ). As I have less time to blog, I might as well write a quick and dirty guide to crack Winrar using Ollydbg this time. Ollydbg is a debugging program which I tout as the best debugging and disassembling program available to us,the lesser mortals. It has an extremely intuitive interface (although at first run, it might be cryptic for many) and one can write off their own plugins to extend functionality. You must have a basic idea of memory address and assembly language, or you might want to read the part one of this tutorial - Learn to crack any version of Winrar – An Introduction to cracking

 

Update -

Hi Folks..Due to sheers amount of load the initial post was taking, I had to move the post on cracking winrar from my homepage to here

 

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As a special tribute to Pacman on its 30th anniversary, Google has unleashed the best Google doodle ever..an interactive videogame (with full sound efx) on Google homepage..and that too is Pacman and Google at its best. Still Google is a day early as the legendary game was launched on 22 May 1980 in Japan 30 years before and has spawned numerous spinoffs altogether.But the classic has not lost its charm..not for me..ever..When folks at Namco were developing it,who knew that a game about pill chomping and eating ghosts can revolutionize the videogame genre.

The Videogame on Google homepage can be played by clicking on the “Insert Coin” button and Pacman can be controlled using mouse or using Keyboard..Love you Google :) The game will be live for the next 2 days and make sure you play it before,else you might be dusting off Google at Wayback machine.

In the mean time, you can check out the game by clicking here or by going to Google home page.

( btw…i guess the chomp chomp voice is getting on my nerves while i m surfing net :| )

 

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If you are in security, you might have heard of an Intrusion Detection system, which is a device or mechanism that monitors network and/or system activities for malicious or unwanted behavior and can react, in real-time, to block or prevent those activities. There are a lot of professional IDS available for commercial use,but when it comes to being free as freedom (read:open source), Snort is my favorite.Snort is is a very powerful tool open source IDS (Intrusion detection system) written by Martin Roesch & and is known to be one of the best IDS on the market even when compared to commercial IDS.Snort performs protocol analysis, content searching/matching, and is commonly used to actively block or passively detect a variety of attacks and probes, such as buffer overflows, stealth port scans, web application attacks, SMB probes, and OS fingerprinting attempts, amongst other features. Like Wireshark,Snort uses the libpcap library to capture packets.

Snort can be run in 4 modes:

1. sniffer mode: snort will read the network traffic and print them to the screen.
2. packet logger mode: snort will record the network traffic on a file
3. IDS mode: network traffic matching security rules will be recorded (mode used in our tutorial)
4. IPS mode: also known as snort-inline (IPS = Intrusion prevention system)

A lot of people in the very active snort community are sharing their security rules which is very useful if you are not an security expert and wants to have up-to-date rules.Snort can be combined with other free software such as sguil, OSSIM, and the Basic Analysis and Security Engine (BASE) to provide a visual representation of intrusion data..which is in fact a PHP script displaying alerts on a web interface. At the end of the day, Snort is a must have for any security researcher or  network paranoids out there..another mentionable IDS systems are Fragrouter,OSSEC HIDS and sGUIL.

You can download Snort from here

 

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With over 150 options available for locking down privacy, the process of making yourself really anonymous on Facebook is like programming a VCR – truly a pain in the ass. While it was not enough, a new loophole was manipulated by folks at YourOpenbook which allows to search for status updates containing some really embarrassing stuff. Mind it, you could be there too, and someone else could be enjoying your share of fun just because of some stupid configuration in the privacy portal of Facebook. YourOpenbook even provides customized searches of freely viewable status updates with search results even returning the name and profile picture of those commenting naughty out there. On an earlier note, FourSquare community was manipulated easily by a similar site PleaseRobMe which allowed to track locations.

YourOpenBook automates a type of security loophole which allows users to search for posts containing the word sex, or any other “ curious “ search term.As the spokeswoman for Facebook cleared

This is the search feature of the Graph API, documented

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api#search

Obviously, the same is applicable on Facebook too.She added

"Only posts (status updates, notes) which are Everyone and Page names are available unless you authenticate with an app (e.g. the TweetDeck app is a desktop client you can use to search over your own status updates),"

A lot of privacy invasion practices and loopholes have recently caught up with us,with Google found guilty over sniffing out data and Facebook being recently dunked for disabling its chat due to a serious bug . In all, Facebook has been deteriorating its privacy settings and shifting control from users by auto-approving many websites and applications to share there data. In Mark Zuckerberg’s own words

They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks.

Be Wary..

The solution ? The simplest one a common man would find would be to delete its Facebook account making "Delete Facebook account" ninth most search term on Google. Social networking is getting increasingly insecure..

 

 

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You might have heard of Google street view, heck, some of you might be avid users of Google street view, which is a service that allows you that provides panoramic views from various positions along many streets in the world. Google managed to pull up that by using its elite squadron of sophisticated technocars to capture both imagery and 3D geometrical data for Google Maps and data about Wi-Fi networks that it uses in its geolocation-enabled applications. The practice of mapping and gathering data has always been a controversial practice (giving too much of power in Google’s hand, or in any techno firm is a bad omen.). It was on April 27 when Google tried to clear up misconceptions in a blog post which can be easily summarized as -

1. We are not invading anyone’s privacy &
2. Take a look around folks, other people have been collecting data even longer then we have.

While the whole posts was quite edgy in nature, Google tripped and now has stated in an updated post that it was not only collecting SSID and MAC information from the wifi networks, but also “fragments” of payload data from open and insecure wifi networks they drove by. At the request of the German government, Google audited its data collection system more carefully & discovered that Street View cars have been accidentally using a piece of software that can collect data being transmitted over insecure wifi networks. But it was further clarified that since the cars were always moving and their networking monitoring devices changed channels five times a second, Google says they "typically" only picked up "fragments" of data.

Nevertheless, cars have been temporarily grounded and the data has been isolated till someone figures out what do do with it. Google intents to hire a third party to examine the software is "profoundly sorry for this error" and will try to learn from it. Quoting from the official blog post

The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust—and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.

Inner thoughts -
I am glad German authorities are competent enough to sniff and dig facts and give an earful to Google.
Data collection is a scary thing anyways..we need to be paranoid of what data we are allowing to be public and private considering the vast attempts of world to catch us with our pants down :P Who knows that data might be jacked up with folks at CIA/FBI/NSA to track some sucker down (there's always a chance…remember FBI carnivore ? anyone ?).
Before the screw up, Google insisted what they were doing was nothing wrong. Frankly speaking, NO company ever admits to invading anyone's privacy. It's always "your privacy is important to us" blah blah blah…skepticism is the key to protect ourselves anyways.
In the end,

if privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy
(sorry if I sound corny.. but I couldn't think better)

From – PCWORLD

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On one hand Microsoft has been releasing and updating its smartphone operating systems, geeks are going the other way  by porting windows on their respective iPhone’s and Android based phones. On an earlier note, a Norwegian developer named Erik Kristiansen developed the first “boot camp” (later turned out to be a hoax) but that had the devs going for the inevitable. Google about windows on iPhone and you will get loads of results.

The suit was followed by android geek Shawn McHenry who ported Windows 3.1 on Android phone. As he confesses -

I realized, Hey, Windows can be installed VIA Dos. So I went on google & youtube and looked up "Windows on Android" and what do you know, No results. However, I saw a lot of videos about Windows 95, NT, 3.1, etc on a Nokia. So I thought, I want to try and put it on Android. It appears its never been done before. So I gave it a shot...

The hack was done using DOSBOX emulator which allows to run old MS-DOS games for Intel x86 PCs that can't be run on modern operating systems such as Window XP, Vista, Linux, or FreeBSD Unix. Windows 3.1 was launched in 1992 & added quite an array of features at that time like support for long file names,virtual memory and support for sharing.

McHenry explains what he did here but finishes off quickly

"It's completely useless, but really damn cool."

Windows on Android ? Watch out Windows 7 :P

 

 

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Plug a pendrive into a public computer and you will be pesked by the continuously replicating “New Folder.exe” virus or the “regsvr.exe” virus. Hear my story, while I transferred my notes last night (around 600 folders) and I was surprised to  see that around 450 MB of space was eaten by these self replicating space eaters ! I was running Linux so these were not a concern for me, but when I plugged my pendrive into my virtual machine (windows xp sp3), it caused multiple problems of explorer corruption and disabling registry tools.

Time for some virus busting I guess..here is how you can remove “regsvr.exe” and “new folder.exe” from your computer.

 

Step 1 - Some Startup Repairs

First of all, boot into safe mode.After you get to your desktop,press F3 or Ctrl + F and search for “autorun.inf” file in your computer and delete all the subsequent files. I case you are no able to delete them, select all the files and uncheck the”Read Only” option. If you are still not able to delete them , you might want to try out Unlocker tool to delete the files.

Now go to

start – > run –> type ”msconfig”

and press enter

Go to startup tab and uncheck “regsvr”, click ok and then click on “Exit without restart”.

Now go to

control panel –> scheduled tasks and delete “At1” task listed there.

Once done, close all windows.

 

Step 2 - Changing Configurations

Your registry might be disabled,and you need to activate it back to undo all the malicious changes done by worm.In order to do that, you need to go to

start – > run –> type ”gpedit.msc”

and press enter

then navigate to

users configuration –> Administrative templates –> systems

Find “prevent access to registry editing tools” , double click it and change the option to disable.

Once done, your Regedit will be enabled. In case your task manager is disabled, you need to enable it.

 

Step 3 - Registry Edits

Now we have to perform some registry edits to enable our explorer and to remove all instances of worm from the registry. Go to

start – > run –> type ”regedit”

and press enter

Click on Edit –> Find and search for regsvr.exe . Find and delete all the occurrences of regsvr.exe virus (don't delete  regsvr32.exe as its not a virus).

then navigate to entry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

and modify the entry

Shell = “Explorer.exe regsvr.exe”

to delete the regsvr.exe from it,so that it becomes

Shell = “Explorer.exe”

Once done, close all windows and get ready to delete all virus files.

 

Step 4 - Deleting Virus Files

The final step is to delete all the virus files in your computer. To do this, Press F3 or Ctrl + F and search for regsvr.exe (make sure to search in hidden folders ) and delete all “regsvr.exe” “svchost .exe” files (notice the gap between ‘svchost’ and ‘.exe’, keep in mind you don't delete the legitimate file.).

Clean your recycle bin and restart your PC (perform a cold boot).

Volia..you have cleaned your computer from regsvr..just make sure to scan your pendrive the next time you plug in :)

 

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The fated day has come..As Valve launched its Steam distribution service for MACs, the freebie being offered is quite     jaw dropping: multiple award winning game PORTAL is being offered for free ! Since 2004, Steam has been a service exclusively for PC users,but this time,Valve made a smart move to expand its user base by launching Steam for MAC's. The popular game distribution service launched today with a library of 63 games, along with a ' free to play ' Portal game, for both PC and MAC users until May 24.

As quoted on the official site -

Well, technically speaking, there are some strings attached. Fortunately, they're entirely decorative. We just like the way they look, swaying in the gentle breeze created by a million people simultanously fainting from shock at the news that Portal is free. Now you have no reason not to try Portal.

"I have a reason," some of you are probably typing into an angry email. "You see, sir, I own a Mac."

Well guess what: For the first time ever, Portal is also available for the Mac.

"Capital news! But the excellent puzzle adventure Portal won over 40 Game of the Year awards; Surely it must cost at least five or six hundred dollars."

You'd think that, especially since it actually won over 70 Game of the Year Awards. But, like we keep saying, Portal is free. Free on the Mac. Free on the PC. But only until May 24th.

 

 

Steam for MAC will open a multitude of opportunities for Valve(and gamers alike :) ), as it will attract PC developers to Mac platform through SteamWorks. Also, Mac users get to play all the games they have been playing on their windows pc using the bootcamp feature of Mac, furthermore they can even continue the game from the same point where they have left it on PC. Through the Steam Cloud,Steam Play feature will allow to play the same game on Mac and Windows for free..now that’s something we gamers have been demanding for a long time, unlike EA which has started charging 10$ even for multiplayer and online connectivity (damn u EA ! ) !

You still reading ? Darn!! What are you waiting for ?

Download Portal from here

 

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Sony banned him for cheating at SOCOM NAVY SEALS, and he took the Playstation portal down. Sounds simple huh ? That happened in Pennsylvania, when a 17 year old teenage hacker was infuriated over the fact he was banned after cheating. It was found that in his routine life he was a normal kid, well participating in co-curricular activities. The whole story goes around the sentiments of vengeance against banning and the obsession to win the game. The unnamed hacker using his tools, blocked 3 games which caused the website to go offline.

Sony corp. asked for a huge 33,200$ as compensation but the Judge keeping in light that the kid admitted personal liability in the hack , and considering he was a teenager, fined him much less.Later he was penalized with 5000$ , 12 months of probation and 250 hours of community service.
Lessons learnt ?

• Be a teenager to hack :P Juvis rock !
• Even if you are fined, you have a great future ahead, some software giant will hire you.
• Even if hacking biggies sounds dangerous, it makes up for a good adrenaline rush and inspire the hacker within the lesser mortals.

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Everybody likes videogames, and the best ones have a fair share of creative geniuses who want to develop their games or just want to mod their favorite one for a richer gaming experience. This time, I will be specifying some great tools and which you can use for modifying your favorite videogames.
Counter strike 1.6
One of the most played games on this planet, counter strike has a dedicated community for modding. You can modify just anything in this game, and various scripting tools are available for it.

Download counter strike 1.6 tools

Halo
Microsoft’s shooting gem redefined action fps genre and tons of mods exists for it.

Download HALO modding tools

Call of Duty 2
Infinity ward’s COD2 redefined the WW2 shooter genre, now you can put your genius in by modding it.

Download Call of Duty 2 modding tools

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Infinity ward’s another take on tactical shooting in modern shooting and war scenario was a superb take. You can mod it using the official developer kit.

Download Call of Duty 4 : modern warfare tools / developer kit

StarCraft
One of the most played real time strategy games of all time, Starcraft has a huge fanbase of gamers and modders alike.

Download Starcraft modding tools

Metal Gear Solid 2
Highly acclaimed tactical espionage action 2.0 from Konami can be modded easily by using Solidus 1.9 and Milkshape.

Download Metal Gear Solid 2 modding tools

Prince of Persia Trilogy
Highly acclaimed Prince of Persia trilogy has been repacked and ripped by multiple cracking groups. Wonder how do they do so ? using unpacking tools to rip movie files and audio. You can use these tools for rather creative use..

Download Prince of Persia modding tools

Assassins Creed and New Prince of Persia
Ubisoft’s acclaimed “sandbox stealth” game, Assassins creed has quite a following with it and it can be further customized as per your whims. These tools work equally good for Prince of Persia 4.

Download Assassins creed modding tools / Prince of Persia 4 tools

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RHEL 6.0 was long overdue for release and when the beta finally hit the community, the download and the traffic rates proved it. There has been quite new releases in Linux camp this year,with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx being released last month. When it comes to RHEL, version 5.0 was released in 2007 with Linux 2.6.18 kernel and despite a barrage of incremental patches,it was beginning to show its age. The major release sports a Linux 2.6.32 kernel, a hybrid of several kernels with a strong emphasis on virtualization. That means that bulk of new features are found in the KVM (created by Qurmanet,purchased by Red Hat in 2008), which allows for managing virtual machines as easily as physical machines. KVM has been upgraded by adding a lot of performance and hardware support based upgrades.XEN has gone and it might be hard for some to make a move towards KVM.

Another addition on board is the addition of SELinux Sandbox which allows you to run any kind of arbitrary or untrusted code on your virtual machine, and is pretty handy with virtual hosts and allows to run guest machines in isolated environments.
Better multi-core support is the buzzword with RHEL 6.0 supporting new chip architectures including Intel's Xeon 5600 and 7500 and the Power7 from IBM. Also RHEL offers a plethora of disk formatting options when it comes to choosing a file system, with native support to ext4 and support being added for XFS file system.Added support for Nvidia display drivers has been added.

When it comes to installation, the familiar Anaconda installer offers preconfigured software packages to suit your needs. Pre-configured options include basic server configuration,web server packages, the desktop setup or the bare “minimal” install, however you can customize your installation as per your whims by selecting individual packages.
However, upon installing the basic desktop setup, I found out that RHEL is not the place to look for the latest in the GNOME developments (it was already expected as GNOME 2.30 was released early this year and so far its not a part of RHEL 6.0), the beta is stuck at GNOME 2.28 and several other prominent software offerings like Firefox and open office are showcased in their older versions. However on the server front, everything was close to their latest stable version;with Perl 5.10, PHP 5.3, Apache 2 and MySQL 5 bundled for web admins.

RHEL is targeted at enterprise deployment and development and you are better off with light weight linux distros for casual desktop use. But its worth a try if you are just curious.

You can download beta from here (redirects to red hat ftp server),RHEL is available for these architectures, choose your pick from there :)

• i386
• AMD64/Intel64
• System z
• IBM Power (64-bit)

Download RHEL



From the register




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Last night when I was at Facebook, suddenly it stopped responding and the server requests just timed out. I wondered  if it was a problem with my ISP or the king of social networking was down at the moment. With nothing to do, I googled and stumbled across Downrightnow , a service that monitors your favorite websites. It compiles the status by combining

• Reports from users who visit downrightnow
• Public messages on Twitter from users who are having service trouble
• Official company announcements and status reports
• Other third-party web sites that monitor service status

As soon as I opened the website, I came to know that Facebook was having some problems at that time

Mission Successful :P I guess you will find it interesting.

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Yesterday when i logged into my facebook account, things were a little different. I was literally spammed with “Facebook chat disabled – do you have any idea”  messages in my inbox. “No folks, i dont have any, but soon I will”,I replied as I found out that the Facebook chat function was disabled and there was a cryptic message of maintainance posted in place of it. A bit of googling enlightened me about the situation, as facebook engineers disabled the live chat function after folks at TechCrunch discovered a major bug that made private conversations visible to other users.

An emergency action was taken to correct a different security that allowed users to see their friends' pending friend requests. Ironically its quite contradictory to the Zuckerberg’s views according to whom

"people have really gotten comfortable sharing more information and more openly and with more people."

The holes were a result of a "preview my profile" feature which was added last month to give users more control over their privacy settings. Facebook has been under fire from critics who say that the site is playing with the privacy of 400 million users. Even former Facebook privacy honcho distanced himself from the most recent policy shift, which automatically shares user data with partners.

"I strongly encourage Facebook to structure all its programs to allow Facebook users to give permission before their information is shared with third parties," he wrote.

In the mean time, Facebook commented at its fan page -

"Chat is unavailable as we work quickly to fix a bug reported to us," it said. "It should return to normal soon … We apologise for the inconvenience."

5000+ likes and 14 hours later, chat is restored..I wonder how many bugs are there waiting to be exploited..

 

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Hi folks..sorry for a late update , I was busy with my internal vivas and exams. In the mean time one of my favorite Linux distro’s, Ubuntu has been updated with its latest release; Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu version 10.04,a long time support release) . Ubuntu has a 6 month release cycle and I will be updating my virtual rig from Karmic Koala to Lucid Lynx. Ubuntu is a fantastic Linux distribution which focuses on usability, and comes preinstalled with a wide range of software that includes OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Empathy, Transmission, and several lightweight games (such as Sudoku and chess). Additional software that is not installed by default can be downloaded using the package manager. My Recco –

If you are not a Linux convert yet, Be one then with Lynx :)

Anyways..for the skeptics,here are some features of Lucid Lynx or Ubuntu in general (shamelessly ripped form official site :P , I dont have much due to my final exams)

 

Browse the web faster

Ubuntu includes Mozilla Firefox – for fast, safe web browsing. You can also choose alternative open-source browsers from the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Create professional documents and presentations

OpenOffice.org is fully compatible with Microsoft Office and has everything you need to create professional documents, spreadsheets and presentations. OpenOffice.org is easy to use, packed with the features you need and completely free.

Get free software

The Ubuntu Software Centre gives you instant access to thousands of free open-source applications. Browse software in categories including: education, games, sound and video, graphics, programming and office. Software is easy to find, easy to install and easy to remove.

Email and chat

Get chatting with Empathy. Quickly integrate your chat accounts from Yahoo, Gmail, MSN, Jabber, AOL, QQ and many more. Evolution Mail provides easy, intuitive email.

Social from the start

New in 10.04. Read and update your social networks instantly. Ubuntu's new Me Menu lets you access your Facebook and Twitter accounts (and more) straight away. Connect to your chat channels and make updates through a single window. Being sociable has never been so easy.

Buy music while you listen

Ubuntu's new music player includes an integrated store, so you can buy and download new tracks with just a few clicks. And thanks to Ubuntu One's file-sharing magic you can store your music online and listen to it from other computers and music players. Ubuntu works with most music and media players.

View, store and edit photos

Ubuntu is ready for all your gadgets. Connect your phones and cameras to download your pictures. You can organise your photos with F-Spot and use popular tools like Picasa, Facebook and Flickr. For advanced photo editing, find a free application from the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Mobilise your digital life!

All Ubuntu users get a free Ubuntu One account. Ubuntu One allows you to store all kinds of files online so you can access them anywhere. Store bookmarks, contacts, music and pictures. Take everything everywhere with Ubuntu One.

Make, play and edit video

Watch all your favourite content from YouTube, iPlayer, and MSN Player. Play your own videos with Movie Player or use Pitivi to edit your videos.

Start fast with Ubuntu

Ubuntu loads quickly on any computer, but it's super-fast on newer machines. After loading, opening a browser takes seconds, unlike other operating systems that leave you staring at the screen, waiting to get online.

Choose from hundreds of free games

The Ubuntu Software Centre offers hundreds of games, including puzzles, adventures, tactical challenges and more. All free to choose and free to use.

Accessibility

At the core of the Ubuntu philosophy is the belief that computing is for everyone and access should be free and complete whatever your economic or physical circumstances. Ubuntu is one of the most accessible desktop operating systems around.

Guess thats enough to entice you :)

you can download Ubuntu from here

 

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