Mar 252013
 

Article by Jay Turla first published on infosecinstitute

A lot of sniffers, rootkits, botnets, backdoor shells and malwares are still on the wild today, which are used by malicious attackers after successfully pawning a certain server or any live network in order to maintain their access, elevate their access privilege, and spy other users in a network. In order to protect our network or server from such intrusions and further damage, there are free and open source detection tools that can be deployed and used as part of our security strategy. They are mandatory when our server or network is up and running, especially if a certain user is downloading a file which could possibly be malicious or harmful.

The advantage of using free and open source detection tools is that you obviously don’t need to pay a single penny and that tutorials are very easy to get and understand because manuals are included which are usually named as README so be sure to RTFM (Read the F****** Manual).

Here are some tools which could be of use to you guys
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Mar 212013
 

The tool that usually I use to download from the command line is wget, it’s simple to use and it’s installed (or easily installable) on any system, but if you want something that can do the same job in a smarter and faster way you must really test Aria2

Aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source command-line download utility. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. aria2 can be manipulated via built-in JSON-RPC and XML-RPC interfaces, let’s see some practical use and examples.

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Mar 182013
 

Cuttlefish is a tool which can execute various actions when specific events are triggered, and it allows you to create events that only happen under certain circumstances

For example, you could set a condition/reaction such as “when the lan network is connected start Transmission”, or “Unmute the audio when I start Banshee and mute it when I close Banshee”.
The nice things of this program is that it’s completely configurable via a nice graphical interface that makes the creation of any task extremely easy and intuitive.
The software is wrote in python, open source and is born on Ubuntu as “Ubuntu app” and so it’s easily installable on this distribution or Derivate, there is a package from AUR for Arch Linux and I’m sure soon you’ll find it for any distribution.

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Mar 092013
 

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. The word steganography is of Greek origin and means “concealed writing” from the Greek words steganos (στεγανός) meaning “covered or protected”, and graphei (γραφή) meaning “writing”. The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on magic. Generally, messages will appear to be something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other covertext and, classically, the hidden message may be in invisible ink between the visible lines of a private letter.

And now that we have saw the definition of this word, let’s take a look at three open source programs for Linux that you can use to play with this concept: Steghide and Outguess and one closed source Steg

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Mar 032013
 

Many NAT firewalls or VPN server time out idle sessions after a certain period of time to keep their trunks clean. Sometimes the interval between session drops is 24 hours, but on many commodity firewalls, connections are killed after as little as 300 seconds, and this can be a problem if you are working on a remote machine and suddenly you find yourself logged out with a message “Connection reset by peer”.

In a former article I’ve presented autossh, a solution that comes to your help when you want to be sure that a SSH connection stay always on between 2 machines. Autossh is a simple program that allows you to run an instance of ssh, keep it under control, and restart the same instance once that the connection is dropped up to a maximum number of times controlled by an environment variable.

This is useful if you need to have a “permanent” connection between 2 machines, but perhaps you just need to have a connection between your personal computer and different servers, and in these cases autossh is less useful, so let’s see how to use some openssh options to keep our connection open.
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