I needed to encrypt some strings before sending them out over the network to another process and I don’t want to rely on another mechanism for handling the encryption, so here’s my simple AES encryption class. You can load plain text out of the vault by providing a cipher or save an encrypted message by supplying the plain text.

ooking to sniff your VoIP traffic? ccording to the sourceforge site, UCSniff is a VoIP & IP Video Security Assessment tool that integrates existing open source software into several useful features, allowing VoIP and IP Video owners and security professionals to rapidly test for the threat of unauthorized VoIP and Video Eavesdropping.

Perhaps you don’t have iptables running or you don’t want to process icmp stuff in your firewall rules. Echo this as root, and it will take effect immediately. If you’re wondering if changing things like this, tcp timeouts, and open ports will trick nmap fingerprint scanning, the answer is no.

I found a number of simple VBScript’s that relaunch themselves with elevated privileges using the “runas” verb just to launch another application or script. They just do it by re-invoking themselves with a bogus argument just to trigger the else clause the second time through. I don’t like the ampersand and underscore style, so I rewrote it a little less quirky.

Stop identifying yourself to the world. Stop giving away personally identifiable information about yourself on forum posts, facebook, twitter, or any other social sites.

It’s about meeting the developers half-way, and that’s mentioned, but it can’t be stressed enough. I just worry this might be used as an excuse for not writing secure code. If you tell developers they don’t have to worry about insecure code because a framework will save them you may as well tell them they can avoid exercise and eat all the twinkies they like because there’s a magic pill for that too.

Since so many websites use flash, and most computers you come across have adobe flash installed, this vulnerability is kind of a big deal due to the sheer volume of potentially affected computers. Install Google’s Chrome browser. It’s faster than your browser, and while you’re at it, head over to youtube with this link, and try youtube through html5.

What if there’s no open file to be found, then what? If you were looking for some sort of media file, it might be easy to use a memory based distro with tools like photorec

You can use this to check to see if anyone has modified, updated, upgraded, added, or removed any files on your system. After you’ve configured a system the way you want it, dump hash files for all the important directories, /etc, /bin, /usr/local, etc., or just dump the whole thing. Move the output to another system. Now if you want to check to see if something has changed, you can hash the file(s) in question and grep for the hash.

Capture filters are completely different than display filters, and for some reason it’s not immediately evident when you’re in Wireshark to understand what the syntax is for capture filters. Capture filters don’t follow these rules at all. But if you’re familiar with tcpdump, then you already know how to limit the capture with filters.