monline

Well, I should have known. Once people start putting Ubuntu and whatever on their Android phones, there's no turning back. A guy called Zachary Powell started making Android apps that help you install Ubuntu, Debian or BackTrack on your phone. I think the latter needs not too much of an introduction ... it's got pretty much most of the "security" tools that you might need to do a vulnerability scan of a LAN. Running BackTrack on your phone you can become a "secret agent", walking into a place and just "hack" (as in "run apps that do it for you") through your way to the target by pressing a button titled "upload virus" (note the movie reference ). Of course as a possible side-effect you might find yourself pretty soon in jail. So treat this idea as seriously as it was meant.

The default Firefox cookie management is not very sophisticated. I guess it's OK for users who don't know any better, but people with some knowledge about online security & tracking & enough paranoia to care might want to have a tighter control over which site is allowed to track them and their activities. Cookie Monster is the right tool for the task. It sits in your addon bar and shows you what cookies are set for what domain/site and exactly how the permission for a specific site came to be (from which rules). It gives you easy understanding and access to cookie control.

The page describes SYN cookies pretty well. For a bit more info, take a look at these:

• SYN cookies at Wikipedia
• TCP variables in the Ipsysctl tutorial
• Linux firewall-related /proc entries

To turn off file quarantine default behaviour (reboot required):
To disable quarantine for already downloaded files:
It's a great hint btw. Although I suggest if you disable file quarantine, you should also force Finder to always show file extensions (Finder Preferences / Advanced / Show all filename extensions). Otherwise you could launch a malicious app that disguises itself as a PDF (without the extension it's hard to tell what you're trying to launch).

"MySecureShell is an SFTP server that is based on OpenSSH and allows for very flexible configurations, e.g. it has support for chrooting users into their home directories and limiting upload-/download bandwidths. MySecureShell makes maintenance of an SFTP server easy."

I think the makers of the movie did a fair job in giving a chance to both the hackers and their "victims" to explain their POVs. I liked the historical aspects/flashbacks too.

"Ophcrack is a free Windows password cracker based on rainbow tables. It is a very efficient implementation of rainbow tables done by the inventors of the method. It comes with a Graphical User Interface and runs on multiple platforms."

There's also a LiveCD ISO available that you can write to an USB drive too.

"Fail2ban scans log files like /var/log/pwdfail or /var/log/apache/error_log and bans IP that makes too many password failures. It updates firewall rules to reject the IP address."
There's a nice Debian howto here for a basic setup of Fail2ban to protect the SSH daemon from brute-force login attempts.

According to the Apple document "Mac OS X Security Configuration For Version 10.4 or Later" you can reset the password if you've physical access to the machine.

Windows Update is a tricky thing. It can use a proxy server (see one of my previous posts on this), but it won't use the same proxy as you've set in "Control Panel" / "Internet Options" (aka. IE's proxy settings). Windows XP has a "hidden" HTTP service (it's actually a driver visible in "Device Manager" under "Non-Plug and Play Drivers") and Windows Update uses this service to access Microsoft's servers. To set a proxy for this service, you've to use the proxycfg command line program. However setting a SOCKS proxy won't take any effect (at least it did not for me, neither for airwin). But there're ways to get around this.