Dr. Ali Jahangiri, the well known security expert and author of Live Hacking: The Ultimate Guide to Hacking Techniques & Countermeasures for Ethical Hackers & IT Security Experts, is pleased to announce the launch of the Live Hacking CD, a new Linux distribution designed for ethical hacking. The Live Hacking CD contains the tools and utilities you need to test and hack your own network but using the tools and techniques that more malicious hackers would use.

Download it here: http://www.livehacking.com/cd-dvd/download.htm

Read the full press release here: http://www.free-press-release-center.info

Hakin9 is a source of advanced, practical guidelines regarding the latest hacking methods as well as the ways of securing systems, networks and applications. I have provided a few recommended copies to download as pdf. Get them here.

Local wireless networks, which provide information to receive and send to the Internet, have become part of the houses and offices. Where as it is less expensive than wired networks and allows for roaming between the two offices to remain in contact with the electronic devices. But experts warn of the penetration it by the strangers or intruders in order to sabotage it.

According to views of the U.S. experts, unsecured homes networks can also be used by the neighbors in order to spam bots download unauthorized material on the rights of the songs and music, and even pornographic material without knowing the owner, which had led to legal proceedings. In particular, it is difficult to identify the person or organization that used the network. One person was detained when he stopped his car in front of a U.S. charitable organization and used its network to communicate with the Internet.

The offices of small businesses were opened that do not have secured internal networks to penetrate the large companies that make business with them; this also is applied to the home network. To overcome the problems the experts proposed to change the passwords on wireless networks from time to time and installation of cryptographic keys to the codes can be changed according to a regular basis. The radio signals can be adjusted so as not to fall outside the walls of the office.

Finally, the use of advanced software to scan wireless networks secures the development of local home and office computers “in the case of the shadows!”

Author: Shrif S Kassem
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Latest trends in mobile phone

Security testing  or assessment is a process to determine that an Information System adequately protects data and maintains intended functionality from the following points:

Confidentiality: A security measure which protects against the disclosure of information to parties other than the intended recipient(s). Often ensured by means of encoding, using a defined algorithm and some secret information known only to the originator of the information and the intended recipient(s) (a process known as cryptography) but that is by no means the only way of ensuring confidentiality.

Integrity: A measure intended to allow the receiver to determine that the information which it receives has not been altered in transit or by other than the originator of the information. Integrity schemes often use some of the same underlying technologies as confidentiality schemes, but they usually involve adding additional information to a communication to form the basis of an algorithmic check rather than encoding all of the communication.

Authentication: A measure designed to establish the validity of a transmission, message, or originator. It allows a receiver to have confidence that the information it receives originated from a specific known source.

Authorization: The process of determining that a requester is allowed to receive a service or perform an operation.

Availability: Assuring information and communications services will be ready for use when expected. Information must be kept available to authorized persons when they need it.

Non-repudiation: A measure intended to prevent the later denial that an action happened, or a communication took place, etc. In communication terms, this often involves the interchange of authentication information combined with some form of provable time stamp.

I’ve listed 100+ free and open source tools used in security testing here.

Backtrack is a linux-based penetration testing suite of tools  used by security professionals to perform assessments. Backtrack has been fully customized as a penetration testing tool.

BackTrack 4 (codenamed “pwnsauce”) includes a new kernel, a larger and expanded toolset repository, custom tools that you can only find on BackTrack, and more importantly, fixes to most major bugs that we knew of. You can install and use it as your primary operating system, run it as a live cd, from a usb drive, or as a virtual machine.

Some of the tools included in the suite are: Metasploit, Kismet, Autoscan, Nmap, Ettercap, Wireshark, etc. These tools can be used for network, system and wireless reconnaissance, enumeration and penetration.

I use the backtrack suite in teaching my ethical hacking class. It is a great tool for anyone interested in learning to perform security assessments.

Other suites with similar functionality can be found in a previous post.

Many hotels,coffee shops and other such establishments  offer free wireless internet access to their customers. These networks are often unprotected. They typically do not require customers  to  enter a password and provide no encryption to protect the networks traffic.  Any user within wireless access range can potentially connect to this network and sniff or listen in on the network traffic of any other user. A skilled attacker can perform a man-in-the-middle attacker in a matter of seconds and intercept all your network communications using tools that are freely available on the Internet.  A man-in-the-middle attack is where a hacker places himself/herself between the victim and their gateway connection to the Internet. This is done by simply network packets to the victim’s computer telling it that the attacker’s computer is the gateway and telling the real gateway device that the attacker’s computer is the victim’s. There are numerous tutorials and videos on web sites like Youtube on how to perform this attack. There is really no way to prevent this and having a firewall, anti-virus, or other security software on your computer offers no protection as the attacker is not really trying to access the victim’s computer directly.

There are some steps you can take to protect yourself however:

The best safeguard is to avoid accessing sensitive websites on public networks i.e. your bank account, email. etc

If you must access such websites, before entering you user name and password, ensure that your connection is encrypted and connected to the real web server. You can do so by verifying that the url begins with an https. HTTPS refers to HTTP over SSL encryption. This means that all communications between your web browser and the web server you are connecting to is encrypted. Anyone sniffing your network traffic will be unable to see what is actually being sent.

You can also verify the legitimacy of the web server where the web pages are hosted. If the connection is over HTTPS, there should be a golden lock on your browser screen. Firefox displays it on the lower right and Internet Explorer displays in it the URL bar. Double clicking on the lock will display the digital certificate which verifies that the web server belongs to the organization whose web site you are trying to connect to.  This digital certificate should be issued by a reputable company like Verisign or Thawte.

Lastly, you can use a remote access VPN. A VPN encrypts and protects all your network traffic. VPNs are often used by users to connect to their company’s internal networks. If you do not have ready access to a personal or company VPN. There are several online services that offer free VPN solutions. Three of such services are:

CyberGhost is a  free VPN service from Germany which route your through a German IP. The free service is limited to 10Gb of traffic every month. There is also a paid service that is affordable.

UltraVPN is a  free downloadable VPN client from France with no traffic quota.

AlonWeb is a third option. It uses the OpenVPN tunneling server to encrypt your traffic and users are limited to 1GB of traffic a month. AlonWeb is also ad supported so it injects advertisements into the web pages users are browsing.

These VPN services, in addition to verifying your encrypted communication with a legitimate web server, provide an increased level of security to protect your network traffic from prying eyes.

When I first started running Ubuntu as my laptop OS of choice, it was partly  because I got fed up with having to rebuild my Windows XP OS whenever it would pick up some particularly stubborn piece of varmint during my browsing of hacking sites around the web. The second reason, however, was that most security tools I wanted to use were native to Linux and it was just easier to install them on my Ubuntu laptop and always have them available. You never know when you might get the urge to….um…nevermind.  I tried running them as virtual machines in VMware for a while but I found  the inability to use all the computing resources on the laptop a little limiting. There are several pretty good suites out there that do good job of compiling tools ( eg. Backtrack, my fave ) but it lacks some of the tools found in other suites.

I was quite pleased when I came across Katana, which is a multi-boot suite that combines multiple security distributions ( and you can add more ) to one bootable USB. By default, it comes with the following:

- Backtrack 4
- the Ultimate Boot CD
- Organizational Systems Wireless Auditor (OSWA) Assistiant
- the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows
- Got Root? Slax
- Ophcrack Live
- Damn Small Linux
- Damn Vulnerable Linux

It also includes “over 100 portable Windows applications”. Katana v1.0 can be downloaded from the developer’s site here.

I assigned my class a research paper on the security implications of moving an enterprises data processing to a cloud provider i.e. a company that provides Software as a Service ( SaaS ) or Platform as a Service ( PaaS). I’ll leave my views on that topic for another post however I couldn’t resist sharing this article I came across titled New could-based service steals Wi-Fi passwords. Launched yesterday, the new WPA cracker service stated purpose is to be  a tool for security auditors and penetration testers to audit their wireless encryption.  There are already entities out there that provide Hacking as a Service ( HaaS) so this is just another one. I mean, why shouldn’t us good guys get in on the action?