Information Security (InfoSec) Software, Books, and Resources

Security training and resources. I am creating this post mostly to help myself keep track of all the different infosec resources, applications, and study material for exams like Comptia Security+, CEH, CISSP, OSCP, and others. This is a resource for offensive security practices and tools. This list will be updated as time goes on.

Remedy 7.x, 8.x and possibly 9.x login password decoder

So recently I have been doing some QA for a BMC Remedy product that my work is starting to work with. One thing i noticed right away is that the cipher that they use is extremely bad and basically plain text.

How a Cracker breaks wifi and more details, WEP,WPA,WPA2,WPS and more

Attacking wifi tools and how attacks work.
Wifi types are open, wep, wpa1, WPA2, wpa2 enterprise. There are also services on wifi to help people connect for the first time easier.  This service is called wps.  WPS is either active or passive. So here are the bellow

Getting WepCrackGUI installed on Ubuntu 13.04 & 14.04

WebCrackGUI is an easy scripted way to run attacks on WEP and a simple way of grabbing handshake from a WPA network. Though WepCrack does not install always easily.
*updated 11/.2/14*

Setting up Security Camera with Webcam on Ubuntu

Ever wonder what to do with your old webcams in your house. I mean you don't use them anymore right? You have a smartphone for that now.  Well how about turning them into a surveillance system?

Network security auditing - Subterfuge

For a long time there has been problems with security flaws in consumer grade routers for middle man attacks.  

Facebook Timeline Removal For Firefox

Facebook's Timeline is still annoying to many people. If you don't like it and your using Firefox then your in luck.

Black Theme for Google+

*update* this theme will not work on the current layout of Google+ I am in the process of updating it. *update*

I recently got tired of the white on Google +. so I have set out to eliminate that. For those that are using the Chrome browser I now have an extension for you.

How to View Your Friend's Facebook Profile Without Timeline

If your getting tired of having everything on facebook be timeline and you miss the old style. Well you may want to check out another plugin for your chrome browser.

Chrome & Firefox App for Google+ Main Icon Clickable

I got tired of always trying to click on the Google+ icon to go to the home page instead of the small little home icon. For some reason I mentally just click on a sites main icon/title to go back to the websites home page. Sense I also do this mentally on Google plus it started to bug me after a while so I decided to change that.

Avast Free AntiVirus Results

Avast is a low powered power house when it comes to virus protection. First off I don't know if results are fully accurate as some of the virus links went dead sense the first part of the tests but after adding more it still did well.

Avast performance wise is not that bad as it runs at ~50mbs of ram while idle and does not very much while actually scanning. The software did well when I was surfing the net trying to download viruses using IE8 though on known bad sites the software would block the download of the known viruses not even giving it a chance to get in temp directory to do havoc. On top of that avast redirects you to their page telling you that you just dodged a virus and tries to sell you on upgrading your free version to a version with more bells and whistles. Though on the positive note avast did not allow me to bypass the block like some other virus scanners did when they did warn you about a site.

On scan it did not pick up any viruses which surprised me a little though sense it did block downloads it did not allow many to get a foothold. While in herins boot cd avira did not pickup anything though SAS did pick up 2 variants of a fake antivirus. While malwarebytes did not pickup anything spybot did pickup a pup that every other virus scanner also did not pick up.

Overall avast did well enough to go to round two with the other better virus scanners to go in to more testing. AV-Test.org has their results here if you want more information from their tests.

So far avast has done the best out of the virus scanners both detection rate, prevention, and performance in low memory situations.

Hope this helps and will do more testing later,
Local Tech Repair Admin

Avira Antivir Personal 2011 Review – Benchmark Windows XP

Today I am testing out Avira Antivir Personal and seeing how it holds up compared to other anti-virus suites out there. Avira AntiVir Personal has a fairly simple display and for a free anti-virus it I was hopping for a ok performance both detection rate and also hopefully having a low resource requirement.


I just want to start off by saying that I am not really impressed with how well it works. Avira is the software the company I work for uses for their virus removal off of Hiren's Boot CD. So I figured it be good for a dedicated virus scanner on the windows side.

Results:

While testing Avira with their Guard activated I used IE8 to surf the web to known predetermined websites that hosted a wide verity of bad software. Most the sites that I downloaded viruses from did not get stopped by avira in their active scans I only had 1 active block from an active x virus sense active x was enabled across all websites. Avira only stopped one virus from installing and only one virus from running after it installed. Which total 3 viruses in all during avira's active guard.

On the other hand during the scanning Avira did pick up one more virus in a 14min scan. This is not the best seeing that the computer still has many more viruses installed and spyware and spamware. So lets compare this to others to see how much they truly did miss.

Hiren's Boot CD
avira: 0
superantispyware: 3
normal mode:
comodofix: to many to count over 20
malwarebytes: 1
spybot S&D: 1
Sophos: 0


Conclusion:
Avira did protect against some of the more nasty viruses on the list though did miss many adware and rootkits and fake anti-virus software. Though sense it was able to pick up active x viruses and stop a few of them it is on the same level as AVG but with out a any warning on the web for if your going to a bad website or not. Still this is still better than what we have on our low end of clamwin.

Thanks for reading,
Local Tech Repair Admin

AVG Internet Security 2011 Review for Windows XP

AVG is a popular anti-virus software along with others like Norton and McAfee. So I decided to see how well it did compared so some other anti-virus software. I decided to test the AVG Internet Security 2011 instead of the free version because they gave a free 90 day trial to see how well it works and I wanted to see if it worked. I will go back and try again later with the free version to see the difference between the two.

If you have not read the first review check out it here:
http://localtechrepair.blogspot.com/2011/07/clamwin-and-clam-sentinel-review-on.html
this gives detail on what links I used for the malware.

Performance:
I just wanted to start out by saying that AVG Internet Security 2011 did not pick up every virus and malware so even the paid version still needs help by other things like spybot, malwarebytes, or/and superantispyware. But it did do a lot better than clam did to say the least.

AVG has some nice features like integration into the web browser to help warn people of virus infected sites. This should help some of the less techy people out there see a visual sign that something is wrong. Though only one of the sites did it not let me at all go to the site where the others gave me an option to bypass the warning.

AVG was able to block some of the applications from installing in the first place with is good for prevention though it did not prevent all of them. It was only able to block 4 while they where trying to install. This is better than nothing but not perfect either. It was able to detect running processes after some of the viruses where installed (5 of them). This is nice but I would rather of had it block it before it was installed but still did not make me have to scan for them.

While scanning it did a whole system scan and was able to find 1 infected file and 4 warnings which where corrupted exe from viruses that tried to download. The scan for a 10 gb hard drive took ~13mins.
AVG gives you the option of the priority that you want the scan to go I left it at the default for the scan though giving it high priority would probably speed up the time but make it less likely for the user to work on the computer while scanning.

Though AVG did not pick up everything and could not uninstall everything.

While running in Hiren Boot CD I ran different tests to see what it missed.
Superantispyware was able to find 4 adware and 1 rootkit and remove them.
Avira was able to find 5 infections.
Normal mode:
Malwarebytes found 12+2 = 14
Spybot Search & Destory found 1


AVG Internet Security 2011 missed a total of ~24 malware/virus and possible more that the programs above did not find.



Conclusion
AVG did a fairly good job and probably would have don't a lot better if we listened to the warnings that they gave while on the Internet we may have been in a better place. Though this still has room to grow in its protection of viruses sense the internet is not the only one place that can give you viruses. The performance of the scan speed was not bad at all compared to that of clam. Though on the performance of the the software on the ram side while idle the software was using 230MB of ram while scanning on default mode it was using 334MB of ram and while on High Priority scan it used 375MB. For a slow computer this may be acceptable but it depends on the users. Though for a windows xp computer with a half a GB of ram this and other things starting up this may be little to ram heavy for those computers.


Thanks for Reading,
Local Tech Repair Admin

ClamWin and Clam Sentinel Review on Windows XP

Clamwin is a version of ClamAV for windows. Though clam does not have active protection this is where clam sentinel comes in providing active protection for the clam definition database. So trying out clam to see if it really holds up to some of the things that viruses can throw at it we will see if it is worth even trying.

The list of viruses are from the following links.
-----WARNING REAL VIRUSES-----
adeliminator.net
http://www.thevalidatecheck.com/fr_ipd3/MjAxMTA3MTAtNzYuMTE1LjI0OC4xNjk=/index.php?web_id=CD4099&muid=MT-4e1a64ed4d383-3659
http://www.anti-spyware-101.com/download-sph
http://www.top20free.com/wallpaper.html
http://www.keygenguru.com/
http://spywarezapper.com/
http://www.rocketdownload.com/program/serial-keys-recover-215490.html
http://www.topwallpapers.com/
freevirusprotection.org/
www.free-antivirus.info/anti-virus/avg-antivirus-free-edition.html
www.newfreedownloads.com/find/adware-removal.html
www.freechristmasscreensavers.com/animatedsavers.htm
www.ihateadware.com/
www.freechristmassavers.com/
www.fasterpccleanclean.com/remove-rootkit-win32-agent-pp
http://www.reimage.com/lp/nhome/dyn.php?tracking=ga1&banner=6.1_Content_US&adgroup=Malware&ads_name=728x90_spyware_new_lp8&keyword=Spyware&lpx=LP-8
www.handyarchive.com/free/rootkit-web-bug-worm-eliminator/
---------WARNING REAL VIRUSES DON'T GO TO--------------


So while visiting these sites and and allowing the active x to run all these sites. I never received any popups warning me of possible infections or any warnings on a default install. This could possibly been fixed if I turned on warn on suspicious activity though this is not turned on by default. After trying to run in normal mode spybot, malwarebytes, and superantispyware and all of them being killed by the viruses I decided to try safe mode to see if it made any difference. And it did not.

Detection Rate for Default mode for clamwin is 0%


To see if clam will pick up any off them I tried to run it under hirens boot CD to see if the definitions would work. While in Hirens Boot CD Clamwin was able to find 1 virus after a ~31min scan of a 10GB hard drive. Where by comparison avira picked up 5 in 9 mins from hiren boot cd. And superantispyware found 5 more on top of that in 14mins. ClamWin is a non effective virus protection it could not prevent any viruses from being installed and it could barely find any when there was some.

My Rating of this small virus scanner is a complete fail for both boot scanning and active windows scanning.

How to Prevent Viruses in a Low Memory Situation

Lots of older computers have a problem with memory. I am fixing a computer right now that had malware on it and only a half GB of ram. This computer was running a full antivirus suite from McAfee though the only problem is the computer was incredibly slow.

I mean really really slow. The OS was windows xp and the OS it self was taking up ~200 MB just to run the OS and on a default start up with McAfee running it was running around ~600MB which is a bad thing. McAfee was taking up almost the whole ram that was on the computer leaving nothing to be used by the computer OS or any application.

So after uninstalling McAfee the computer ran a lot faster probably 10X as fast. But the only problem is the computer did not have any anti virus software anymore. So I looked for a alternative antivirus that offered real time protection. What I cam with is clamwin this uses a lot less ram than Immunet 3.0 that you get from clamav.net which used 200MB of ram so still to much for a computer with only a half GB of ram in them. The only problem is that clamwin does not provide real time protection. So I needed to fix that to help pro actively prevent viruses.

So the solution is Clam Sentinel. This solution is not the best seeing that the clam database is not the most complete but it is the only low memory solution that is fitting for low memory computer. Running clamwin and clam sentinel only uses ~20mb of ram this helps the computer be able to do other things like running firefox with out having to use the hard drive as virtual ram which slows the computer down a lot.

Hope this Helps some,
Local Tech Repair Admin

Online File Backup - Business

Businesses need a good disaster recovery plan and in that is data backup. I use this when I was in school to make sure my research papers did not get lost because if I had lost a 25 page research paper it would kill my grade and make me loss a lot of money. So how can a company effectively keep their data backed up at the minimal cost.

There are now many different online backup solutions for businesses and home users out there today. But they all cost different and offer different features. And some do it by strictly amount of space and some do both amount and computers.

Dropbox is one of these services that offer backup service. Their pricing is based on amount of space. I personally have never used the service so I do not know if they allow you have more than one computer on the account.
*update*
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/06/21/dropbox-lets-anyone-log-in-as-anyone/
Dropbox has had a major security mixup so if you been using dropbox your data may have been compromised
*update*


Another well known company in my area is Carbonite backup. This is for small businesses if they are dealing with lots of documents or needing lots of space. Their Business plan allows as many computers as they need on the plan starts at $230 a year for 250GB which is by far cheaper per GB than Dropbox is. But their house hold plans limit you to only 1 computer and cost a lot.

The solution I personaly use is an Open source one that comes with Ubuntu called Ubuntu One. They are like dropbox, they give you the first 2 GB free, but they allow as many computers as you need on the plan. You buy size of space type of plans. In comparison to drop box Ubuntu One is half the cost and they are nicer as you can just add 20GB more if you need more and if you need more than 22GB then you can add another 20 GB. They also allow you to buy their MP3's from their store and they don't count it as space against you the same thing that Amazon adopted after they did it and then Apple with their iCloud.

So for a small business that does not need that much space but just enough to backup their small database files, word documents, spreadsheets, and what not the best choice I see for the cheapest price is Ubuntu One not only is it cheaper but your supporting the Open Source community when you do use their service and spreading the knowledge of Ubuntu.

I hope you try out Ubuntu One it is available for Windows and Ubuntu and mobile phones. Hope you go out and start your free 2 GB plan to give it a try. *update*
Ubuntu One now gives you 5 GB free
*update*

Local Tech Admin

Learning to Type - Software

Learning to touch type is one of the most effective skills that a child or worker can learn these days. Sense I have been learning a new keyboard layout called Dvorak I have been trying out a few different websites and open source software in my learning methods.

One of the programs that I have been trying out is one called Klavaro
It not the most graphical typing application but it works very well. They have builds for linux and windows. They support multiple keyboard layouts and different languages in each they support layouts that you want to build our self. It also supports graphing your progress. So you can see the progress of how well your learning and how accurate your doing. they give you words per minute and characters per second which is fun just seeing how well you do compared to the past. If your teaching a class this is an easy one for people to use.

the next would be dvorak7min this is a linux only program. The home screen gives you 29 different tests that work you through learning the whole keyboard in what I think is a very effective way. You don't have to be using a dvorak keyboard to use this program but it may confuze you if you have the keyboard layout above the text which I would just hide anyways. though one thing I like about this one is it does not allow you to make mistakes you must press the letter before it goes on to the next letter. so for instance if the line said 'ahha' and you you typed ahaa it would stop at ahh till you typed the h. the program also keeps Words per second, words per minute, misses, seconds, and your % ratio of misses to characters. I personally prefer this program because it is simple just black and white, or what ever terminal color you have.

Another good typing for Dvorak learning is
http://www.powertyping.com/dvorak/typing.html
they have a nice simple site and will grade you on how fast you type and you can keep trying till you beat your self and move at your own pace.


The nicest online typing to learn I would have to say is
http://www.keyhero.com/typing-tests-wpm/
it is very graphically pleasing to look at and they give you paragraphs from literature to type out. Though this may not be the very best for those that are starting out but it is a great place if your teaching a class and your wanting to use something that is random and use it for a test taker. It graphs the users progress and does not require you to register to use it. Though you need to register if you want your progresses saved from one visit to the next. This also does not matter which keyboard layout you may be using whether it be dvorak, qwerty, or colemak your system will translate it all for the website.


I hope this helps people learn typing and know that you don't have to spend a lot to get good free resources.

Parents teach your kids colemak or dvorak!
Local Tech Repair

Firefox 6.0 Alpha

For those that don't know it looks like firefox 6.0 Alpha is being tested on in their nightly builds. right now i am using their 64bit version of the build and it is running very nice.
let me just use this as an opertunity to talk about open source and the importance of being a alpha and beta tester.

Testing open source programs is a very important thing to the open source community. it helps you and others get a better product. Anyone can help with testing products. Open source products need everyone from the security experts, coding gods, to those that know very little about computers. If the open source programs only got the security experts and coding gods then we may not get a very large user base or an easy to use program which kinda defeats a lot of programs out there. but on the other hand if we only have people that new very little of programming and security then we would have a very insecure program and still a very bad user interface.

so go out there and support your open source community and test their nightly builds.

you can find firefox's nightly builds here

http://nightly.mozilla.org/

WPA password testing - Pyrit

Today I am going to talk to you about what type of password you have for your wireless connection at home. Many of us know that WEP encryption for your wireless connection is all but compromised and does not work. You are able to find video after video showing you how to crack a WEP password in less than 5 mins. Even we here at Local Tech Repair have written an article on how WEP is cracked and how easy it is. If you have not checked that out check it out here.
If you are wanting to find out how secure your password for your Wireless connection truly is well then lets take a look in to the world of WPA PSK cracking

For those that don't know WPA is short for WiFi Protected Access. This Started to be implemented when research started coming out about how insecure WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) was and in 2003 was passed by WPA because WEP was to insecure. Though many routers still present WEP as the first choice for setting up your wireless network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wired_Equivalent_Privacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Access

So now that we have a little history lets start testing it. So far no Major hole has been found in the WPA encryption algorithm like WEP has. Though that does not mean that WPA does not have some holes that can not be exploited to help a hacker gain access to your network.  The problem with most routers is that they mostly all rely on PSK or Pre shared keys. This allows hackers to pre complie an hashes for your router to test them at a much faster rate later. A great techy explanation can be found here: http://pyrit.wordpress.com/the-twilight-of-wi-fi-protected-access/

So are you secure. lets check some basics first. If you are using a word for your password like a Hollywood actors name or your favorite football player then yes you are extremely vulnerable.
If you are using WEP well then yes we know someone can get on your network in 5 mins.
IF your password is a phone number then your password can be cracked in less than a day by a modern laptop(with GPU) of all things.  if you use a common ESSID for your network name. like "linksys"
for top 1000 list of already made rainbow tables for Essid names check here:
http://www.hak5.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=12708
so how does someone go about testing.

first thing we will need is a to capture a WPA handshake you can do this by using the WepCrack gui

once you done that you will need to install Pyrit.

you can test to make sure that pyrit is working by doing

pyrit benchmark
if you don't have CUDA or the ATI equivalent your pyrit will be very slow. you need a GPU (Dedicated graphics card) to be able to crack a WPA password fast. For instance my 2.6 Ghz dual core processor can brute force at 500 pmks  per second but with a cheap graphics card in the laptop it runs at 4000 PMKs per second. This is a cheap graphics card also the higher end ones on desktops do 60,000 PMKs per second.

but thats a different topic.  so basically to help save time it is easy to find password list online to help you with your problem to speed up the process. for instance a collection of password lists to add would be from this link
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4017231/-_Xploitz_-_Master_Password_Collection
this is a list of different common passwords from a respectable  and educated hacker/cracker.
also for a more random list if it is not a word check out
http://www.torrenteen.com/torrent/2111522/WPA-word-list

both of those can go in to your pyrit database to be compiled to help crack your essid.

so we first need to add your essid to the database
pyrit -e your_essid create_essid
then we need to upload your wordlist to the database
pyrit -i dict.gz import_passwords
then we need to crunch the numbers for the database (this will take a long time)
pyrit batch
then we can go through and test the handshake we found
pyrit -r your_essid.dump.gz attack_db
this will check your database if there the password is in the database. this should go fairly fast.

The advantage of using pyrit to do all this is that for the batch process your able to share the work load across as many different computers you want across the network as you want. this greatly reduces the batch processing time.

I hope this helps you start looking in to using strong passwords that are long. I would suggest passwords greater than 20 characters. remember you only really have to type the password in to your computer once and most computers remember the password. this greatly secures your wireless and less likely for your personal information to be stolen or cost you money.

thanks for reading.
Admin Local Tech Repair

legal: this is for educational purposes and we do not take any responsibility with what you do with your new found knowledge or any of your knowledge.

if you have a comment please post bellow

CUDA programs

Sense CUDA has been getting such a large response here on the blog I figured I add something else about it in the different programs out there that take advantage of the extra processing power.

so first of all here are a list of some programs:

Pyrit
multiforcer
GPU Rainbow Cracker
boinc
Elcomsoft

these are some of the programs out there that you can use your CUDA system to help process more. most of all these programs have something to do with number crunching which is why they use the GPU to process them. If you know of some programs that you use for the CUDA I love to hear them so post a comment.