In my last post, I outlined the potential dangers of using Twitter to give out excessive amounts of information.  Here, I'll talk about using Twitter against anyone you may have around more than you want.  If you have a stalker, the first thing you should do is contact the police.  They can help you stay safe and they'll do their best to apprehend the person causing you trouble. If an ex-boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife is giving you problems, you should get a restraining order immediately.  This will give police a rock solid case against them and give you more power to keep them away.  If these don't work, it may be time to take a little offensive action.

If you think the stalker or ex-lover is also tracking you online, there's a good chance he's got your Twitter page.  They know that you post your activities and plans on there and they plan on using this against you.  You can inform the police of the continued problem and let them know your plan to use Twitter to bring the suspect in easily.  You may have to do some explaining, I'm not bashing police officers but I'm sure more than a few are too busy to know what Twitter is.  It would be a trivial thing to setup a sting operation where the police are waiting on the person while you go do something, expecting him to find you.  All you'd have to do is post to Twitter about a public place you were going to be where they might find you.  You'll have to find a suitable situation to bait them into, depending on the aggressiveness of your enemy and the police could help you with that.  Then all you have to do is bait and wait.

Make SURE you have the police as backup before you attempt any of this and make SURE you don't try to take matters into your own hands.  If you do, you could bring down the law on yourself instead of your target.  I encourage police to look to this method more, especially in large tech-oriented cities where more of the population might use Twitter or other social networking outlets.

On a totally unrelated note, here's my Twitter :)  Don't get any big ideas, all you'll learn from me there is what kind of beers I've been drinking.

If you're one with the web2.0 trend, you've surely heard of Twitter.  Its the first generation of what's being called 'microblogging' and its used by thousands upon thousands of people to let people know what they're doing at any given point in time.  It's great for groups of close friends who like to hang out, it provides a perfect place to keep up-to-the-minute details of what might be going on.  Used properly, Twitter is a great platform.  However, if you're one of the people that use Twitter to update your every move at every moment of the day and someone targets you personally, you could be in a world of danger.

Don't panic, I have yet to hear of anyone using Twitter as a platform for malicious behavior, but its bound to happen sooner or later.  The candid release of information such as whereabouts and activities one is participating in can give your enemies like stalkers, ex-lovers or ex-employees out for revenge, or even child molesters (parents, supervise your children on the internet) far too much information about you and could put you in serious danger.  Here are a few simple rules to follow to avoid these things.

• Don't be too specific about where you're going, you can say where but try not to give times.
• If you want to get together with friends, send them a message requesting a more personal method of communication such as a phone call to work out details.
• Don't make a habit of posting every 5 minutes about what you're doing.  This could give your enemies clues to your daily routine which they could use against you, your family, or your property.
• Don't give details about where you work if at all possible, again it could give people an idea about your schedule and it lets them know where you are on a regular basis.

Of course, there are situations where one might want to give this information, such as if you're in entertainment and promoting show times.  This isn't as dangerous because you know there will be a crowd around in those environments and those events are usually on a more random schedule than work.

Whether you're using Twitter or Myspace or Facebook, you should keep in mind that the information you make available about yourself could be used against you.  Be careful about what you tell a mass audience, especially if you think you may already be a target.

Ever opened up task manager (windows) or top (*nix) and saw a process running that you were curious (or suspicious) about?  Me too, There are ways of finding out what it is, and it never hurts to look it up.  It could be a trojan, virus, or any other form of malware. 

The first option is simple enough, Google.  Just google the name of the executable and you'll usually find out some decent information in the first record.  Try that first. 

Second, there is Exelib.  This is a search engine exclusively for executable files.  It gives a detailed description of what the file is, but doesn't necessarily elaborate on what may be bad about it.  For instance, the svchost.exe page tells you that svchost.exe is a normal Windows executable file that it probably doing something important, but it does have a threat level of 3 out of 10.  What it doesn't tell you is what that threat might conceivably be.  I'll tell you, if svchost.exe is running as a normal user account, you've got a trojan on your hands. 

ProcessLibrary is a site similar to Exelib but its a little older.  While it may be a little older, it's also more outdated.  It doesn't list any threat whatsoever from svchost.exe.  I know from personal experience that svchost.exe is a commonly trojaned executable for Windows operating systems.

While nothing's perfect, the first place I would look for information on strange processes is Google.  Then hit up Exelib.  ProcessLibrary should be used as a last resort, its not only outdated but its inundated with ads for crap you don't want.

Another aspect to this concept is unknown file extensions.  This is very common and I run into it very often.  This website is a comprehensive resource for finding out what that weird file extension is and therefore, what you can do with it.  Superbly valuable resource.

PC Tools, vendor of the popular ThreatFire antivirus software, has released some interesting information about what ThreatFire has found on Vista machines.  It turns out that about 3/4 of the Vista machines running ThreatFire were infected with adware or trojans.  No matter what Microsoft wants you to believe, Vista is susceptible to the same malicious software that XP is.  Even though you're running the latest, "greatest" product from Microsoft that has all those new security features, run antivirus and antimalware programs regularly.

darkc0de has written this python script that will attempt to gain information from a URL known to be vulnerable to SQL injections by feeding it a list of common table and column names.  This script does require that you know the vulnerable URL along with the query strings.  Proper syntax is listed in the opening comments.  This should be a great tool to see if your code is properly sanitizing URLs.

A serious bug in the Debian implementation of OpenSSL was found last week that allows an attacker to guess the key.  The vulnerability lies in the random number generator used by this version of OpenSSL and effects any keys created by OpenSSL, including those for SSH.  Updates are available for this flaw and any keys generated between September 2006 and May 13, 2008 should be recreated.  You can recreate these keys with ssh-keygen.  Remember that any clients that have connected to that server will need to delete the key they already have for that server and fetch the new one.  You can read more about this vulnerability on ComputerWorld's website.

When learning about networking and security, you'll see alot of references to RFCs which are documents that basically describe the operation and features of protocols, ports, standards and practices.  They can be rather cryptically written but with the right guide, you can easily find the information you need.  The RFC Sourcebook is this guide.  With it, you can quickly find out about any RFC or standard relating to TCP/IP, data encapsulation, PPP, etc.  It also contains nice reference guides to the stuff you never use but may need in an extreme situation of diagnosing a network problem, like ICMP codes.  Detailed information can be found regarding anything you can think of related to networking, encryption, authors of RFCs, organizations related to the computing world (like IANA, EFF, ICANN, etc), protocols, etc.

So if you've ever been in need of a quick reference for RFCs, I'd give RFC Sourcebook a serious look.

As you may have noticed, I've had that widget promoting free security magazines and whitepapers through Tradepub.  This is a great site that you can go to and get free subscriptions to all sorts of magazines like Network World, Security Magazine, and Dr. Dobb's Journal, among many more,  There is also a plethora of free whitepapers, webcasts, newsletters, case studies, etc all for free.  This is how I get all my trade publications.  Not only can you get all the IT related material you want, there are lots of other categories with free subscriptions to trade publications for those areas as well.  Oh, and recently Electronic Gaming Monthly started offering free subscriptions there.

One of my favorite magazines is absolutely free all the time, its called INSECURE magazine.  This is one of the better security publications I've ever read.  It is packed full of great information regarding practices, software, information security management, and lots of other security and network related articles.  It is only released bi-monthly so there's a while to wait between issues but there are 16 issues to keep you occupied till the next one comes out.

There is alot of great info to be found in both these resources and you should use them to your advantage.  The more you read and the more you learn, the better equipped you are.

There have been tools available for many years that allowed you to hide information in everything from text files, images, and audio files, a practice known as steganography.  Before finding MSU StegoVideo, I had never heard of a video steganography solution.

With the increasing volume of video on the net, and the already existing abundance of images and audio, one has to wonder just how much of it is implanted with hidden information.

One of the most important things you can do while studying to be an ethical hacker or security professional of any kind is practice offensive security.  As we all know, we can't do anything illegal but we can still have wargames.  The trick is to find some like-minded people to get together and set up a sandbox network with servers, network connectivity devices, workstations, whatever else you can think of and then the attack machines of the people participating.

Then you can start having wargames.  You should set things up in such a way that people rotate between offensive and defensive roles between each session.  While some people are attacking, some should be trying to defend but you always want to rotate so everyone gets a taste of both sides.  You should then find some good tutorials on the subject and read up on the methodologies and techniques you need to use.  Then have at it.

There are some really good posts 1 2 3 4 on the Anti-online forums.  There is a plethora of good information there and can get you started with your own Wargame sessions.  If you get something like this going, leave a comment and tell us about it!