Date: 02/12/2014
Only lazybones know nothing about Cydia today. Such words as jailbreak, tweak and unofficial app store have long ago come into general use of every more or less competent user of an i-device. On the other hand, it would be a blasphemy not to tell about Cydia, so we decided to take a different way collecting entire info about novelties, utilities and other interesting things found in the expanses of this app store.
Date: 25/11/2014
OpenStack is a very fashionable word in today’s IT media space. Virtually everyone heard about it, but not so many have seen it in action. Moreover, only a few dared to taste it in a “serious way”. In our company, we took this risk and, today, I’ll tell you what happened to us and why the fashion often runs ahead of prudence and stability.
Date: 19/11/2014
If I started the article with describing all the advantages of cloud storage of data, you would think that I had been just thawed after twenty years of anabiosis, or that I use overdoses of hypnotics :). Therefore, I will put it briefly, in a programmer-like fashion: when I was faced with the task of making a program that could operate without being bound to the API of a particular service, enabling work with files located in a number of storage spaces (its purpose was backup), it turned out that it was not that simple. I decided to tell you about all the intricacies and pitfalls of that work in this article.
Date: 11/11/2014
Often, you find yourself in a situation when it is not convenient to use your smartphone or get it out of pocket, such as when it rains, while driving a car, at a meeting… Or you may simple feel a bit lazy to get up from a warm couch to see what has arrived to your phone. In this article, I’ll show you how to configure the notifications, customize and use the full power of Pebble, one of the most popular smart watches.
Date: 27/10/2014
As you can remember ( and as a must to remember for each good administrator) it is not a good idea to work as a root user on Linux. In a perfect world you should use it only to configure a server, to install or to update software, by and large, only for purely administrative purposes. The problem is that we live in the real world that is, actually, quite far away from a perfect one. So, the situation is quite common and, generally, because of negligence, wherefore, the Linux users had no choice but to figure out how does their software works. However, if you know how does the system work and understand its safety mechanisms then you will never work as a root user. Anyway, today we are going to review the ways of raising authorities up from the unprivileged user to a root one, unlike the situation with Windows where we were considering the ways of running with administrative privileges. So, let’s start.
Date: 22/10/2014
Android devices are good by any definition, but sometimes they extremely lack features and utilities available in desktop Linux. Separate instruments, such as Terminal IDE, partly help, but anyway they do not have some of the desired functionality. How can we remedy the situation?
Date: 14/10/2014
Let’s start with the configuration of the Indian who gained recognition on many servers on the web. The first setting we select is the one that prevents an attacker from recognizing the version of Apache. To do this, you can use two directives that have to be set to the following values:
ServerSignature Off ServerTokens Prod
The second step is to make sure that Apache runs under its own separate user and group. If the same user also manages something else, e.g. DBMS, an attacker who manages to compromise the web server can have access to the database as well.
Date: 06/10/2014
One of the few interesting exploits that I could find includes the ability to download the source code of ASPX pages whose address is known in advance and accessible from outside. This vulnerability exists only in SharePoint 2007, and the exploit is quite simple:
http://www.example.com/_layouts/download.aspx?SourceUrl=/Pages/Default.aspx&Source=http://www.example.com/Pages/Default.aspx&FldUrl=
This could be useful, if the website has proprietary code. But you still need to know the address of specific page.
Date: 29/09/2014
Now, when everyone is obsessed with encryption, cryptocontainers and other methods of fighting with “software attacks” such seemingly obsolete things like intrusion bugs are regarded as artifacts from James Bond movies rather than a real threat. As a consequence, a network that is physically isolated from the Internet is considered to be almost invulnerable to hackers. Even if the length of the network is many kilometers, and there are no security people to protect many of its components, which are literally accessible to anyone, sometimes just open to anyone, the network is still considered to be absolutely secure. Actually, it is not, as experience has shown.
Date: 22/09/2014
It all started two years ago, when many antivirus companies tried to outdo each other with reports on catching a new malware with full-fledged functionality aimed at taking away cash from users of different online banking systems while fitting just in 19968 bytes of code.
Date: 15/09/2014
Despite the fact that Russia (surprise!) is not among the leaders in computer infectioning by this method (three leaders are traditionally USA, Germany and the UK), we suppose it will be still useful to find out what makes many users in different corners of the world click on attachments in messages from unknown senders. Off we go!
Date: 09/09/2014
Let us try to consider an implementation of any cryptographic algorithm from top downwards. At the first stage a cryptographic algorithm is written in the form of mathematic operators. Here the algorithm is in the environment where only mathematical laws are valid; therefore, researchers verify only the mathematical resistance of the algorithm, or its cryptoresistance. We have a low interest in this step because mathematical operations should be converted into a code. At the code operation stage the critical information about the cipher operation can ooze through holes in the implementation. Buffer overflow, incorrect memory operations, non-documented capabilities and other features of the program environment enable an intruder to find a secret encryption key without using complicated mathematical manipulations. Many researchers stop at this step forgetting that there is at least one more step. Data reflect the real physical state of logical elements rather than an abstract notion whereas computations are physical processes which convert logical elements from one state to another. Consequently, the program execution is a conversion of physical signals, and from this point of view the result of operation of an algorithm is determined by physical laws. Hence the implementation of a cryptographic algorithm can be considered in the mathematical, program and physical environments.
Date: 02/09/2014
An identification, user detection or, simply, web-tracking, all that means a computation and an installation of a special identificator for each browser visiting a certain site. By and large, initially, it was not designed as a ‘ global evil’ and, as everything else has another ‘ side of a coin’, in other words it was made up to provide a benefit, for example, to allow website owners to distinguish real users from bots, or to give them a possibility to save user’s preferences and use them during the further visits. However, at the same time this option catch promo’s fancy. As you know, cookies are the most popular way to detect users. And they have been being used in advertising since 90s.
Date: 26/08/2014
Most expert reviews mean physical access to the device, and the expert has two tasks to achieve: retrieve as much information and data as possible and leave as little evidence of such retrieval (artifacts) as possible. The second task is especially important when the results of such forensics are to be presented in court: too many artifacts may impede a follow-up expertize, which is, in turn, may compromise the results of the initial one. In many cases it is impossible to avoid such artifacts; one of attempts to solve this problem is a detailed record of each artifact created on various stages of the investigation.
Date: 19/08/2014
OSINT (Open source intelligence) is a discipline of American Intelligence Service responsible for search, collection, and choice of information from publicly available sources. Social networks are among the largest public information suppliers, because almost all of us have an account (sometimes more than one) in one or more social networks. Here we share the news, private photos, preferences (e.g., when you “like” something or start following some community), friend lists. And we do it of our own free will without thinking of possible consequences. In several articles, we already analyzed the ways of getting the interesting data out from the social networks. Usually it had to be done manually, but for better results, it’s more reasonable to use specific utilities. There are several open source utilities enabling to get user information out of the social networks.
Date: 12/08/2014
The phone infection process has nothing unusual compared to the scheme that is already known for Android-based devices. A malicious APK file gets into the phone under the guise of the game called ‘Sex Xonix’, which supposedly gives you an opportunity to look at some naked women. Obviously, there is no way of stumbling upon such ‘treasure’ on Android Market. So it dwells on all sorts of second-class websites with questionable content, which attracts those who ‘like it hot’.
Date: 05/08/2014
Today we are going to talk about one of the types of malicious instructions exploiting remote software vulnerabilities, particularly memory vulnerabilities. Historically, such sets of instructions are called shell codes. Previously such attacks used to grant access to shell, and somehow it became the custom. Typical memory vulnerabilities exploited by shell codes are, first of all, buffer overrun, stock variables and other structures overrun.
Date: 28/07/2014
A small optimized kit of ARM chip commands is perfect for mobile devices. Thanks to lower power consumption, it is very popular today for being used in smartphones and tablets. However, recently there has been a lot of talk about the ARM chips being introduced into the area entirely occupied by Intel — the servers.
Date: 16/07/2014
One of the best-known and most aggressive members of this family is, undoubtedly, Adware.Webalta.2 (according to Dr.Web’s classification). This piece of work is intended for viral advertising of webalta.ru, a Russian search engine, (we are happy to learn that, by now, this resource has fallen into decay and refuses to find whatsoever :))
Date: 07/07/2014
Nowadays, top Android devices have the same capacity as the five-seven year-old laptops, which were quite suitable for code writing. But due to some peculiarities of modern gadgets, it’s rather hard to do this sacred work on them. However, hard doesn’t mean impossible.