OSINT

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.

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Shell codes, what are they and what do they do?

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.

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The high fidelity positioning, data density and such other intricacies characteristic of modern HDD can be the subject matter for a great many articles, but we are not going to explore the disk mechanics or process physics profoundly, let’s focus on the most interesting component for us — electronics, instead.

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