tansqrx

I wouldn't recommend the USB route. Just like the days of ole in which serial cables still reigned, you will need a special cable or null modem to transfer data. If possible you should backup to CD or DVD. This way you will have a backup of your data just in case something goes wrong. In addition to this you should keep a monthly backup from this point forward.

Microsoft can come up with some of the weirdest and funniest (at least to me) articles. Just ran across this one today. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/555375 And my all time favorite https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/default.aspx

Now you know that this is considered hacking, right? Ohh well I hopefully will not stand in your way too much. When attacking a VNC machine you might consider some of the functions in Cain & Able. I don't know about the latest version but historically the password is kept in the Windows registry which is turn is not protected very well.

Preach it again akijikan.It is hard to imagine someone would thing that something as complex as an OS should not have to be upgraded. The simple fact is this; we are still in the infancy of software development. Compared to other inventions of mankind, computers and therefore the software that runs on them has had one of the most explosive growths in history. Most people were not even exposed to a computer until Windows 95. Wow that was only 10 years ago. There is still much to be learned about this beast called software. From as little as we do know, updates and security patches are going to be a way of life. From this point on, if a piece of software over 100 lines long does not get an update at least once a year, most likely you are a sitting duck to be hacked. Think of it this way. There is a software engineering term referred to as defect per line of code, usually per 1000 lines of code. A defect could be anything from a bad loop condition to a security hole. A very good software project will have maybe 1.5 defects/KSLOC. Lets say you even have really really good QA and it gets down to .5 defects/KSLOC. Now think of how many millions of lines of code Windows XP has in it (around 40M)40,000,000/1,000=40,000 SLOC40,000*.5=20,000 defectsThere could be as many as 20,000 defect in Windows XP. If even 10% (2,000) are exploitable then you will need a patch immediately. This is for an extremely well written piece of code. If you have ever written code you will much better appreciate this paradox. Code is a very hard thing to create and putting code out without patches is a thing of the past.P.S. akijikan, you sound quite educated in this area, any comments would be appreciated.P.P.S. This does not include bugs introduced with patches or other upgrades such as new functionality.

Never give in!!!

Not to get on your case that much but I hope you haven't been visiting any sites that you might be embarrassed for others to see. As it turns out, just by clearing the cache in IE (Tools>Internet Options>Clear History, Delete Cookies, and Delete Files) you are not actually getting rid of all of you history. Itâs kind of a dirty little secret by Microsoft. As I wrote this I cleared everything out and then downloaded a utility that will view the cache. Index (History) Reader for Internet Explorer ÂŽ 4, 5 or 6 [ /IndexReader/index.html ] was the first one that I found at http://download.cnet.com/windows/. I ran the program and there were still sites in the history. The program that I used is one of the quick viewers that anyone can get. I know for a fact that some of the advanced forensic tools that you have to pay big bucks for can ferret out unerased cache very easily and efficiently. Several files are involved in keeping the cache of Internet Explorer C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Cookies\index.dat C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\History\History.IE5\index.dat C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\History\History.IE5 \MSHistXXXXXXXXXXX\index.dat C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\index.dat C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\UserData\index.dat Any of the above files can hold site information and you will notice that if you open Windows Explorer and go to C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\History\ there will be no files but a special display with the timeframe of cached files. Furthermore even if you open a DOS windows and browse to this location you will not see any files. Apparently if a file is marked as system, archive, and hidden you will not be able to see it on the OS no matter what. I had to write my own VB.NET program to list the files and subdirectories. After locating the files the very hard way I tried to delete them only to find out that they were in use by IE, even when IE was not in use. All the index.dat files are in use from the time Windows start will the time Windows shuts down. The only way that I have found thus far to remove them is to get special third-party software that will delete them before Windows full starts. Another approach is to boot into safe mode and then delete them. When I asked earlier if this also worked on IE cache this is what I meant. References: http://www.acesoft.net/delete_index.dat_files.htm http://browsertools.net/IE-Privacy-Keeper/index-dat.html http://www.milincorporated.com/a_indexdat.html /IndexReader/index.html

Wonder if this work on the index.dat files used to store IE history. Its open by IE from bootup till shutdown. Quite hard to delete by conventional means.

This is nice to know since I have already installed the !@#$% patches. Any word on when the patch patch will be out?

It appears that there is a good possibility that the Yahoo! chat rooms will be back online sometime in the future but at what cost? Yahoo announced on Thursday [http://aunty-spam.com/] that only users 18 or older will have access to the chat rooms. In addition the “Teen” chat channel has been closed and the chats will now be patrolled for sexually explicit content regarding minors [http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3556196]. This comes after an agreement with both Kansas and New York’s Attorney General Offices to control the content in Yahoo! chat rooms [http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ the Yahoo! chats back will be a big step in getting Yahoo! back to normal. If you have not been in the rooms lately, they are quite simply DEAD. During the traditionally busiest times when at one time you could simply sign on and have unlimited conversations, now you are hard pressed to find a halfway decent conversation for hours. I don’t know how much Yahoo! depends on their chat rooms for revenue, but I am sure that the financial people have been screaming bloody murder the past few months. With the new no under 18 restriction, I have a feeling that Yahoo! is cutting off 80% of their users. Not to say that people will not just lie about their age, but this may create a huge bump in the road for Yahoo! From what I can see, teens are the primary users of Yahoo! for one simple reason, price. Most of the other sites charge money for their services which is an age deterrent in itself. Should Yahoo! just give up and close its doors now that the new restrictions are in place?In somewhat related news, Yahoo! and Microsoft unveiled plans to merge their user base [http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/]. Similar to Trilian, now Yahoo! Messenger and Microsoft MSN users will now be able to IM each other form their native applications.

Way back when I had Messenger 6.0 I came across a fairly unique add-on to Yahoo! Messenger that added the "join user in chat" function that was taken away in the migration from 5.0 to 6.0. The program simply consisted of a file that replaced a Yahoo! DLL and re-enabled the join user in chat function. Once I upgraded to 7.0 the program of course did not work and I started my search for a replacment. At long last I have found it and not only does it add the join user in chat, it also adds view webcam and much more that has been missing since the days of 5.0. The add-on is called Yahoo Messenger 7.0 Menu Update 3.5 and is discussed at WackyB [http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/]. The executible is mirrored at Jesters Jungle [http://www.tera-byte.com/] Thank you very much vb_packets for such a fine program and thank you even more for sharing it with the world. A secondary program that may be of use to some is Yahoo Multi Login for 7.0.0.437 [http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/], mirror at Jesters Jungle [http://www.tera-byte.com/]. This program, as the name implies, will allow you to run more than one instance of Yahoo! Messenger at a time. In other news it is rumored that Yahoo! Messenger 7.0 brings a new protocol with it. The default standard is YMSG12 but 7.0 is YMSG13. I have just been too lazy to confirm or invistigate this myself. When the latest Messenger come out one of my first thoughts was "I wonder if this has a new protocol?" 7.0 behaves so much like 6.0 that I did not give it a second thought. I came across a thread at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/& which showed that apparently there is a new YMSG13. Very minor changes are made to YMSG12 and apparently the change was brought about because of the new voice features. This will require more investigation indeed.

mitchellmckain, I am working on similar project myself. In my case I can not say that I am so innocent, in the way of cracking that is, although my plights are all for research using my own usernames before anyone complains. Well actually I donât care if anyone complains, I will still do it. On to the story⦠I am accessing the Yahoo! login pages and need various information back, such as if the login was successful or not. In the case of Yahoo!, the status of login is given in the HTTP status code at the very beginning of the received packet. I am using Visual Basic.NET 2003 as my programming language. I know that this does not go very well with C++ but I believe for your purposes you might want to look into the .NET suite. I m not using IE for any data transfer but a built-in data type called âHttpWebRequestâ. After the variable is typed a method called Create is issued with the host in it. Then GetResponse actually contacts the server and a response is brought back to the computer. A small sample is given below and is actual code from my project. 'The object used to define a http requestDim httpRequest As HttpWebRequestâThe object that is the responseDim httpResponse As HttpWebResponseâThe HttpWebResponse has to be converted into a streamâwith a certain encoding before it can be read as a stringDim responseStream As StreamDim responseEncoding As EncodingDim responseStreamReader As StreamReaderâThe string that will hold the htmlDim strReturnCode As StringTryâThis is were you put the server informationhttpRequest = CType(WebRequest.Create("https://www.google.de/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=BwkjVKfAD8uH8QfckIGgCQ&gws_rd=ssl;, HttpWebRequest)âGo get the responsehttpResponse = CType(httpRequest.GetResponse(), HttpWebResponse)âI grab the HTTP status herestrReturnCode = httpResponse.StatusCode.ToStringâMake the response into a stringresponseStream = httpResponse.GetResponseStream()responseEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8")responseStreamReader = New StreamReader(responseStream, responseEncoding)Catch ex As WebExceptionMessageBox.Show(ex.Status.ToString)End TryâThe stream is finally made into a stringDim strResponse As String = responseStreamReader.ReadToEnd This is a very specific example of what you might do. After you receive the string you will have to so some application specific processing on it to get your information out. In my case the HTTP status code is the most important thing so I donât have to dig into the html. If the page is fairly static then you shouldnât have that hard of a time parsing the information you are after. As for using IE for this task I am not sure if it is possible. There may be some Windows COM calls that you can place but I would recommend against it. Making a direct request will give you much more control over your code. I know that this is not exactly what you are looking for since you are a C++ guy but I hope it helps you a little.

Reaver, The program that I use to control Tor is TorCP and can be found at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/, I found it as a link off the Tor Wiki at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. I followed the instructions for adding Tor as a windows service, basically âtor -service startâ. I then added a control listener to the torrc file which is all explain in the instructions. As for some of the other questions, Yes Tor acts like a proxy server. The unique catch is that the proxy never takes the same path, rarely has the same exit point, and is very hard to trace. The Tor Wiki showes how to torify many applications. One gripe that I have noticed. When running mIRC, many of the exit points have already been banned. This shows that there are a limited number of exits and apparent many are heavily used. Besides that I have had little trouble. I am even looking into setting up my own server.

I have recently found an extremely wonderful piece of software and I want to share it with everyone. It is useful, open source, and of course free. The great collection of 1’s and 0’s is called Tor (tor.eff.org/). Tor is essentially a privacy application that you can use to surf the internet “anonymously”. Of course I have to but anonymous in quotes because with current technology there is no true anonymousness when entering the internet. Tor does bring this goal one step further. Tor is a research project funded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), another wonderful organization that you should check out. I will let the site explain the details but basically Tor is a network of computers running the Tor software. The network forms sort of a cloud where each Tor server only knows the recipient and who to sent the data to. With a chain of several Tor Servers it is possible to completely loose the IP of the original client and server. The links between each Tor server and the client is encrypted to prevent any eavesdropping.I installed Tor over a week ago and for the most part I am very pleased with it. The install was not completely straight forward but far from impossible. To surf using a web browser you have to also install Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org/) and configure some of the Privoxy config files. Tor runs as a console application so an annoying DOS window remains in the task bar. There is an additional piece of software that I use to run Tor as a windows service and report the status messages via a system tray icon.In most cases browsing was just as quick as without a proxy. Every now and then I will hit a circuit that times-out or is very slow. This is perhaps the biggest downfall but a livable one considering what you give up in privacy when not using a proxy such as this one. I have also connected mIRC and several other applications, all of which work well.I have great plans for Tor in the future. I have been writing an application that uses proxies to search the internet that has been giving me a hard time lately. If all goes well. Tor will solve my problems entirely. Just start the search and the proxy changes for me automatically every 10 minutes. Also in the future Tor may support BitTorrent which will make downloading a lot safer.Give Tor a try and if you don’t like it or don’t have a strong sense of privacy, chunk it. But I think you will be surprisingly pleased with what you find.

Is this a bug or "feature" in the eyes of Microsoft?

rantsh,I am impressed to say the least. You are taking this seriously and that makes me want to help you even more. I guess I will have to get off my lazy butt and get to work on putting together some material.The material presented at HackR is not the most challenging but does show the biggest part to hacking, it’s the mind set. Just because the system says something is not possible does not always mean it is so. Go ahead and proceed to the intermediate levels. If I remember correctly this will involve starting to reverse engineer pieces of software. You will perhaps learn more here than the entire beginner levels combined. Let me know when you get through this and get your books.I hope this is a good lesson for everyone reading this thread. Learning is an action that requires a person to actually do something. Rantsh has taken the first steps and I commend him for it. Perhaps I can get a few more people on board and we can have a very enlightening experience here. I know that this is not a college class in box site but as long as you are interested I will lay everything on the line. Once you get your cryptography books we will start discussing the first chapters and I will give further assignments, if of course that is ok with you.

rantsh, If you have a bachelors in Computer Engineering then you should have most of the basic knowledge need to become a very successful hacker. Of course I am from the US and take for granted many of the luxuries that we have here. I do come from the same background education wise and therefore might be able to help you out on your quest. First of all where did you move to and are you going to pursue a masterâs degree? I was fortunate enough to actually take two âhackingâclasses and a network security class right before I graduated with my Masters. These classes were invaluable to my knowledge but I can only assume that you will not have the same luck. Actually Last year was the first time that any of these classes were offered, so ethical hacking is just not starting to take hold here too. Take what you have already learned. If you have a computer engineering degree then you should have one programming in your âtoolboxâ of equipment. I also know that you most likely have taken a networking class of some sort. These two things have already put you ahead of the game. As for the books. If you are enrolled in a university, does your institution have any sort of book loan program? Where I went to school, if they did have the book they could transfer it from another university. Also do they have online access to periodicals and the such? This could be a great source of information. From my experience, I have not found any good and complete hacking information on the web, at least not a one stop shot at it. Another book that I highly recommend is âNetwork Security Assessmentâ by OâReilly. It was one of the main books in my Masters course and I found it to be one of the best hacking books out there. I guess the only thing that I can tell you to do is push, pull, bite, scrape, and anything short of kill to get a hold of these books. Of course I would never condone the infringement of copyrighted material, but I hear rumor that there are many e-books to be found on the P2P networks. Perhaps you might find some information that way. I will help in any way. I have all the said books and if you ask enough times I will do anything short of copy each chapter word for word and send them to you, but you have to be willing to learn. Perhaps other here will also like to learn from our conversation. Your homework assignment for the next time is this. Go to https://www.hackr.org/ register, and complete the first five (5) levels.

rantsh I feel your pain as well. This is my take on hackers and is probably not shared my most in this thread. When I have needed help in the past no one would come to my aid and quite frankly it pissed me off. When I asked for help all I got was “read it for yourself.” I think the biggest problem is that all of these “elite” hackers are all show and don’t have the first clue how a TCP packet works. As I have found out over the years, “read it for yourself” is the standard. In many cases you have to read entire books just to find a nugget of knowledge that you need. Hacking is not easy but I will try and help you the best that I can and not follow in the foot steps of my “mentors.”For everyone else. You should not be afraid to give out knowledge. If you know something that someone else does not and they ask for it, give it freely with a smile on your face. If rantsh is truly determined he will find the knowledge by another means and you have only done him a disservice by wasting his time by asking. If on the other hand rantsh just wants a quick fix and wants to learn to hack in 30 minutes or less he will not even read to the end of my message. If he turns out to be a script-kiddie then I feel that he will not cause much damage, at least not to any systems that are properly patched (see below.) After he fools around for about 3 days it will start to bore him because he will have to do some real work after that point to make it any further. Hacking is hard work and takes a lot of time. Without the determination hacking is not possible, and I will give rantsh the benefit of the doubt and help anyway I can.Hackers are good. They keep software writers, engineers, and companies in check. I do not agree with hacking to cause trouble (I believe the PC term now is cracker) but hacking does provide a valuable service in that hackers find the weaknesses in systems and networks. The developers in turn have to counter the new threat and provide a better piece of software. This can even be taken a step further. Although this is not always the case but many security holes usually indicate poor programming practices or techniques. If the programmer would have taken the extra time to dynamically allocate the C string buffer instead of statically allocating it, many problems would not occur.I have studied computer security long enough to know that there are many areas which encompass “hacking.” The area is getting so large now that it is being divided into specialized areas. 150 years ago you could study engineering. 50 years ago you had mechanical, electrical, civil, chemical. Today even electrical has hundreds of sub areas of study. This is becoming the same in hacking. I can see from your previous posts that you would like to study cryptography. I will have to say that this is most demanding and hardest part of hacking.I have had the privilege of taking a graduate level cryptography class and what else can I say but it was hard. As for the basic algorithms, they are very tedious and can take hours if you do them by hand. The communication paradigms are hard for me too because also of things have to happen for a secure connection. It was hard but I was very glad that I took the class.Rantsh, you need to do a few things here. Modern cryptography is nothing like decoding the puzzles in the newspaper. This is the simplest form of cryptography and would be broken by a computer faster than the time it takes to lift you finger off the Enter key. The first is to buy a book called “Applied Cryptography” (https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471117099/ref=pd_bxgy_img_2/002-9902175-7126420?v=glance&s=books) or you should be able to find it in any good library. The book that I used was “Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice” (https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0130914290/qid=1126026386/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-9902175-7126420?v=glance&s=books) which is also a very handy reference. Run through a DES example and work a sample problem completely from beginning to end. This in its self should take a few hours to work the example. Next move on to AES. AES is more difficult as it requires advanced math (finite fields) that even I don’t understand fully. Next is the hashing algorithms and then run through key exchanges and PGP. This in itself should keep you busy for months. If this is too much for you then don’t waste you time.While you are doing this you will have to learn a few more vital skills. All of this took me years in a college environment but are vital to learning how to hack. Learn a basic programming language. Your first one should be ANSI C, it is the mother of all and most commonly used in exploits. Also learn the basics of how a computer works creating a system from scratch to the TCP/IP protocol.This is about all I can do at this time. Let me know if you need help. The next step for you besides what I have mentioned before is to come up with a specific question.

Can you clarify just a tad? Is your computer running slow ever since you put Norton on the system or are you trying to speed up the system with Norton? Also are you just talking about Norton Anti-virus or perhaps Systemworks. This reason I ask is that as odd as it may sound I use Norton to speed up my computer but that is with Systemworks with utilities that include defrag and Windoctor. If this is not the case this yes Norton AV will slow down you computer esp if you have an older machine. The only time that I have noticed an unacceptible drop in performance is if I get below approx 700MHz. The only alternative is to use a different scaner. I do not have any expertise in this area and I am sure that one of the fine posters here will follow up with suggestions.

Thank you yordan this is exectly what I am saying. The requirement for evaluating a piece of software is RH8. The software can not work with any other OS (prob can but this is the world of software engineering and RH8 is baselined). From the many helpful posts I can tell that I am just SOL. I have already setup a RH8 install in VMWare so I suspose all is not lost. Just that VMWare is very slow.

Like I have said before (http://forums.xisto.com/topic/86050-topic/?findpost=1064318496) EFS (the encryption that Windows uses)=GARBAGE. The only thing that EFS does is passify the poor unsupecting user into thinking they are safe using such fore mentioned garbage.The problem lies in how the key can be recovered. Upon creation of an encryption certificate, the administrator of the computer is automatically given a recovery key. This basically means that if some poor sap looses their password to the encrypted data, they are not completely screwed. The administrator can come back and recover the data. The problem is that the administror password can be broken very easily.This is not to even say what if the user does not have a password when loging into Windows, such is the case in a default install. In this case you have done nothing but waste extra CPU cycles encrypting data that is completely open to the world anyway.If you have something that you don't want anyone to see use a third party software package that uses at least AES 256 bit encryption (and not winzip either!!!)

I'm not usually the one to show links to other sites but this one interested me in particular. Apparently Yahoo! is still adding security to their login process by adding code obfuscation and filter-evasion tactics. I'm sure Yahoo! is constantly under attack (looks guilty) and this is another way to stop such attacks (not really sure but why not). I reviewed the article and found it interesting. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

I am about to reach through the screen and stangle that scrawny little penguin!Here is my problem. I am at work and need a way to access files and printers on the Windows 2003 domain. I have to use Red Hat Linux 8.0, it is a requirement for the software that I am testing. I have read somewhere that I need at least version 3.0 of Samba but the only version for RH8 is 2.2.5. I have had a similar problem with Evolution. Is there any way of getting connected to my domain or should I just give up?

Go for it, I have had a dual boot for years now. It does not slow anything down since you are running an entirely different operating system.

Yea too bad I clear my pagefile at shutdown. It sometimes takes 5 mins to shutdown. I usually just turn it off and walk away.

I just reformatted my hard drive a few days ago and this is how I done it. When you get to the XP screen that shows your hard drive partitions and asks which one to install to, customise the partitions before you continue. Since this is a reinstall you will most likely already have a windows partiton. Hit "D" to delete the partiton. You should show an entire hard drive with nothing partitioned. Then hit "C" for create partition. A new screen appears asking how big the new partition should be. By default it is the full size of the hard drive. In my case I do not use Linux that often and I did not need a very large partiton. Out of my 160Gb HDD I created a partition of 100GB for my Windows XP portion, i.e. I just put 100000 in the blank. Agree to this. The partiton screen reappears and simply hit enter on your new partition (the 100GB one in my case). Continue with formatting in NTFS (shame on you if you even consider FAT) and continue the Windows XP install as normal.After Windows XP is installed, start the Linux install. Depending on disrto you will eventually be presented with a screen asking where you want Linux to be installed. Use the unallocated partition (the 60 odd GB in my case) as the Linux partition. Follow directions for your distro for any additional partition such as swap. Just break up the unallocated space even further.