PC CyberTekThe cyberspace visitor’s information center

Last night I saw a banner ad for a “new” version of Risk. I use to play Risk, the board game, many years ago and thought this looks like fun. So I downloaded and installed it. With in a couple of minutes, ESET NOD32 was blocking downloads from a site I wasn’t at. Next time I went to use google to search for something, my search results were being redirected. Looks like it installed some malware on my computer. Most likely it’s some sort of XSS cross scripting exploit.
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If you follow this blog, you know that I did an article on the first stable release of Namp http://www.pccybertek.com/2010/01/nmap-5-20-released yesterday. Now that it has been out for a week, Fydor has already released another update, Namp 5.21 which is also a stable
release and not a beta. It’s mainly just a bug fix release. So I have updated the download section here with a link to the 5.21 release, which is on the right column about 3/4 of the way down the page. My download link is directly to the file on the insecure.org website or you can go to the Nmap download page yourself.

But I don’t want to just tell you about the update, I’d like to offer you some more since you took the time to stop by here. So here is a link to Iron Geek’s Baisc Nmap Tutorial video. And if already know the basics and would like to move on to some more advanced lesson, here is Iron Geek’s Nmap Video Tutorial 2: Port Scan Boogaloo Happy port knocking.

Fydor has released Nmap 5.20. This is the first stable release, or non beta release, of Nmap since July 2009. And like usual, it has a lot of nice improvements and upgrades. If I could only have one security tool, Nmap would be it. It’s the first, and sometimes the only, program I run when I want to do any kind of security audit or if I want an inventory of  the LAN and which services are running .
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At one time I was going to make at least one free software recommendation a week. At some point I realized that in order to do this, sooner or later I would either run dry of suggestions, or make suggestions of products I really haven’t throughly tested. So I changed my mind and decided to only write about programs I have used for quite some time and really like. One of the first was Miro

Tonight’s pick is an all in one Instant Messenger, E-mail and Social Network client called Digsby. I’ve been running Digsby for around a year and it is really nice. I’ve set it up to connect to my AIM, MSM, Yahoo Chat, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and all my various e-mail addresses. It sits nicely in my system tray and when I click on it, it pops up a sidebar on the left side of my screen that lists all the services I have it monitoring. If I click on the MSM bar it expands so I can see who is online and if I click on anyone who is online, I’m chatting with them just like I was running MSM. Instead of having to load all those different chat programs, I just run Digsby. Of course there are other programs like this, I use to run Trillian but it felt kinda clunky me and I haven’t tried the newer version of Trillian which now also supports Twitter and E-mail. However, I see Trillian still offers a pro version which isn’t free so it doesn’t totally fall into my “Free Software” category. Digsby also has several options for notification. Mine is configured so it pops up a little alert window. This is real handy for Twitter. I see the complete tweet and have options to retweet or reply to it. If I click on the notification window it will take me to that tweets page and I will already be logged in to Twitter. The same goes for any notification window, by clicking on it. If it’s one of my webmail accounts, I will be logged in and taken to that e-mail, or if it’s a pop mail account, it will launch whatever application you have chosen for your e-mail, such as Outlook.
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t’s been about a year since one of the best pen testing tools has seen an upgrade to the framework. Metasploit Framework 3.3 is now available. Not only does it support Linux, Windows, OS X, and many versions of BSD, but now it also supports Windows 7. And according to the website this release has 446 exploits, 216 auxiliary modules, and hundreds of payloads, including an in-memory VNC service and the Meterpreter. However one of the new features that I’m pleased about is you can now run a full console version in Windows using Cygwin which is how I like to run nmap when I’m on my Windows computers, and RXVT. To be honest, I haven’t fired up any of my Linux machines in a while. I just boot from a Linux Live CD most the time but I digress.
The Windows installer works on all versions of Windows from 2000 to Windows 7 and the Linux installer works on most versions of Linux released in the last five years.
I’d like to point out, this is not a toy. This is the bad boy of penetration testing tools. I love using this because I know that if I can’t get into the system I’m testing with it, I can feel pretty confident that system is pretty secure. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m 100% secure because I’ve been doing this long enough to know there is no such thing. But if you can’t successfully attack one of your computers with this, then chances are neither can the script kiddies.

Yes, that’s right. The essential network scanner, nmap, has made it to version 5. If you are unfamiliar with nmap, it’s a must have tool for anyone who does anything with networks. It’s the greatest port scanner around. And you can get it for just about any OS. But nmap is much more than just a port scanner. It can be used for more than just seeing what ports are open. You can also use it for its OS detection, among other things, and you can even use it to find the conficker virus on remote computers. It’s available as a command line tool and for those who prefer a gui, it also comes with zenmap which is a graphical front end for it.

My thanks to Fydor and the nmap development team for constantly updating this awesome tool and never being satisfied with the status quo. Now let me quote insecure.org

July 16, 2009 — Insecure.Org is pleased to announce the immediate, free availability of the Nmap Security Scanner version 5.00 from http://nmap.org/. This is the first stable release since 4.76 (last September), and the first major release since the 4.50 release in 2007. Dozens of development releases led up to this.

Considering all the changes, we consider this the most important Nmap release since 1997, and we recommend that all current users upgrade.

You can find a list of the changes here and be sure to download it.

One post has brought this site more traffic than anything else ever before. My article on removing Fast Browser Search. That nasty little search re-director that gets installed when you install a Facebook plug in called Web Tattoo.

The story thus far. For some reason I decided to install web tattoo. I knew it was probably going to install something else. Rule #1 – Programs on the internet that claim to be free, especially add-ons for social sites, aren’t really free. I just figured I could uninstall whatever it slipped in. After I uninstalled Web Tattoo, from FireFox and using add and remove programs in the windows control panel, and it was still redirecting my traffic to Fast Browser Search, I’d just remove it with Spybot or Ad-Aware or Hi-Jack This and remove it from the registry. However, none of these detected it and I couldn’t find any sign of it in the registry. Then I did a search on the internet and couldn’t find anything about removing it either. So I did some thinking and figured out how to remove it. Seeing how there was such a lack of articles dealing with this pest, I figured it would be the perfect thing for my blog. So I wrote this article on how I removed it from FireFox .

Next thing I know there’s a spike in the traffic coming to my little unknown blog. I was happy to learn that referrers were search engine results for “fast browser remove” and other similar queries. All of them looking for a way to take out this blasted thing. For a short time, my blog was on the first page in google if you were searching for a way to remove it. This got me pretty jazzed. I’ve had this blog for a couple years but never had much traffic before. After a couple weeks, the traffic to that article I wrote started tapering off. I was no longer in the first page or two when people searched for it. Then all the sudden it spiked again. Turns out someone on a google forum had Fast Browser Search take over their browser. Next thing I know I’m getting a ton of hits again, this time all comming from this post. Now if the people this helped would just click on my google adds, I could earn a couple cents in this tough economy

There was only one problem. My article only covered how to remove it from FireFox. Turns out there are plenty of people with Internet Explorer who have been attacked by this scourge known as Fast Browser Search. So here is what I’m going to do. Initially I was going to install Windows XP on a virtual Machine. But this would take quite some time and work before I could deliberately infect myself with Fast Browser Search. So I decided to take a short cut. After I’m done writing this, I’m going to create a new user account in windows, head over to Facebook and install Web Tattoo while using Internet Explorer. Then I’m going to figure out how to remove it and write part 2 of this article. So check back in a day or so, hopefully it won’t take me longer than that to figure out. If you would like to show some appreciation, click on my google adds, or leave me a reply. I love getting replies and hearing from you.

I’m sure you have all seen this before. Your surfing along, when all of a sudden, you get a pop-up that alerts you that your computer is infected! YIKES! What to do!??! Ah, you can just download a “free” program that will fix it for you. I’d hope you already know, this is a scam. It’s one of two things. You can either download a legit program that will scan your computer, tell you how badly infected it is and you can purchase a full version of the program to remove all your “infections.” Just in case your not really infected, these programs will increase your infection count by adding your cookies to the list. Pretty good way to jack up the numbers, but I wouldn’t call cookies an infection. And I sure don’t have to buy any program to remove them. The other thing that could happen, and probably will is, you will download a program that will then install it’s own addware. Turns out they have a name for this stuff now, and that name is Scareware.

Turns out many people are still falling for this scam. I had to clean my parents computer up, from one of these. Try doing it over VNC, and you may have your patience tested like I did. Anyways, the old folks aren’t the only ones falling for this, and now their is a new variation. Spware Protect 2009, is the new breed of scareware. Not only does it con you by getting you to install it, it actually does damage to get you to “purchase” it for $49.99 and install a trojan downloader. Meanwhile it increases the pop ups telling you how infected your computer is. So you order the program with your credit card and guess what, you just gave them your credit card number, no hacking needed. A local electronics store, with the initials RS, got hit by it and from what I could get out of them, sounds like the whole corp has been infected through their network.

Since I first found out about this last week, I’ve found out that it’s now also being installed by the conficker virus. At first I was thinking, wouldn’t people be suspicious if there was a new piece of software, on their computer? I sure as hell would. Then I started thinking about it, in a corporate situation. Some poor schmuck, in accounting or where ever, could think it was installed by their IT Dept. So the keylogger installed would run until the computer crashed. The one good thing is, the domain that was selling Spyware Protect 2009 is gone. Keep an eye out for variations with new names and the same or slightly modified interface.

-Your friendly neighborhood PC Cybertek

With all the media hype about conficker, I thought you might like a good collection of trustworthy resources. Beware of websites that have recently registered as “conficker help.” In fact, just avoid them all together. There’s also reports of malicious software masquerading as detection and cleaning tools for Conficker-infected computers, as well as spam offering the same.

There’s no need to try and figure out what’s safe or real and what has more sinister plans in mind. The good folks at dshield.org have been keeping an updated list of third party information on conficker. Here you can find plenty of free conficker detection and removal tools, general information and the microsoft patch. That should help keep you updated, safe and informed.

I’ve also found out about one other real neat way of detecting it, but it’s for more advanced users, so I’m going to make a seperate post about it.

It was 20 years ago Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Not quite 20 years to the day, but close enough. In this Ted talk, Tim talks about what is the next step in the evolution of the World Wide Web.