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By EH-Net Member Cutaway, GSEC-G, GSNA-G, GCUX-S, GAWN-C, and CISSP

Self-employed security professionals, or those who are involved with small businesses, will invariably find themselves conducting security assessments and penetration tests of Internet facing systems and services. These activities will happen through resources that are generally not as robust as those supplied to security professionals in medium and large organizations. The following is a list of a few items that a security team should take into consideration before performing security related activities under these conditions.

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By Daniel V. Hoffman, CISSP, CWNA, CEH

So, why write an article called "Cool and Illegal Wireless Hacks" that details how to perform hotspot hacks?  Some would say it is irresponsible and enables those with ill intent to hack unsuspecting victim's machines.  It really depends which way you look at it.  Would you rather be left in the dark on what types of attacks can occur, how they are performed and not know how to protect yourself against them?  Doing so would not make the threats go away; in part, you would simply be denying that they exist.  Surely, it is safer to be open and honest about the threats, understand how they can occur then become educated on and implement the appropriate countermeasures.  In large part, that is why my articles always detail not only how to perform the hacks, but really focus on how to protect against them.  The purpose is not to teach people how to hack, but rather to educate on how to prevent systems from being exploited.

Now, on with the hacks/cracks/techniques that you will hopefully find to be "cool," informative and which are most certainly illegal.

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By Brian Wilson, CCNA, CCSE, CCAI, MCP, Network+, Security+, JNCIA

Recently while traveling I noticed a hot spot and wanted to surf the internet. Once I connected to the AP I had seen that they wanted to charge me $8 per day to surf the internet. I thought that was just too much money for a quick internet connection, and my layover between flights was about 3 hours. I decided to see what I could access while connected to there AP.

Disclaimer: This paper and the topics covered in the paper are just for educational purposes and should not be tried on a network without the permission from the owner of the network you plan on testing. I hold no responsibility for any actions or damage that might accrue if you try anything explained in this paper. “Do not do this at home kids” hacking/cracking/pen testing might be harmful to your health.

By Craig J. Heffner 

When it comes to buffer overflows, 'Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit' by Aleph One is still the first resource many people are directed towards, and for good reason; it is thorough, well written, and chock-full of examples. However, the GNU C Compiler (gcc) has evolved since 1998, and as a result, many people are left wondering why they can't get the examples to work for them, or if they do get the code to work, why they had to make the changes that they did. Having these same problems myself, and being unable to find an updated version of Aleph One's document on the web, I set out to identify the source of these variations on my own.

I have taken the liberty of writing this paper to share my findings with others who are experiencing the same problems I did, but it is meant only to be a modern supplement to Aleph One's paper. You should read Smashing The Stack first, as it is assumed that you understand the concepts and code presented there, as well as some standard buffer overflow techniques.

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By Dan Honkanen, GCIH, Security+, MCP, DCSE 

This video is a companion to "Alternate Data Streams (ADS): Hiding In Plain Site" by myself and Brian Wilson. I am going to show you how Alternate Data Streams (ADS) work and show you a small example of how to make one. ADS is a feature in the NTFS file systems to make a compatibility with HFS, or the old Macintosh Hierarchical File System. ADS has been a function of NTFS since NT 4.0 and is still available in Windows XP (and yes even Windows Vista). ADS gives you the ability to inject/add file data into existing files without affecting their functionality, size, or display in utilities like Windows Explorer or even "dir" under command line.

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Why study programming? Ethical hackers should study programming and learn as much about the subject as possible in order to find vulnerabilities in programs and get them fixed before unethical hackers take advantage of them. It is very much a foot race: if the vulnerability exists, who will find it first? The purpose of this article is to give you the survival skills and the ability to find holes in software before the black hats do.

It should be said at the outset that programming is not something you learn in an article, a chapter or in one book, for that matter. There are professional and hobbyist programmers who spend years perfecting their skills. However, there are a few core concepts that can be picked up rather quickly. We will not try to turn you into a programmer. Instead, we hope that by the end of this article you won't be afraid to look at source code and that you've learned a few skills to "hack" up some code if you need to.

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Be the first to get a look at this prerelease excerpt from Wiley Publishing, Webster's New World Hacker Dictionary.

Breaking into a computer consists, first of all, of discovering vulnerabilities and then creating an exploit (a program or set of instructions to be followed by hand) that takes advantage of the vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities and their related exploit programs, if made public, are then used by many others, good and bad. For example, some users are system administrators using them to test their systems. Others are computer hackers just wanting to have fun. Then there are the crackers who scan systems to determine which computers have vulnerabilities and then carry out an attack, usually with a motive to get revenge or to make a profit off the attack. Crackers may even verify the success or failure of the attack - a form of personal delight.

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Your computer seems to be running slower than normal. The router shows that your computer is transmitting data out to the Internet without you knowing it. Friends are complaining about you sending them e-mails you never composed. Determined to see if you have a Trojan running on your computer, you take a look at your process list to see if there is anything out of the ordinary. Much to your dismay, you notice a program running that you have never seen before and didn’t explicitly start. You have been backdoored by malware.

There are many questions you should be asking in these situations. What does the program do? Does it use network resources? Can outside hackers now access my computer? Am I being used as a zombie for DDoS attacks? This chapter will focus on methods and tools you can use to determine what these programs do and how they do them, without having the source code. In the past, reverse engineering was something of a black art. Typically it involved some type of decompilation using a tool such as IDA or GDB to extract the assembly out of the binary, and the best you could hope for was to have that assembly converted into a low-level C code that you could use to understand what was going on. These tools have evolved, however, and you no longer need a PhD in Computer Science to be able to reverse engineer binaries. That being said, however, a brief primer will go miles in helping you understand when to use certain tools and when to use others.