is there any credit card transcations involved? you need to use a third party method of verification certifcate/credit card/phone number that is unique, hard for the average user to fool around.

awarness, one of the most important vectors of the client side attacks is social engineering, training users, and admins and briefing them on these kind of attacks is one counter measure also

Rok,
it depends as RR already said, first of all the cookie has to be the means used for that web applications to store the user name, password at least, second you have to have access to the cookie, that is the cookies file, or the cookie in memory, third that password needs to be either in a clear text,or in a formt that is easy to decrypt.

W.

servercrasher365,
crashing a server is not a nice thing to do, DOS can be very simple by trying to run out of system resources memory, cpu, network bandwidth, number of open files, number of connections a sever can handle, illegal instructions to  the BIOS/FIRMWARE of the different I/O devices. it is not advised and there are no skillz about it. why would not you utilize your resources in developing a safe plugin for nessus or enhacing one of the current pen. test tools?!

maumercado,
you are right, the only way is to be on one of the two sides of the communications and using a keylogger for example. or using mitm attack, you can use tcpkill or something similar to disconnect the current going session, and when it is established through you  you will be able to see the whole traffice, that is if the client does not authenticate him/her self to the server

W.

RR
'responsibly'=stumble upon security bug(s) and report them, it does say so in the article.

W.

you mean  you still did not have the password, however you were able to convert it and make it unsecure? that would be a bug wouldn't it?

Dean,
is that an XSS test in your signature?

vijay2,

so you would like to use an exploit without being able to dissect it? most Linux boxes will have python/perl by default, most webserver will have php/asp by default. in windows you will have the cmd.exe , wmic, among other new shells, and sometimes you will be lucky and get a cygwin

the development environment does not have to be complex, scripting is about simplicity.

I never made the assumotion that you will need the compiler on the victim machine, however if it is there he/she is only to be blamed to make your job easier, same applies if he/she provides a tftp client, or vnc. even worst netcat or some sort of netcat functionality

any security topic is not limited to one thing and no one person can master all skills.  so ethical hacking is a wide domain where several skills can be usefull, the more you have them in your utility belt or hacktool box, the more resourceful you are, however this is only valid if the skills of how to use them goes along with the tools availability including coding

have a nice day

ismith,
Invest in hardware that meets your requirements

g00d_4sh ,

firewalls do prevent from most of the threats, however they are not the key factor in preventing this. enterprise/personal firewall would still most likely allow port 80 trafic to pass. most likely you have asked the personal firewal to always trust your favourite browser. so if the bot agent/trojan/malware can inject itself onto the browser code, or even spoof itself as it is the firewall is uselss

Dean,

Interesting URLs, need to investigate this more when i have more time, and collect some storm speciemens from the wild net 

maumercado ,

one factor you need to research regarding the universities is how up2date is their program? the university of Holloway program was excellent 3-5 years ago, however i have not followed it up, and i know it was mostly generic as in any masters program, the burden is mostly in the graduate students. the freshness (out of date) factor is also important in certifications, I have found one of the SANS certification a bit out of date, however the instructors were active security consultants and he gave us more insight on what is happening today, and possible future trends.

good Luck with your roadmap

W.

http://www.learnsecurityonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=293&Itemid=1

that was an easy interesting challange, the writeups are also very interesting. thanks to Chris and Dean from LSO for providing such challanges, and following them up with nice writeups and summaries.

if you have not tried the first two, you still have a chance to catch the new ones soon hopefully

Vijay2,
Thankyou once again for the informative feedback. will have to allocate a budget and time for that course sometime in the future before the information becomes outdated 

_Marshel_ ,

the point was that systems, or operating systems especially on the server have far better security than before as a default setting (AV, IDS, antispam, antispyware, personal firewalls, etc).

however client software can open big doors, and through this networks, and trusted servers can be exploited.

the client software that was exploited in Windows vista, and on the MAC can be argued to have similar flaws in Linux, however in Linux you have other layers of defense (local home dir, user account priviliges, apparmor or selinux security domains).

so may be Linux Rocks, however if we are not careful enough we and the day to day client applications we use are the weakest link