Robbed in London : New email scam

Recently I came across a new email scam strategy. It's like you will get a mail from your friend's email address that your friend went to some place (London preferably) for vacation and got mugged in the hotel. She lost everything except the passport. Now she needs money to pay the hotel bills and come back to her place. So she requests you to loan her some money (mostly around $1000) which she promises to pay back once she will be back. Also the money has to be transferred through Western Union Money Trasnfer. Following is the exact content:

"From:YOUR FRIEND

Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 11:15 PM
Subject: Sad News!!!

I'm writing this with tears in my eyes,my fam and I came down here to London,England for a short vacation unfortunately we were mugged at the park of the hotel where we stayed,all cash,credit card and cell were stolen off
us but luckily for us we still have our passports with us.

We've been to the embassy and the Police here but they're not helping issues at all and our flight leaves in less than 3hrs from now but we're having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won't let us leave until we settle the bills.

Am freaked out at the moment.."

Seems like they first hack the email account, change the password so that the victim won't be able to access her account. Then send mails to the people in the contact list. Though it's new to me but seems similar stuff already happened through Facebook. Details of the earlier incidents were reported here. Also here is a funny discussion of the hacker and a person to whom the hacker was seeking help after compromising a facebook account.

But this time in case of my friend it was not facebook but msn. So seems like they are now spreading their access over the accounts. Now once your are victimized what should you do???

Well, following are few things you could do to prevent your friends from falling prey of the trap:

1. Firstly make sure you have a strong password for your account containing upper case and lowercase letters, digits and at least one special symbol like #, $, & etc.

2. Better to change your password every 3 months or so.

These reduces the probabilities of being hacked. But still there is a chance and if that happens and your friends start getting scam mails from your account, do the following:

1. Try to login to the compromised account. If you are lucky enough to get into the account change the password immediately. You can also try "Forgot Password" option if that is working.

2. If you could login to the account, mail all your contact stating that your this account was hacked and do not reply to any mail from this account.

3. Also if you have any other accounts (facebook, orkut, linkedin etc), please update your status with the same information so that others will be informed about the same.

4. If you have any other email account, log in to that and inform everybody in you contact. (Luckily you might have the same set of contacts that the compromised account has.)

5. If you are using the same password in your other accounts change it immediately.

6. Also you can try reporting the incident to your email service provide and request them to block or reset the account and give it back to you. This process varies for different email service providers. For gmail try this, for hotmail/msn try this, for yahoo this could be helpful.

7. If you want to go further, you can contact the corresponding law and enforcement agency who deals with cyber crime for further investigation.

8. Incase of investigation, email headers of the scam mails could be useful as that could gives the ip addresses of the hacker which could lead to her location. So better ask your friends who got the mails to keep the mails/capture the email header and store for further investigation.

9. Also using ReadNotify you can trace the hacker and give that information to the law and enforcement agency.

10. Last but not the least, it could be possible that the hacker was using some sort of trojan or keylogger in your computer to get the account information. So scan your computer by antivirus/antitrojan software to ensure that your machine is clean.

Also keep yourself always updated with the knowledge of various scams and let others know.

Nmap using TOR

Got a good video about how to do a scanning using nmap and TOR. It increases the anonymity factor.

For further reference, refer here. Also this could be useful.

Send gmail from command prompt

Recently I was just playing with telnet, ssl etc. Reason being, learning how to check http web server on port 80 using telnet. It is a faster approach than opening a browser and type url and wait from the page to load, blah blah.... Specially when your intention is just to verify and not bothered about the content much and you are doing it frequently and multiple times.

telnet www.your_website.com 80
(Enter)
GET /index.php HTTP/1.1
host: www.your_website.com
(Enter)
(Enter)

And you should be able to see the content there in the command prompt. Then this thing came to my mind, can I also send mail or receive mail from the command prompt. Well yah, very much.... So here is how did I send mail from my gmail account:

Steps:

1. You need to get into the SMTP server via telnet if it is not encrypted, or via SSL/TLS (encrypted), gmail uses encrypted communication.

2. You need to authenticate yourself using your gmail username and password.

3. Specify the sender's and receiver's address.

4. Type in the subject and content.

5. Send it.

Generally for an unencrypted custom SMTP server, it is quite simpler and explained here.

But this uses SSL/TLS. So here is it:

1. Login to gmail smtp server

openssl s_client -crlf -connect smtp.gmail.com:465

It will reply a lot of test and at the end of it you should seee

220 mx.google.com ESMTP 14sm2559253gxk.11

220 code means OK.

2. Authenticate yourself:

You need to encrypt your username and password first:

perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print encode_base64("\000My_EMAIL\@DOMAIN.com\000MY_PASSWORD")'

Once you give your username and password there properly, you should get an encrypted test in response. Copy that. Go back to your SMTP server prompt and type the following:

AUTH PLAIN your_encrypted_password_from_previous_step

235 2.7.0 Accepted

3. Specify the sender's and receiver's address.

mail from:

250 2.1.0 OK 14sm2559253gxk.11

rcpt to:

250 2.1.5 OK 14sm2559253gxk.11

4. Type in the subject and content: It starts with the "data" keyword.

data

354 Go ahead 14sm2559253gxk.11

subject: test

(enter)

(enter)

hello, This is my content

5. Send it: Once you are done writing the content, type "." (dot) and it enter twice to send it accross.

.

(enter)

(enter)

250 2.0.0 OK 1267453152 14sm2559253gxk.11

The last "." in the command signifies the end of the mail and sends it across. And!!! Trinnnn, youv'e got a mail....

Nullcon Capture The Flag 2010 hacking competition : How did I crack it

Recently I had been to Nullcon, Goa, 2010 - Internation Hacking and Security Conference.Well a lot to say. It was a great experience. My first hacking experience, unforgettable. Here is the details:

Goal : There was a server, we had to shut it down.

Hint: "Its there in the air"

Step 1: I found the wireless network they have configured for the challenge. Definitely the server is inside that network. It was WEP encrypted network. I used aircrack-ng in Backtrack 4. Steps are explained here. Better explanation could be helpful. Still confused!!! then watch this:

Step 2: Once I got the key and connected the network, I started looking for the server. Now here they had configured two network one with 192 series ip that I was connected to and another one with 172 series ip where the server is. Also they have configured the firewall in the router so that no packets could reach to 172 network. So first firwall had to be disabled. But root priviledge was required to do so. So task is, gain root access to the router 192.68.1.1.

fingerprinting using nmap (nmap -O ip) gave the firmware details of the router: it was dd-wrt firmware. Searched for the existing vulnerabilities or exploits for that and foung cgi-bin vulnerability. It could be exploited by command-line approach or using metasploit. I found metasploit easier and faster as well. Once done successfully, I got the root shell in the router.

Step 3: Now disable the firewall.

They had set up iptable rules to drop the packet. So here are the commands:

iptables -L -nv

It showed the configured rule to drop all the packets mentioned earlier.

Now,

iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT

iptables -F FORWARD

It allowed the connections through. If you want to allow only traffic from your machine then,

iptables -I FORWARD -p all -d -j ACCEPT

Once this is done. I was able to reach the server which was 172.16.1.2 (I guess).

Step 4: Now I could ping the server. Now I had to get into the server. So did a port scanning on that machine

nmap -sS -PT 172.16.1.2 (requires root privilege)

Found port 445 was open. It was SMB over TCP. Already an exploit was available in metasploit. So just ran that and BINGO... I got the command promt of the server.

Step 5: Shoutdown the server. Since I was already inside the server. Only thing required was to run the following:

SHUTDOWN -s -t 01

And I was done...

Spoof Mac in Mac

A MAC address is a unique identifier assigned to your network card, and some networks implement MAC address filtering as a method of security. Spoofing a MAC address can be desired for multiple reasons, and it is very easy to spoof your MAC address in both Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. For the purpose of this article, we are going to assume you want to spoof your Mac’s wireless MAC address. So without further ado, here’s a 3 step process on how to do it:

Retrieving your current MAC address

First, you’re going to want your current wireless MAC address so you can set it back without rebooting. Launch the Terminal and type the following command:
ifconfig en1 | grep ether
You’ll know see something like:
ether 00:12:cb:c6:24:e2
And the values after ‘ether’ makeup your current MAC address. Write this down somewhere so you don’t forget it. If you do, it’s not the end of the world, you’ll just have to reboot to reset it from a change.

Spoofing a MAC address

To spoof your MAC address, you simply set that value returned from ifconfig to another hex value in the format of aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff

For this example, we will set our wireless MAC address to 00:e2:e3:e4:e5:e6 by issuing the following command:
sudo ifconfig en1 ether 00:e2:e3:e4:e5:e6

The sudo command will require that you enter your root password to make the change.

Verifying the Spoofed MAC address worked

If you want to check that the spoof worked, type the same command as earlier:
ifconfig en1 | grep ether
Now you will see:
ether 00:e2:e3:e4:e5:e6
Meaning your MAC address is now the value you set it to. If you want to further verify the spoof, simply login to your wireless router and look at the ‘available devices’ (or attached devices) list, and your spoofed MAC address will be part of that list.

If you want to set your MAC address back to its real value, simply issue the above ifconfig commands with the MAC address that you retrieved in step 1. You can also reboot your Mac.

Enjoy!

Note: Reader Dee Brown points out the following, which may help with some users having difficulties: “running 10.5.6 you need to do the trick to disassociate from the network. ****DO NOT TURN AIRPORT OFF****. What you will have to do is click your airport and click join network and enter some bogus name as the network ssid. Then while it’s trying to connect click cancel.At this point you may spoof using the sudo ifconfig en1 ether command”

other reads point out that Dee Brown’s trick works in 10.5.7 and above too. Thanks Dee!

Update: If you’re still having problems with MAC address spoofing in Leopard or Snow Leopard, the above method still works but try disassociating with any wireless network BUT keep your wireless Airport on (as mentioned above) – an easy way to do this is to type the following in the command line:

airport -z

Note that you have to have the ‘airport’ command setup to work for users, you can do that by copy and pasting this command into the Mac Terminal:

sudo ln -s /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport /usr/sbin/airport

Once disassociated from the network you should be able to spoof your MAC address as usual

[Copied from http://osxdaily.com/2008/01/17/how-to-spoof-your-mac-address-in-mac-os-x/]

Invisible Nmap

Nmap is a powerful tool for network scanning. Whether it is good or bad is a different question and that is upto the users' motives to use it. It has a lot of options. Here are some of those options together to get a reasonable amount of information about an ip or network without bothering the owner by telling her about your existence :). Not sure though how efficient it would be considering the latest IDS/IPSes. But that's all I could get out of the options provided by NMAP. The command and its explanation are as follows:

sudo nmap -n -sS -f -A -T1 -S fake_ip -e interface_to_use -D fake_ip1, fake_ip2, fake_ip3 -vvv ip_to_scan -P0

Sudo: You have to have root permission to run it.
-n: Do not resolve host. Show the ips.
-sS: Stealth SYN scan. SUpposed to be less noisy.
-f: fragment the packets before sending to the ip_to_scan. Reduces the chance to get detected. New IDS/IPS can get it still (as per the information I got).
-A : Do OS and version detection, script scanning, and traceroute.
-T1 : Range is T0 (slowest) to T5 (fastest) -speed of execution. Slower packet sending increases your anonymity.
-S fake_ip: Use fake_ip as the source of the packets.
-e interface_to_use: Since source address is spoofed in precious option, you have to give the network interface details to send/receive packets.
D fake_ip1..ME : Decoy option - Use all these fake_ips mentioned and ME, i.e. my ip to create packets to send. More invisibility.
-vvv: very very verbose mode. Explains the output more elaborately.
ip_to_scan: IP/Network to scan.
-P0: Do not ping , do only scan. Saves time and finds more machines.

Crazy Visual Studio: “No files were found to look in. Find was stopped in progress.”

This is the second time I have faced the same problem... No gurrantee that it won't happen for third time. So here come my tips to solve it. The problem is, in Visual Studio 2008, whenever I tried to find someting in files, after clicking find I got a reply "No files were found to look in. Find was stopped in progress.”. Being stupid and superstitious, I restarted visual studio, din't work. Then restarted machine as well, din't work. Now its time to think logically. Asked my best friend - Google, for solution. He gave me this, this and THIS!!!.. In short: the solution is, press Ctrl+Scroll Lock and everything gets back to normal. If it doesn’t work, try to press Scroll Lock and than hit Ctrl+Scroll Lock again. I have no idea why or how it works, but the fact is that it does solve the problem, if anyone knows what happened here, please leave your comment and share your knowledge with us. This is a very strange and odd bug indeed, I must say.