Wireless security is always something that I am concerned about. I have written about this before and I continue to come up with new and better ways to protect my network.
Recently, I have taken to completely turning off my wireless access point. I figure, if there is no wireless signal to access, then there is nothing to hack into. I got myself another digital timer just like the one I wrote about in How To Get a 2 Year Old To Wake Up When You Want. Then, I analyzed then I needed to have the wireless on and when it was not being used and I programmed it to be off during those times!
Some of the times that I discovered the wireless could be turned off include:
When I’m working at the office
When I’m sleeping
When I have other things planned
This seems to work well for me about 95% of the time. But, I did find that the on/off button on the timer was very important. It was also very inconvenient because the timer was in the back of my wiring closet which is always a pain to get into.
So, my future plans are to built a Y power splitter for the access point. I will then purchase a switch with a remote contol. I can then plug the timer into one outlet, the remote switch into the other, the Y cord into each device. I would then plug the wireless access point into the Y cord.
Theoretically, I should be able to then have the access point powered by either the timer or the remote control.
Please remember, I am not an electrical engineer and this is only an idea. Don’t go out an electrocute yourself!
As I wrote in Big Brother Google Is Watching Me, Google’s new interest-based advertising is pretty freaky. So, I thought that I would help everyone out by sharing this Firefox plugin that may help.
TrackMeNot is designed to perform random search engine searches to as to hide your actual searches in a sea of unrelated searches. The idea is to make your search patterns undetectable and, this, Google can not create an accurate search profile on you.
Here is what the website says:
TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one’s tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view. User-installed TrackMeNot works with the Firefox Browser and popular search engines (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN) and requires no 3rd-party servers or services.
I’m going to give this a try. The hard part will be determining whether or not is is actually successful in covering my tracks.
I have been spending some time working on a network analysis system and I have been slowly adding different tools to the system. I have a lot of the basics such as wireshark, ettercap, dsniff, and kismet but I wanted a little something for the VoIP side. This is when I ran across UCSniff.
UCSniff is an exciting new VoIP Security Assessment tool that leverages existing open source software into several useful features, allowing VoIP owners and security professionals to rapidly test for the threat of unauthorized VoIP Eavesdropping. Written in C, and initially released for Linux systems, the software is freely available for anyone to download, under the GPLv3 license. Some useful features of UCSniff that have been combined together into a single package:
Allows targeting of VoIP Users based on Corporate Directory and/or extensions
Automatically re-creates and saves entire voice conversations to a single file that can be played back by media players
Support for G.722 and G.711 u-law compression codecs
Automated VLAN Hop and Discovery support
A VoIP Sniffer combined with a MitM re-direction tool
Monitor Mode
Sniffs entire conversation if only one phone is in source VLAN
This looks to be pretty cool. Especially if I can get a directory of users from the PBX and then select who to listen in on (which it appears that it can do according to the screenshots)!
Sometimes it takes the worst of situations to bring out the best in us. This is what happened to me the other day. A woman comes into the office that I work in, obviously quite distraught. We quickly discover that she is the widow of a popular local doctor whom recently passed away suddenly. She was carrying with her a laptop and was looking for some help.
It appears that when her husband passed away, he did not leave a record of the user names and passwords for his laptop and there was a lot of information on the system that she would be needing in the near future. She was hoping that we could help. Of course we could.
We Hate F8! We Hate F8!
Initially, I assumed that the users would not have changed the default administrative password from blank. So, all I needed to do was use F8 when booting, go into safe mode, then create a new account with administrative access.
Unfortunately, F8 was disabled on the system and the only way to enable it was to log into Windows. Time to look for something else.
Linux To The Rescue…NOT
My next reaction was to try one of the Linux based password recovery tools. There are a number of boot CDs out there that boot a small Linux kernel and then attempt to recover the password. After trying two different boot CDs, I quickly came to the realization that Linux was going to be of no help this time around.
It just so happens that this was no ordinary laptop. This laptop was a Dell XPS M1730. And, it came with dual hard drives running off a RAID array using the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. And, it had no Linux drivers.
Ask Bart
So, how was I going to proceed. It was obvious that there was no way to get access from a download and boot Linux CD. Then I thought of Bart. Since BartPE creates a self-contained bootable Windows CD, this might do the trick!
A copy of Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 1 (Sorry, you’re on your own for that one)
I installed the BartPE package to C:\pebuilder3110a on my hard drive. Then, I extracted the drivers that I got from the Dell website and placed them in the C:\pebuilder3110a\drivers\SCSIAdapter folder in a directory called iastor. The \drivers\SCSIAdapter folder is where you can put any number of non-standard drivers that will automatically load then you boot the BartPE CD. (For more information on the on adding drivers to a BartPE CD, see their Adding drivers page.) I then proceeded to create the BartPE image and burn it to CD.
Getting the Files
The next step was to get access to the laptop. I put my newly minted CD into the laptop and booted the machine from it. Everything worked like a charm and on first try, too! (That almost never happens for me!) I was able to access the files on the RAID array without any problem.
Now, I could probably have stopped here and copied the files that were needed to a USB drive or even burned them to a CD/DVD. But, I wanted to provide full access to the system so that they would not have to keep coming back to me for help whenever they wanted to get something off the computer. I would have to get the passwords for her.
All Your Passwords Are Belong To Us
To start the process of password recovery, I needed to get a few things:
I booted the laptop one again with the BartPE disk and made sure the USB flash drive was available to the system on boot up.
Next, I started to look through the system and I searched for two files:
C:\Windows\System32\config\SAM
C:\Windows\System32\config\SYSTEM
I copied these two files over to the flash drive, took out the flash drive and shut down the computer.
I then installed ophcrack on my other computer and installed the Vista tables.
Next, I used the Encrypted SAM option to load the files into ophcrack. It immediately recognized all of the accounts that were on the system. It also indicated that the Administrator account and the Guest account had blank passwords. That means that if F8 had been available, I could have gotten into the system in Safe Mode (stupid F8).
So, I started the password recovery process and DING! 29 seconds later I had all of the passwords for the three other accounts on the system. I tried all three and they all worked.
Looking back at the passwords now and the hints that were given in Windows for the passwords, I was on the right track to guessing them but this was a much quicker process.
Lessons Learned
Through all of this, I have learned some lessons about security, passwords, and computers:
Unless you encrypt your hard drive or use some other form of access other than a password (e,g, biometrics, smart card, etc.), it is relatively trivial for someone to get your passwords if they have physical access to your system
Someone does not have to have physical access to your system the entire time they are trying to hack your password. Simply grabbing a couple of files from your computer takes a couple of minutes and they can hack away at your system at their convenience
In the event of your untimely passing, would your loved ones know how to get access to your computer, e-mail, Internet accounts, etc.? If not, you may want to consider a way of getting that information to them
Wireless security is always something that I am concerned about. I have written about this before and I continue to come up with new and better ways to protect my network.
As I wrote in 
According to Microsoft, these are the ten laws of IT security:
I have been spending some time working on a network analysis system and I have been slowly adding different tools to the system. I have a lot of the basics such as 
Sometimes it takes the worst of situations to bring out the best in us. This is what happened to me the other day. A woman comes into the office that I work in, obviously quite distraught. We quickly discover that she is the widow of a popular local doctor whom recently passed away suddenly. She was carrying with her a laptop and was looking for some help.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a7295472-0e24-412c-a4a8-df02fbb810a0)
