Tim's Computer Science Blog

Command Injection is a technique for gaining access, or getting a system to perform unauthorized actions. I've written up a tutorial/walk-through for a step by step lab on how to do this. It involves some setup with two virtual machines. Command Injection Walk Through Document HERE . Knowing a little bit about shells is also useful. Check out the blog post here for some resources on that. Some slides on setting up a virtual machine can be found here  if this topic is new to you. Here is a video that covers what command injection is and how it works. at about the 9:30 minute mark the talk is done and the walk through begins. Slides:

If I were to describe this simply it would be "A Primer on How to Con People: But made for the good guys" I made a prior video about some useful theories that are utilized by social engineers, but it was more tools in a toolbox than a framework that can be used. So I went ahead and put something basic together that if followed can be used to create your own social engineering plan. It comes from real world examples, and will hopefully allow others to recognize social engineering attacks. It is still pretty general and focuses on information gathering rather than executing the exploit steps, but those can still be seen in many of the example videos that are included. It's good enough info to get the general idea of how it works, how quick it is, and how few barriers there are against many social engineering exploits. You can follow along with the slides here .

This video covers several useful theories and principles used in social engineering. Think of it as building blocks that can be used. Quite a bit of this comes from scholarly work in psychology. It contains brief overviews of specific topics, definitely look into it more for a better understanding. This video was produced for academic purposes for identifying Social Engineering practices. This is not an endorsement of any illegal activity.   I think the part from 8:22 on is the most informative since it comes from a research paper I found specifically about social engineering attacks. Covers: +Mere Exposure Effect (0:47) +Theory of Planned Behavior (4:04) +Modes of Communication Styles (meh) +Anatomy of Social Engineering Attacks (8:22) *Principles of Persuasion (Authority, Reciprocity, Conformity, Commitment, Scarcity) (9:04) *Frequency of Persuasion Principles used (16:23) *Number of steps used before compliance (17:51) *Occurrence of principles by ste...

I simply don't need all of the web enabled "features" on all of my windows 10 devices. (Save data, privacy, less network footprint etc... ) So, after a little sleuthing I have cobbled together a *.bat file to reduce this a bit. A good portion comes from the comments section of the following website from users named Wade and Alup: https://winaero.com/blog/how-to-disable-telemetry-and-data-collection-in-windows-10/ I have added a few of my own edits, such as, the ability to revert the changes, turning on/off the web search feature in the search bar. I also commented out where the script attempts to block microsoft urls. (You can uncomment them to enable the blocking if you want) You will need to prevent your anti-virus (at least if windows defender) from removing/blocking the bat file. You can review, copy and paste the following into a file (script.bat). Then run it from administrator mode in the command prompt (cmd) I take no responsibility for any harm this ma...

Recently learned about this interesting search engine. It's not your normal search engine instead it surfs the net looking for computer vulnerabilities. http://www.shodanhq.com/ Works very similarly to other search engines you can use quotes and operation characters (+,-) Looks like the results are curated based largely on meta-data, user-agent, and banner results. Moral of the story, don't use default passwords, there is a search for that. http://www.shodanhq.com/search?q=%22admin%22

Lets take a look at some tracking tools with the advent of CISPA! RIOT = It essentially scrolls through social media sites and curates information. There is a neat video in the link below showing it's use. The most interesting function is that it will do analysis on when you do things during the day, such as going to the gym. Maltego- Pretty similar to RIOT. It is open source. This is what Wikipedia has to say about it. “Maltego focuses on providing a library of transforms for discovery of data from open sources, and visualizing that information in a graph format, suitable for  link analysis  and  data mining .” Jigsaw- It's good for looking up employees of a company. Doesn't really have anything to do with the post! http://darkernet.in/cispa-about-to-become-law-we-list-the-companies-that-back-it-and-introduce-its-new-friend-riot/

I've been allowed to try out a few workstation securing exercises from the cyber patriot security competition (circa 2012). I've made a quick guide that give's a basic overview, remember I did say Basic Overview, of things to do or look for to manage to get all of the points. Here's the link: https://docs.google.com/ClickHereforCyberPatriotDoc

The web is a ruthless place full of Trolls, Crackers, and Phishers, Much like the Doom sayers, Burglars, and snake oil sales men of past generations. It is important to be able to take some basic steps to secure yourself from the dangers of the web. One way that you can protect yourself is by checking whether a website is a reputable source, and if not use some simple factors to help determine if you can trust the site. Here is a simple list of Do's and Don'ts Don'ts: #1 Don't judge a site based on how professional it looks #2 Don't Trust sites proclaiming get rich schemes #3 Don't use the same password #4 Don't trust what a link might say, double check the address Do's: #1 Do a whois query on suspicious sites #2 Do look for “ https:// ” on login pages #3 Do use different passwords #4 Do-uble check the url isn't weird. (e.g. g00gl3.com) #5 Do use Anti-virus on downloads Many phishing sites will look exactly the same as an accepted site...