Tim's Computer Science Blog

Hi there. I've put together a presentation on password cracking with Hashcat. Fair warning I made a small mistake in one of the slides where I switched the labels for the dictionary and the file containing the password hashes. The video is pretty comprehensive and should be enough information to compete in the National Cyber League password category.

Here is a slide by slide guide on how to setup and create virtual machines, and even network them together. This is really useful to know about if you want to simulate setting up servers, networks, and various technologies and then test them. For those who are into cyber security you can safely practice your skills! You don't even need to spend money on a bunch of additional hardware!

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 .

There are a great many topics that people disagree on, whether the cliché: politics, religion, ethics, or the common: "This is the best way to do such and such.", "This is what's right"...   Regardless of what it is, people are generally pretty terrible at accepting and applying logic, or even the scientific method to their beliefs.   To an extent, this is acceptable, natural, and fine. The book  "The Righteous Mind Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion"  by Jonathan Haidt does a great job of going into depth of the psychology of these disagreements.   On the discussion of logic though I've found there are three common somewhat intellectual responses used to simply disregard and dismiss what another person has said, especially when they do so under the veneer of being intellectual. This is ignoring all of the unintellectual responses such as calling each other names, ignoring what was said, etc... The three somewhat intellectual resp...

 I recently came across a post talking about how Linux is used as a barrier to keep people out of tech. Huh? Wasn't part of GNU Linux founded on the idea the code should be free, as in freedom? (not free as in beer) Anyone can get it, freely, and use it freely, and change it how they like freely. All this free access is supposed to help people who might not otherwise have access to pay, or be controlled by those own own the rights to said software. (among other ideals within the free software movements) It worked for me, and my bootable cd of knoppix when I first got started. Choose an operating system you are comfortable with, that you like, that fits your needs. Please realize that for some of us, Linux broke down the barriers. It's not an IT gatekeeper to learn something new. *I should probably avoid potentially controversial topics like this... It's just that I care about something that gave me opportunity.

Considering the current spread of COVID-19 and how everyone is spending more time online. I went ahead and made a series of tutorial videos for the Monterey County Free Library. Maybe someone out there will find these videos useful! They cover three resources on the http://www.emcfl.org/ website, though I think it would be wise to mention that these resources may be found in many libraries both public, and private. The tutorial videos include: Master File Premier (EBSCO) [video link 7:38] Learning Express Library (EBSCO)  [video link 4:19] ProQuest CultureGrams [video link 5:26] Click on the links to view the video directly. The first video covers a common database that is used by pretty much every library i've ever been in. Literally every public library, and university library uses it. It is hosted by EBSCO, and this particular service is called Master File Premier. "Master File Premier is a full text database containing magazines, reference books, images,  and primary sour...