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Anti-Hacking School: Lesson 1

Winner of the first International Cyber Security Awareness Contest conducted by (ISC)²

Published by (ISC)². Today, even your grandmother probably knows who hackers are. But do you know who hackers really are and how they work? In this school we will try to answer some of your questions and show you how hackers work and how, step-by-step, to defend against them. I will even teach you some "harmless" ethical hacker's tips and tricks (remember that hacking is illegal and is considered as a criminal action!). You will also learn more about hackers and decide by yourself whether hackers are "real geniuses" (as some people believe) or not.

Anti-Hacking School: Lesson 2

Winner of the first International Cyber Security Awareness Contest conducted by (ISC)²

Published by (ISC)². In this second lesson we are going to learn how hackers can be categorized. What are their variants, or rather, specific species? You will learn how hackers classify themselves based on their special interests, knowledge, and beliefs.

Unix, Solaris and Linux: A Practical Security Cookbook

Dr. Boris Loza explains how to secure various UNIX operating systems without using any third-party or "freeware" tools.
ISBN: 1420848240

Hack Proofing Sun Solaris 8

Randy Cook (Editor), With Ed Mitchell, With Ido Dubrawsky explain how to secure X Window environment based on B. Loza's reasearch.
ISBN: 192899444X

Security Forensics Using DTrace

Featured by Sun Microsystems

Published by SysAdmin. Solaris 10 has introduced a new tool for Dynamic Tracing in the OS environment -- dtrace. This is a very powerful tool that allows systems administrators to observe and debug the OS behavior or even to dynamically modify the kernel. Although this tool has been designed primarily for developers and administrators, in this article, I will explain how to use dtrace as a security forensics tool for analyzing suspicious files and processes.

Analyzing Suspicious Binary Files and Processes

Published by the "original" Phrack. The art of security forensics requires lots of patience, creativity and observation. You may not always be successful in your endeavours but constantly 'sharpening' your skills by hands-on practicing, learning a couple more things here and there in advance will definitely help.

Finding Trojans for Fun and Profit

Published by USENIX ;login. "The Trojan Horse" used to refer to the ploy used by the ancient Greeks to attack the city of Troy. Today, it's fairly common knowledge that a trojan horse is an application that a cheeky hacker tries to install on your hard disk to get easy access to your computer. A trojan can be part of a rootkit while masquerading as a legitimate application such as ls, df, or ps. In this article I will show you how to find rootkits and trojans using other handy little utilities and a couple of tricks.

Under Attack: Dealing With Missing UNIX Files

Published by USENIX ;login. A Security Breach can inspire panic in administrators. This quick application note explains some techniques to be used to recover the names and contents of files during an attack or shortly thereafter.

Web Server Discovery Tool

Published by 2600. Tool After looking at your paycheck, an employee in the Payroll department, John, has decided to become a web administrator. In fact he has already installed the IIS web server on his workstation. In the Marketing department, Sally has her own internal web server for selling her personal artwork. If you are not aware of these situations, you can't apply the necessary security patches and it's only a matter of time before a Nimda-like virus exploits well-known IIS vulnerabilities. So how do you find unauthorized servers?

How to Regain Privacy on the Net

Published by 2600. You'd probably be surprised if you knew what information about yourself is available on the Internet! Do you want to know what kind of information?

What Everybody on the Internet Knows about You

Published by 'Inside Solaris'. New terminology is constantly cropping up in the technology arena. Lucky for you, the Internet Savant is here to help you impress your colleagues at the water cooler with the latest techno babble. This month, we'll demystify the ethical differences between hackers and crackers, and we'll take a look at the seedy side of things by exploring the associated terminological hierarchy.

Hackers, Crackers, Phrackers, and more

Published by 'Inside the Internet'. New terminology is constantly cropping up in the technology arena. Lucky for you, the Internet Savant is here to help you impress your colleagues at the water cooler with the latest techno babble. This month, we'll demystify the ethical differences between hackers and crackers, and we'll take a look at the seedy side of things by exploring the associated terminological hierarchy.

Reviewing Your X Window Security

Featured among many others by Sun Microsystems, Novell, SecurityPortal, IT Security Cookbook, LinuxSecurity, SecurityFocus, BSD Today, Securitydatabse, Rootprompt, and SANS Security Institute

Published by 'Inside Solaris'. You can impress your boss by showing him how easy it is to view somebody's X session. In order to do this, you only need the native X Window utilities that come with the standard Solaris distribution.

Protect Your Personal Information form Internet Peeping Toms

Published by 'Inside the Internet'. New terminology is constantly cropping up in the technology arena. Lucky for you, the Internet Savant is here to help you impress your colleagues at the water cooler with the latest techno babble. This month, we'll demystify the ethical differences between hackers and crackers, and we'll take a look at the seedy side of things by exploring the associated terminological hierarchy.

Auditing Solaris Security with CLI

Published by 'Inside Solaris'. Did you know that you can inspect the security on an existing Solaris box by using the command line interface (CLI)? You don't have to install any expensive GUI-based applications. In this article, we'll build a security check list using just native Solaris OS commands. Following this list step by step will help you to identify whether the system fits with your security policy.

Sniff Your Own Networks with Tcpdump

Published by 'Inside Solaris'. Learn how to secure your network using a freeware sniffer - tcpdump. A sniffer is any device, software, or hardware that listens to all packets traveling along a network. Bad guys use sniffers to breach your security by capturing and analyzing all network traffic. Good guys use sniffers to protect the network.

Network Security with Kerberos

Published by 'Inside Solaris'. Massachusetts Institute of Technology created Kerberos in the mid-1980s as part of the Athena project. Today Kerberos version 5 (Kerberos V5) is the latest implementation and is avail- able as a product from many different vendors for various computing platforms. In this article, we'll show you how to use Kerberos V5 in the Solaris environment as a solution to your network security problems.

Build Your Own IDS with Logsurfer

Published by 'Inside Solaris'. Internal breaches still make up a significant portion of attacks-44 percent-according to the Computer Security Institute/FBI survey. This statistic emphasizes the need for detecting intrusions on the machines inside the network as well as the perimeter. In this case, a host-based IDS can play a significant role. You can build such an IDS using a free log analyzer like Logsurfer.

Turn a Solaris Box into a Packet-filtering Firewall

Published by 'Inside Solaris'. In this article, we're going to show you how to create a packet-filtering firewall with a Solaris box using a simple network configuration.

Choosing a Good Password with Npasswd

Published by 'Inside Solaris'. If a computer system's security is one of your concerns, you need not be reminded that one of the first points of attack from hackers is the users' password. Even though you may think you have taught users how to select good passwords, you can still come across many guessed passwords after running some password strength checking software. Each time we've checked our user's passwords, we've come up with as many as 10 percent have been identified as being easy to crack. This was a real nightmare until we decided to find a way to prevent users from creating easy-to-guess passwords.

TCP_Wrapper: Do I Need One?

Published by 'Inside Solaris'. The brave new world of the Internet has brought many dangers as well as opportunities. Security is now a bigger concern then ever, with hackers creating viruses daily. It makes sense to protect your computing resources every way you can, and TCP_wrapper is one of these tools that can help you. This article will explore what TCP_wrapper can do for you.

Conveniently Administrating Remote Servers

Published by 'Inside Solaris'. Imagine that you're in charge of 40 Solaris/SunOS servers on a 24x7 basis. To make life easier for you, let's suppose that some of these servers are located a good two-hour drive from your house, and some are even a three-hour flight away. Then one night, when you're ready to go to sleep (or even already dreaming), your pager starts beeping. One of the servers is down. After trying to telnet and ping to this server several times, you suddenly realize that something is really wrong. What are you going to do?

SPARC OpenBoot and the Forth Language

Published by 'Inside Solaris'.From time to time as a UNIX system administrator, I've had to work in the Solaris Open Boot environment. It's useful for booting the operating system (boot -r, boot cdrom -s, etc.), modifying system start-up configuration parameters (input-device, output-device, setenv, etc.), troubleshooting (probe-scsiall, show-devs, etc.), or running diagnostics (test net, test /memory, etc.). But sometimes, it isn't enough to use predefined commands and utilities. For this purpose, OpenBoot provides a very powerful environment based on the ANS Forth programming language.

Booting from an Alternate Hard Drive

Featured by Sun Microsystems

Published by 'Inside Solaris'. Imagine that one morning your system doesn't come up after a regular planed shutdown. A root file system is corrupt, or some of the files (/etc/passwd, /usr/bin/login etc.) are damaged. Your company's operations are interrupted, and your office is crowded with people expecting you to resolve the problem immediately! You can easily prepare yourself for such dilemmas by creating an alternate boot device. You simply need a spare hard drive with enough capacity to hold your root file system. It's not necessary that the hard drive have the same geometry (i.e., it need not have the same number of heads, cylinders, or sectors per track). In this article, we'll show you step-by-step how to create this alternate hard drive, then we'll show you how to boot off it.

Achilles Heel of Your Information Security Infrastructure

Published by (ISC)². It's a situation often overlooked by information security professionals: rogue Microsoft IIS servers installed by developers or curious users without authorization. In the 'post-Nimda' period, we diligently apply all web server patches as soon as they are announced. But if the network consists of hundreds or thousands individual boxes, it is extremely difficult to keep track of all new and existing web servers. Users can install IIS on their workstations without the LAN and other security support groups having any knowledge. A web server (e.g., IIS) that is improperly installed, unpatched or otherwise poorly secured presents a clear risk for the entire security infrastructure. This article offers a working strategy to deal with this growing problem.