Which application is using that port?

See which ports are open, as an attacker would:

nmap 127.0.0.1

(Superuser seems to need to be used on some the following commands)

See which process is using port 25:

netstat -nlp | grep 25

Same, with a bit less info:

fuser -n tcp 25

Or you could also do:

fuser -u smtp/tcp

Discovered here

And now, a demonstration in how ridiculously easy it is to hack stuff with Google

Inspired by this reddit thread (look here for help deciphering the Google syntax).

phpMyAdmin -- inurl:SELECT inurl:FROM inurl:WHERE intitle:phpmyadmin

HP Laserjet printers -- "identify the document you want to print by using either option shown below, then select the apply button."

More printers -- "Web Image Monitor" location comment "device name"

Web cams -- inurl:"viewerframe mode="

And, let's not forget the Google Hacking Database or how to use Google to crack MD5-hashed passwords!

Critique of Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It"

One book that the technorati have been talking about recently (ok, not so recently... it took me a while to write this article) is Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. For a book written by a co-founder of the Berkman Center and someone who is a remarkably good speaker, I found the work to be disappointing. The book's argument is not convincing and the writing seems to lack discipline, often wandering from one loosely related subject to another.

Zittrain's main point is that the security failings of generative technologies will push consumers to buy more restrictive, and supposedly safer, devices. This claim has a number of problems with it. The first is that tethered devices are not safer or more secure than generative ones -- in fact, normally the opposite is true. Compare the number of vulnerabilities in the Windows operating systems vs the number in Linux or BSD operating systems. Or bugs in Internet Explorer vs bugs in Firefox. This claim is even more dubious the more control the manufacturer has over the device: Richard Stallman points out in his response to Zittran that the iPhone's remote kill-switch makes the iPhone "designed for remote attack by Apple."

The second problem with Zittrain's principal claim is that a consumer has no incentive to prefer a non-generative device. Since non-generative devices are less secure than generative ones, any purported advantage that the non-generative device manufacturer could claim is lost. There is empirical evidence to support the belief that consumers prefer generative devices --Stallman cites the number of jailbroken iPhones as an example. Roger Grimes adds in his response: "It’s hard to say that closed systems are taking a more prominent role when open examples abound. Even the 'closed' systems he mentions are becoming more open thanks to competition and customer demand."

Even if, for the sake of argument, locked-down devices were somehow more secure than generative devices, consumers wouldn't necessarily migrate to non-generative appliances because users rarely make purchasing decisions based on security. Most computers are purchased because the user is comfortable with the platform or because he thinks that the computer is pretty or because that particular computer is necessary to run some type of software. Rarely will a run-of-the-mill consumer take into account a record of operating system vulnerabilities or the pros and cons of different systems architectures when deciding between OSX and Windows.

There are other shortcomings of the book besides the weakness of the main argument. For one, Zittrain mistakes generativity as being a zero-sum game: something is either generative or it isn't. There is a continuum of generativity: for instance, Linux is more generative than Windows XP, but Windows XP is more generative than Windows Vista. It is a fallacy to simply assume that all products fall into one non-generative bucket or the other generative one.

For a book whose title suggests solutions to the problems with the Internet, Zittran's ideas underdeliver. Virtual machines, extra-legal incentives, data portability and network neutrality are all things that are familiar, and have been, to policymakers and programmers for a while. In a book such as this which only worries about theoretical overtures and not about the detailed technical implementation, more out-of-the-box, grander thinking and proposals would have been welcome.

The book has a couple of chapters that feel decidedly out of place. The final chapter regarding privacy and the chapter exploring Wikipedia both don't seem to fit in to the framework of the book. That being said, both are certainly worthy of scholarship on their own merits. I particularly found the chapter on privacy engaging, if not particularly relevant to the rest of the book.

Zittrain's book is still worth a read: it addresses areas of concern in today's Internet and references much interesting material. The end result, however, is unconvincing and disappointing -- keep a few grains of salt handy when reading.

=========================================
REFERENCES / FURTHER READING

Jonathan Zittrain
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/zittrain.php
"Protecting the Internet Without Wrecking It"

Richard Stallman
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/stallman.php
"The root of this problem is software controlled by its developer"

Bruce M Owen
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/owen.php
"As long as flexibility has value to users, suppliers will have incentives to offer it"

Roger A Grimes
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/grimes.php
"Fixing Web insecurity requires more than a caring community"

Hal Varian
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/varian.php
"Ultimately, the best protection is an informed buyer who demands openness"

Susan Crawford
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/crawford.php
"In the eyes of many exiting institutions, security isn't a problem -- it's an opportunity"

David D. Clark
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/clark.php
"We need to develop a socially embedded online experience"

Jonathan Zittrain
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/zittrainresponse.php
"The best solutions don't assume a zero-sum tradeoff between security and generativity"

Coverage on BoingBoing

Ars Technica review and interview

DEFCON 16

DEFCON 16 was awesome, as expected. Some highlights:

• The first presentation I went to was called "Hacking in the Name of Science." Here a bunch of University of Washington grad students and a professor discussed the sweet research they are doing, almost all of which has been in the news (Implicating 'downloading' printers to the RIAA monitors, RFID ghost proxies, TCP information leakage, voting machine vulnerabilities, TrueCrypt vulnerabilities, implantable medical device hacking, ISP injected ads, etc.). They discussed the difference between just hacking and what you need to do in an academic setting to study what anyone else would call hacking. They encouraged attending academic security conferences, such as ACM CCS, NDSS, IEEE Security + Privacy, HotSec and Woot
  
• A talk entitled "Satan is on my Friends List" detailed the security vulnerabilities in OpenSocial-enabled websites. These guys demonstrated some hilarious things, including using a CSRF DOS attack: using an img tag placed in an html-enabled form that displays on a page, you can automatically logout anyone that sees that img by pointing the img's src attribute to the logout page. The speakers talked about how the socnet widget applications space is essentially a security free-for-all: apps hacking personal information, apps hacking other apps, etc. An opt-in security model for javascript safety in apps exacerbates the problem. An amusing conclusion to the talk was the speakers' impersonation of another security researcher on social networks which fooled his colleagues and family alike.
• Locksport enthusiast Eric Schmedl gave a talk that had some amusing anecdotes about cloak-and-dagger spying. Mary Lou McFate (NRA infiltrator of anti-gun groups), reconstructing passwords from audio of keystrokes, and multiple phone bugging technologies were discussed.
• Fyodor gave a talk on nmap, the tool he created and how he used it to scan a large subset of the Internet. He also presented some new features of the tool, including traceroute, ping, and netcat-like functionality... what can't it do?
• I briefly stopped in on a talk called "Taking Back Your Cellphone" which plugged the site HowardForums as an excellent resource for phone modification.
• The activity that I took part in for a fair share of my time there was the Lockpicking Village. I bought a set of lockpicks, and tried my skills on a variety of locks lying about the room. I also listened to talks on how to crack certain types of locks, including masterlocks (use coke can shiv, patterns for figuring out combo).
• Probably the most interesting thing that happened at DEFCON nobody got to see: a judge ordered a group of MIT students not to talk about hacking the Boston Subway system. This was rather pointless because 1) the presentation was distributed on CD before the gag was ordered 2) the ban was lifted after the conference 3) MIT's student newspaper put the presentation up on its site
• Other cool things: the badge, the mystery box
• Didn't see these presentations, but I looked at them on the CD:
• "The Death of Cash" features a preview of a world without cash. People are turning to credit because it is more convenient, banks love it because of better profit margins, government loves it because it makes you easier to track. (Note: Illegal to transfer $10,000 in/out of the country without declaring it). This is getting worse with stupid legislation (Patriot Act). Also, national security risk: electronic outages now mean that people can't get access to cash (even more troublesome as electric grid becomes less reliable). Strong crypto might be the basis of a future E-payment system. Advice: keep some cash on hand for emergencies, use non-cash as little as possible. thowlett@netsecuritysvcs.com says the presentation can be downloaded at www.netsecuritysvcs.com/presentations/defcon16/ but I don't see it there...
• An introduction to ham radio called "Ham for Hackers"
• A presentation on Javascript obfuscation that goes over the following methods: ASCII/Unicode escapes, XOR (ASCII/encoding), string splitting, simple encryption, non-obvious variable and function names, member enumeration, whitespace encoding/decoding
• Another presentation on SCADA systems that made me have nightmares
• A HOWTO on SSL cookie hijacking by Tor developer Mike Perry: insert an img tag with src mail.yahoo.com into an unencrypted connection and read their cookie, then save that cookie to cookies.txt and read their email (over SSL, if you want!)
• OCR tools: tesseract, jocr, ocrad
• A presentation similar to "Satan is on my Friends List" for Google Gadgets

Update:
Good photos of the event can be found here

Airsnort / WEP

Airsnort is the most widely used utility for cracking WEP. Get it on Ubuntu Dapper with sudo apt-get install airsnort. Here is a nice guide (with pictures!) to using airsnort on Linux. Airsnort uses an exploit described in this paper (postscript format) to obtain a WEP-encrypted password. Wikipedia has a more digestible summary of WEP flaws. wepcrack is another (and was the first) utility to implement the WEP exploit described above.

The way that Airsnort works is by passively monitoring all packets sent over a wireless network and then observing those packets for patterns it can exploit. The key to this is setting your wireless card to promiscuous mode: sudo iwconfig ethx mode Monitor. While you have this mode enabled, you will not be able to access the Internet.

One of the problems with monitoring traffic to crack WEP is if there is no traffic to montior in the first place! That is, the network isn't being heavily used. Solution: traffic injection. Aircrack-ng is a tool that supports this, among other things (homepage, tutorial, wikipedia page). Packet injection, however, is not a passive activity.

Books on the subject (links to Amazon.com pages):

• Wi-Foo: The secrets of wireless hacking
• 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide

TODO: Add sections about hidden SSIDs, MAC address filtering
http://www.cs.wright.edu/~pmateti/InternetSecurity/Lectures/WirelessHacks/Mateti-WirelessHacks.htm#_Toc77524653
http://docs.lucidinteractive.ca/index.php/Cracking_WEP_and_WPA_Wireless_Networks