Back in the day “recon” had a different meaning than it does today. Today, in the age of cyber-terrorism and cyber-stalking or Google stalking, reconnaissance comes from a variety of different sources including tools such as mash-up applications make things quite palpable for a social engineer. For the purpose of this discussion, let’s consider two entities “stalker” (the person seeking information about “someone”) and the “stalkee” (the “someone” whose information is being sought).
Back in the day (and man I’m only talking about 4-5 years ago!), the only source was public forums where users would post questions using constant email IDs. You would need to scourge through different Usenet groups and that was it…and possibly a Friendster account. Now, people have Facebook profiles which can be publicly viewed. This gives us the information about a person’s friends giving us information about the stalkee’s geographical location and may be even birthday. LinkedIn gives information about the stalkee’s job. You can even confirm the geographical location of the stalkee using LinkedIn. Now you have the name of the person and the geographical location. If you need more information about the person such as his/her age/birthdate, I’ve seen that ZabaSearch is a good resource. You can get a lot of information using ZabaSearch but if the stalkee needs he/she can remove this information using the block feature of Zaba located here. I do not know how they deal with this information but Zaba does have a “premium service” and I do not know if this premium service would give access to these “blocked records”. Now you have the information about the age of the stalkee. You could even search Twitter for the person’s twitter feed to see what the stalkee’s doing. I came across an interesting mashup application that crawls twitter to get information about where a person is and it’s aptly called Please Rob Me!. There are other great tools available such as Loopt and Tripit. Just as Twitter, Google Buzz can also give a lot of information. And the best part about google buzz is things are searchable …cool…the stalker’s job’s now easier.

Seems like the pwn2own this time around is going to be putting up prizes of about $100,000+ for people who can find 0-days for a variety of platforms. Especially, the fact that about $60,000 are being devoted for 0-days on the mobile security platform including the android platform etc., indicates a new era of security bugs.
The iPhone (non-jailbroken ones) as well as the BlackBerry application do tend to use signed executables. One only hopes that like the trust-relationships of the SSL-based certificates, the trust is really kept by analyzing the blackberry and iPhone apps.
Tyler Shields from Veracode presented his work of TXSBBSpy (source code URL: http://www.veracode.com/images/txsBBSpy.java; Presentation slides: http://www.veracode.com/images/TylerShields-MonkeyBerries-ShmooCon-2010.pdf).  In this he suggested that when controlled APIs are used the code needs to be signed by RIM but to do that RIM only gets the hash and not the source code.  This presents an interesting situation where RIM could actually be signing something that they don’t really know what it seems to be doing.

I finally got a new home for my blog.  www.rajatswarup.com will be my new homepage.   In the coming days, I’ll continue blogging while also improving the look & feel of my website.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Interestingly enough, I found last week that the new Nessus 4.2.0 works by default as a web interface. Gone are the days of using the NessusClient and connecting to TCP port 1241 and using it to connect to the nessusd. Connecting to local TCP port 8834 (https://localhost:8834) brings you to a web interface that you can use to connect to the new Nessus daemon. The nesssusd listener does not even listen on port 1241 by default.
I’ll shortly get used to it but I know the transition would be slow for me …. after it takes getting used to when you completely change the architecture after maintaining it for at least a good 7 years or so!

I’ve often tried to use MS Word tables and do computations with the values in the tables. Example:

Suppose, the following conditions hold true:
c1 = a1xb1
c2 = a2xb2
a3 = a1 + a2
b3 = b1 + b2
c3 = c2 + c2

Click on the c1 cell, click on the “Layout” button, click on “Formula” button, in the Formula field, enter the following:
=PRODUCT(a1:b1)
Similarly, for c2 use =PRODUCT(a2:b2).
For a3,b3,c3 use =SUM(ABOVE)