I kept getting the following errors on my AD domain in the event viewer and accounts kept locking out:
Pre-authentication failed:
User Name:      user1
User ID:                DOMAIN\user1
Service Name:   krbtgt/DOMAIN.COM
Pre-Authentication Type:        0x0
Failure Code:   0x12
Client Address: 192.168.246.134

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

In the Directory Service logs I see the following entry:
[snip]
Active Directory could not update the following object with changes
received from the domain controller at the following network address
because Active Directory was busy processing information.

Turns out this happens if you have samba/winbind/AD type infrastructure. If someone has some processes running (Even if they us sudo) and happen to change their password while the process is running on unix (and using kerberos authentication), the accounts lockout because the kerberos ticket granting ticket (krbtgt) is not current and any object access is considered to be a failed login attempt. This locks out the accounts if you have account lockout implemented in your AD domain security policy.

One of my acquaintances told me today of an innovative scam.
So this friend of mine posted an advertisement for renting her apartment out on craigslist. As soon as she posted the ad, an email response came that looked absolutely legitimate.
The respondent claimed that he was a professor in the UK and would be visiting the US on a sabbatical. He even listed a phone number for contact as well as gave some very legitimate looking references. The respondent also said that he wanted to rent the apartment in about 1 months’ time. So far all good. My friend contacted the respondent over the phone and there was nothing odd about the conversation.
In the subsequent conversations, the respondent requested my friend to collect delivery of the furniture for his apartment (which he had indicated that he was going to rent). The respondent said that he would send a check to her and she should then collect the delivery of the furniture and pay the furniture company out of her own pocket. The respondent even sent in a personal check to my friend in advance. She deposited it and sure enough, the amount showed up in the bank account. But what had her spooked out, was how could someone give away a check to some one just like that. For some reason, due to a weird hunch, she decided that she was not going to engage in any financial transactions on the behalf of someone who was sitting hundreds of miles away who she barely knew. In the end, it was this hunch that saved her from losing the money.
So the respondent (thinking that my friend had agreed to undertake the transaction on his behalf) gave her the phone number and information of the furniture company. My friend googled the furniture company but could not find anything. Moreover, the furniture company would not even pick up the phone. This put my friend in doubt over the dubiousness of the potential renter. As it turned out, that the check bounced a couple of days later and if she’d paid the furniture company it might have been used as a way to steal money from my unsuspecting friend.
I guess what could be interesting to know here is that if there was a legitimate phone number (say from Google voice) and a legitimate website (which costs a few dollars for a month now), then my friend could have possibly been duped.
This serves as a reminder to us of the reality of the world we’re living in where scammers are looking for an opportunity to dupe us.

I will be speaking in Prof. Sengupta’s class at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York on Oct 28, 2010.  The topic of discussion will where does Digital Forensics fit in the big picture of organizations.  The talk will introduce the students to a variety of topics including choosing a career as a digital forensics investigator, their duties as an investigator, being successful as an investigator, case studies and real-life problems faced by the computer forensic investigators.

Let’s assess the situation: You have a 3G phone which allows tethering, a windows machine, a wireless access point and another PC that is connected to the LAN port of the wireless access point (or typically called a wireless router). The wireless access point is a home network and your ISP decides to disconnect your signal or is experiencing some problems. How do you share your 3G connection, so that other computers can connect through the wireless AP and use your cell phone’s 3G connection? It’s actually quite simple.

Tether your smartphone (in this case let’s say blackberry). Blackberry tethering in Windows over AT&T is allowed using a software called AT&T Communication Manager. Install ACM, and connect your Windows machine using a mini-USB cable to your phone. Goto Start->Run->cmd.exe. Type ipconfig /all to see the IP address and the DNS servers IP addresses.

Now connect the WAN link of your Wireless access point to this Windows machine’s ethernet port. Setup a static IP for this Windows machine say 192.168.10.1 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0. Now go to Network connections (from Control Panel), right click on the Mobile connection representing your blackberry, click on Advanced. In the Internet Connection Sharing section, check the box that says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection” and select “Local Area Connection” (this is the same connection you connected to the WAN port of the wireless AP). Click OK. You may have to disconnect and reconnect your ACM connection to allow the settings to take effect.

Now that this is done, connect to the administration interface of the wireless access point to the other PC that is connected to the LAN port (or through the wireless) to the access point. Go to the administration interface of the wireless AP, and set a static IP for the router in the same subnet as with the Windows box (the one you set with 192.168.10.1). Set the static IP on the AP to be say 192.168.10.2 (remember this has to be the same subnet), netmask as 255.255.255.0 and then the most important, the default gateway to 192.168.10.1 (the IP of the windows box on the ethernet card). To set the DNS server addresses, use the same addresses you found using ipconfig /all in the first step. Otherwise you could also use open DNS servers or any other DNS servers but it’ll be best to use the DNS servers pointing to the ones used by the tethered connection because you can rule out DNS issues if something isn’t working and it comes down to troubleshooting. Once on the router, the static is set, the gateway is set, the DNS is set, you should be able to connect from your wireless network to the internet through your 3G connection! 🙂
Happy internet sharing! 🙂
Here is a schematic diagram:

[tethering]                [static IP]    [static IP]   [internal IP]  [DHCP address]
                                   |         |                |           |
[ phone ] <==> [Windows machine]:eth0 <==> wan:[Wireless AP]:lan <==> [client]

I encountered various errors when compiling wepattack. This download does not come with a makefile that is compatible with the ubuntu distro that backtrack uses. First of all make sure that the wlan directory that you get when untarring the .tar.gz archive has execute permissions set to it.

$ cd WepAttack-0.1.3/src
$ chmod +x wlan

Once this is done “permission denied” errors should go.

/Desktop/WepAttack-0.1.3/src$ make
gcc -fno-for-scope -c -D__LINUX_WLAN__ -D__I386__ -o wepattack.o wepattack.c
cc1: warning: command line option "-fno-for-scope" is valid for C++/ObjC++ but not for C
wepattack.c: In function ‘loop_packets’:
wepattack.c:141: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘strlen’
wepattack.c:146: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘strlen’
wepattack.c:151: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘strlen’
wepattack.c:156: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘strlen’
wepattack.c: In function ‘clean_up’:
wepattack.c:184: warning: format ‘%d’ expects type ‘int’, but argument 3 has type ‘long int’
wepattack.c: In function ‘main’:
wepattack.c:309: warning: format ‘%d’ expects type ‘int’, but argument 2 has type ‘long int’
gcc -fno-for-scope -c -D__LINUX_WLAN__ -D__I386__ -o rc4.o rc4.c
cc1: warning: command line option "-fno-for-scope" is valid for C++/ObjC++ but not for C
gcc -fno-for-scope -c -D__LINUX_WLAN__ -D__I386__ -o wepfilter.o wepfilter.c
cc1: warning: command line option "-fno-for-scope" is valid for C++/ObjC++ but not for C
gcc -fno-for-scope -c -D__LINUX_WLAN__ -D__I386__ -o log.o log.c
cc1: warning: command line option "-fno-for-scope" is valid for C++/ObjC++ but not for C
gcc -fno-for-scope -c -D__LINUX_WLAN__ -D__I386__ -o modes.o modes.c
cc1: warning: command line option "-fno-for-scope" is valid for C++/ObjC++ but not for C
modes.c:25:30: error: wlan/wlan_compat.h: Permission denied
modes.c:26:28: error: wlan/p80211hdr.h: Permission denied
modes.c: In function ‘generate_rc4_key’:
modes.c:51: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘memcpy’
modes.c: In function ‘process_rc4_key’:
modes.c:68: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘memcpy’
modes.c: In function ‘mode_keygen’:
modes.c:125: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘memcpy’
modes.c:127: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘strcpy’
modes.c: In function ‘mode_wep’:
modes.c:145: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘memcpy’
make: *** [modes.o] Error 1

The following patch file will take care of most errors and you should be able to get Wepattack compiled properly:

diff -aur WepAttack-0.1.3/src/Makefile WepAttack-patched/src/Makefile
--- WepAttack-0.1.3/src/Makefile 2002-10-23 09:11:36.000000000 -0400
+++ WepAttack-patched/src/Makefile 2010-09-26 04:54:20.000000000 -0400
@@ -6,23 +6,23 @@
LD=gcc
#
# CFLAGS
-CFLAGS=-fno-for-scope -c -D__LINUX_WLAN__ -D__I386__
+CFLAGS= -c -D__LINUX_WLAN__ -D__I386__
#
#
# LDFLAGS
-#LDFLAGS=
+LDFLAGS=-L../run
#
#
# Libraries to link against
-LIBS= -lpcap -lz -lcrypto
+LIBS= -lpcap -lz -lcrypto
#
#
# Install path for wepattack
INSTDIR=/usr/bin

// main loop to process key in modes on every packet

Copy the above patch in to a file called wepattack.patch. Copy wepattack.patch into the WepAttack-0.1.3 directory and patch it as follows:

$ patch -p1 <wepattack.patch
$ cd src
make
sudo make install

You should be able to get wepattack installed!