Radical Development

Tag Archives: Security

May 22, 2013
by Steven Swafford
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Hacking 102: Active Footprinting With Nmap

This article is a followup of Hacking 101: Footprinting Using Nothing But A Web Browser which served as an introduction to passive footprinting. There are a number of tools that you can use both on a Windows and Linux platform and I prefer to use the Backtrack Linux distro for penetration testers, more specifically I will be using Kali Linux. If Linux is not your cup of tea then you can give the following tools a look and pick and choose what you need. Wireshark which open source multi-platform network protocol analyzer. It allows you to examine data from a …

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May 17, 2013
by Steven Swafford
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Hacking 101: Footprinting Using Nothing But A Web Browser

Welcome to this article which is to introduce the idea of foot-printing when it comes to hacking. What foot-printing really means is the act of information gathering and this can be either active or passive or even and combination of both. In order to determine the vulnerabilities of a given target you must first understand the target. To this end the information you can compile over the internet can yield tremendous results and this is known as passive foot-printing. Remember to keep good notes on the information that you are able to find. These notes will come in handy later …

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May 16, 2013
by Steven Swafford
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Ways To Protect Your Identity On The Internet

At the time of this article I have an IP Address of 89.239.207.81 and I would ask you if you have any idea where my Internet Service Provider (ISP) resides? I live in the United States and at this moment my Internet connection is coming from Denmark. As demonstrated from the Google Map, I am clearly sitting  in Havdrup, Denmark however this is not true, well at least physically. My internet connection resides in Denmark why my physical location is within the United States. Here is the detailed information: IP Address: 89.239.207.81* City: Havdrup State: 20 Country: Denmark Latitude: 55.5333 …

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May 14, 2013
by Steven Swafford
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Website Mirroring Using GNU Wget

GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP – the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive command-line tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc. Why would you want to use this application? The fact is the black hats often use this to mirror a given site in order to review the content for anything that may be of value. This concept falls into the area of information gathering. So you may be asking your what possibly could be of value that a …

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March 6, 2013
by Steven Swafford
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The Four Goals of Cryptography

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties. It is about constructing and analyzing protocols that overcome the influence of adversaries and which are related to various aspects in information security such as data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation. Cryptography intersects the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering. Applications of cryptography include ATM cards, computer passwords, and electronic commerce. There are four goals of cryptography, these are: Privacy Authentication Integrity Non-repudiation

March 3, 2013
by Steven Swafford
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The Future of Cybersecurity Technology and Policy

Only when a comprehensive understanding of the cyber threat is taken into consideration can organizations utilize process, tools, and technologies to find, correct, and combat those who launch a cyber-attack. This paper takes a look at the past, present, and future in order to present a concept that works. The idea here is a partnership with both private and public sectors in a type of responsibility where everyone works together to achieve the goal of cyber defense. This includes tools, technologies, methodology, and a common sense approach to the problem. The days of standing alone have failed and it is …

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March 3, 2013
by Steven Swafford
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Open Source and Commericial Security Tools

Whether you’re a network administrator, security professional, or an end user, it’s important that you keep your system clean and secure. There are a variety of high quality open source security tools available. Toolkits Network Security Toolkit: This bootable ISO live CD/DVD (NST Live) is based on Fedora. The toolkit was designed to provide easy access to best-of-breed Open Source Network Security Applications and should run on most x86/x86_64 platforms. The main intent of developing this toolkit was to provide the network security administrator with a comprehensive set of Open Source Network Security Tools. The majority of tools published in …

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January 13, 2013
by Steven Swafford
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A Look At Microsoft SQL Server Database Security

Security and web applications is something that I speak and write about often and I believe one aspect of overlooked security is the database itself. For the purpose of this article I am focusing on Microsoft SQL Server. I am by no means a database administrator therefore this article is from the point of view of a developer and general in nature. Since web applications typically have an interface to the database the best way to think about security is the fact that the web application is the key to the database and for this reason you must take a …

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