BackTrack: A penetration testers toolset

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

There are few job titles as misleading as that of the "Penetration Tester." Sure, saying professional computer hacker would be more direct, but have you ever noticed how hackers seem to have a dirty mind? Why else would they want to go phreaking through backdoors? Anyway, in order for hackers to ...

Five free pen-testing tools

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

Security assessment and deep testing don't require a big budget. Some of most effective security tools are free, and are commonly used by professional consultants, private industry and government security practitioners. Here are a few to start with. For scanning in the first steps of a security assessment or pen test, ...

Top 10 Firefox 3 Features

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

The newest version of our favorite open source web browser, Mozilla Firefox 3, offers dozens of new features and fixes, but only a handful will make the most dramatic difference in your everyday browsing. After 17 months of alphas and betas, Mozilla's finally made a feature-complete release candidate available, so ...

Admins warned of brute-force SSH attacks

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Over the weekend, a number of network administrators issued warnings over an order-of-magnitude increase in the number of attempts to guess the username and password of systems running secure shell (SSH), the encrypted access method that replaced the common telnet service. System administrators at universities and some companies have reported ...

Firefox Plugin Shipped With Malicious Code

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Mozilla warned Wednesday that a malicious program inserted adware code into a Firefox plugin that has been downloaded thousands of times over the past three months. Because of a virus infection, the Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 was polluted with adware, Mozilla security chief Window Snyder said in a blog ...

Linux: Windows Made Hard

Monday, April 21st, 2008

For the past few months, we've shown how Linux has emerged from its early murky reputation of being cool to have but impractical to use. And there's no question it's refreshing to use an entire desktop system with nary a Microsoft or Apple product. But as some of our readers ...

Load Desktop Backgrounds Immediately in Linux

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

When logging into Ubuntu or most any GNOME-based Linux system, users see a blank one-color screen until the actual desktop is loaded—which can make one feel like something's broken, or at least make your boot experience less fluid. One intrepid Ubuntu hacker, however, shows how to banish the blank screen ...

More big security holes in Linux

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

Open-source developers have warned of serious security holes in two Linux components that could allow attackers to take over a system by tricking a user into viewing a specially crafted image file or opening an archive. Patches exist for the bugs, which affect LHA and imlib. Imlib, a library for graphics-viewing ...