Hi-Tech Arena

Wargames The wargames offered by the OverTheWire community can help you to learn and practice security concepts in the form of fun-filled games. To find out more about a certain wargame, just visit its page linked from the menu on the left. If you have a problem, a question or a suggestion, you can  join us on IRC . Suggested order to play the games in Bandit Leviathan or Natas or Krypton Narnia Behemoth Utumno Maze … http://overthewire.org/wargames/

This article is a compilation of several interesting, unique command-line tricks that should help you squeeze more juice out of your system, improve your situational awareness of what goes on behind the curtains of the desktop, plus some rather unorthodox solutions that will melt the proverbial socks off your kernel. Follow me for a round of creative administrative hacking. 1. Run top in batch mode top is a handy utility for monitoring the utilization of your system. It is invoked from the command line and it works by displaying lots of useful information, including CPU and memory usage, the number of running processes, load, the top resource hitters, and other useful bits. By default, top refreshes its report every 3 seconds. Most of us use top in this fashion; we run it inside the terminal, look on the statistics for a few seconds and then graciously quit and continue our work. But what if you wanted to monitor the usage of your system resources unattended? In other words,...

netstat To list open network ports and the processes that own them on FreeBSD with netstat, you can use this command:   netstat -a | egrep 'Proto|LISTEN' The output for this on my laptop running FreeBSD is: Proto Recv-Q Send-Q  Local Address      Foreign Address    (state) tcp4       0      0  localhost.ipp      *.*                LISTEN tcp6       0      0  localhost.ipp      *.*                LISTEN tcp4       0      0  *.2200             *.*                LISTEN tcp6       0      0  *.2200             *.*                LISTEN tcp4   ...

For a more detailed analysis of this catastrophic bug, see  this update , which went live about 18 hours after Ars published this initial post. Researchers have discovered an extremely critical defect in the cryptographic software library an estimated two-thirds of Web servers use to identify themselves to end users and prevent the eavesdropping of passwords, banking credentials, and other sensitive data. The warning about the bug in OpenSSL coincided with the  release of version 1.0.1g of the open-source program , which is the default cryptographic library used in the Apache and nginx Web server applications, as well as a wide variety of operating systems and e-mail and instant-messaging clients. The bug, which has resided in production versions of OpenSSL for more than two years, could make it possible for people to recover the private encryption key at the heart of the digital certificates used to authenticate Internet servers and to encrypt data traveling between ...

Snoopy  is a distributed tracking and profiling framework to perform some pretty interesting tracking and profiling of mobile users through the use of WiFi. The talk was well received (going on what people said afterwards) by those attending the conference and it was great to see so many others as excited about this as we have been. In addition to the research, we both took a different approach to the presentation itself. A 'no bullet points' approach was decided upon, so the slides themselves won't be that revealing. Using Steve Jobs as our inspiration, we wanted to bring back the fun to technical conferences, and our presentation hopefully represented that. As I type this, I have been reliably informed that the DVD, and subsequent videos of the talk, is being mastered and will be ready shortly. Once we have it, we will update this blog post. In the meantime, below is a description of the project. Background There have been recent initiatives from numerous gover...

When UK Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech at CeBIT this year, what examples did he use to highlight tech innovation in Britain? Yes, ARM and Imagination were on his list, but he also referred to the tiny, Linux-based computer called Raspberry Pi, which has now sold over 2.5 million units. In a timely fashion, the Pi's makers, element 14, have just announced a new $33,Wolfson-powered audio card that should give the device a broader range of functions. The add-on board fits right onto the Pi's P5 pins and carries a Wolfson audio processor that supports high-res audio up to 24-bit / 192KHz, which can be played via a direct connection to an amp over 3.5mm line-out or alternatively via a digital S/PDIF output. Audio recording, meanwhile, comes courtesy of two onboard MEMS mics (useful for things like voice control), a 3.5mm mic jack and a digital S/PDIF input. It's true that some of these audio capabilities have already bee...

Amal Graafstra snaps on a pair of black rubber gloves. “Do you want to talk about pain management techniques?” he asks. The bearded systems administrator across the table, who requested I call him “Andrew,” has paid Grafstra $30 to have a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip injected into the space between his thumb and pointer finger, and as Graafstra describes Lamaze-type breathing methods, Andrew looks remarkably untroubled, in spite of the intimidatingly high-gauge syringe sitting on the table between them. Graafstra finishes his pain talk, fishes a tiny cylindrical two-millimeter diameter EM4012 RFID chip out of a tin of isopropyl alcohol, and drops it into the syringe’s end, replacing the RFID tag intended for pets that came with the injection kit. He swabs Andrew’s hand with iodine, carefully pinches and pulls up a fold of skin on the top of his hand to create a tent of flesh, and with the other hand slides the syringe into the subcutaneous layer known as the fascia...