Hacking into a Gmail account proves to be an easy thing. Robert Graham (Ceo of Errata Security) gave a demo of it at Black Hat 2007 yesterday using an unprotected Wifi hotspot. The tools he used — nothing but 2 coded scripts called Ferret and Hamster.

Basically, he used Ferret to capture the Wifi signal Session IDs and Cookies from the victim’s Web browser session and used Hamster to clone the Session IDs/Cookies. The cloned web identity was then used to gain full read/ write access of the Gmail account. The scary part of it all is that one doesn’t need to be a super programmer to hack into an email system i.e. just knowing how to use the scripts would be enough. The term script kiddies comes to mind.

Just shows how much you should be aware of potential exploits within email. George Ou from Znet, posted a good article on security steps to safeguard yourself when using email. You should know however, that there is never a case where it is 100% hacker proof — to think it is would be foolish.

The video shows to how crack WEP and WPA secured wireless networks. It further educates you in preventing hackers from cracking your already secured wireless networks. The main objective is not necessarily to teach people to hack but more so to help you understand the need to take better steps to secure your wireless networks.

For those of you thinking that putting this up may increase the possibility of individuals using it negatively, here are my thoughts on that — the best way to learn and prevent network security vulnerabilities is to know how hackers operate and the loop holes that they target. As Sun Tzu said in his book “The Art of War” … “To know your enemy is half the battle of winning the war”.

Thanks to Brian Young for submitting this. Sorry about the annoying music in between but I believe he included it to cut the monotony of a powerpoint presentation. All information shown is for educational and informational purposes only.

If you are want a faster browsing experience on the Internet, OpenDNS may be an option for you.

Giving you a simplistic version of DNS (or Domain Naming System) - it is a system that translates domain names of websites and servers (like Yahoo.com, Google.com) to numerical IP addresses. Each IP address acts as a unique identification of where it is located on the internet and to which company or business it belongs to. Think of it like a street or house address. So when you type in a domain name on your browser, visit a web page or send an email, your ISP’s DNS Server automatically and transparently does the IP to Domain translation.

There are 2 factors that may influence and enhance your internet browsing experience:

Once you are sure that the first factor is out of the way, you can start concentrating on the later - making sure you have a good DNS. However, that may be a futile effort as most local ISPs would not give you access to their servers or mess with their DNS settings. That is where OpenDNS may be advantageous.

Read more

Ajaxian has posted a way of hacking Digg with two tools i.e. jQuerify and a Fix Digg script. This would allow you to build a reusable “bookmarklet” that can manipulate digg Posts and Comments like remove all buried comments from a Digg post. This screencast shows you how to do it.

Site [ejohn.org] Via [Ajaxian]

If normal backup media doesn’t suit your liking for some odd reason, try this - backing up your data files onto a digital video tapes using a camcorder. Windows, Mac and Linux computer systems should be able to backed up in this way without any problems.

Shareware packages available …

For Windows: Firestreamer and DVSstreamer
For the Mac: DV Backup
For Linux systems: Dvbackup

A rule of thumb would be about 10 GB for every 1 hour digital video tape you use. There might be compatibility problem with using a different camera to read back the data from the one used to record it - so there aren’t any guarantees.