Thank you to all you Aucklanders who turned up for my humble presentation last night. I presented a few slides on the theory of wireless cracking, and then we jumped right into a practical demonstration. We failed to crack a WEP key with 400,000 IVs the traditional way (I suspect the firmware outsmarted us), but succeeded using PTW to crack WEP ARP data with 45,000 packets.
We moved onto a wordlist attack on a WPA network, which worked exactly as expected, kicking clients off the network with deauthentication injections, and snagging their WPA handshakes. It took less than a second to wordlist the WPA password, but the wordlist was rigged with only about 8 entries, one of which was correct 
We finished off the evening by exploring OpenWRT, and flashing my WRT54GL back to Linksys firmware, and then back to OpenWRT again.
It was great to meet you all, and it’s my observation that Linux communities around the world share common traits – friendliness, geekiness (the good kind), and an excitement for technology 
I’ve put the slides for last night’s presentation here
Below is a list of links for some of the software we discussed last night:
- OpenWRT (Alternative Open Source Router Firmware)
- BackTrack2 (Forensic Analysis Live CD)
- Aircrack-ng (Suite of wireless hacking tools)
- HostAP (Run a software access point with your Prism2 card)
- IPTables “Recent” (Glen Ogilvie introduced us to this – implements some “temporary blacklisting” functions in iptables rules without any additional software)
I loved the original Dune 2 – it was the mother of all RTS games, and was probably the first strategy game I played. I recently made a post about Frank Herbert (author of the Dune series), which showed up in my search engine stats as being hit upon by the search term “dune for linux”.
Intersting.. I did a bit of research, and in fact, there is a “Dune for Linux”. It’s a free clone, called “Dune Legacy“. It’s been enhanced, with multiple-unit-select, network-multiplayer, etc.
The original Dune 2 (Windows XP compatible), can be downloaded here.
I developed a web-based app for a client to store huge amounts of PDF data – we setup a 1.2TB drive for the purpose. Recently, the drive became full. Prematurely.
Database statistics showed that the PDF table was only 400GB in size – so where was the rest of our data going? As with most tech issues, the problem was only solved when the heat was on – unable to gracefully restart the database (because we upgraded the Gentoo init script), we had to kill the process.
Resulting in corruption.
On a 400GB database.
Which couldn’t repair itself, since the myisamcheck functions require free space to make a backup copy, before making any changes. Aaarg!
A bit of research brought the answer.. we had the “log-bin” entry in “my.cnf”. This told MySQL:
“Create a binary log of every insert we’ve ever done. Since we haven’t specified a filename, use the server’s hostname, followed by “-bin” and a number”
I zapped the 600GB of 10GB-sized data-bin files, and restarted myisamcheck. Hopefully it’ll be finished before lunch!
This tutorial shows you how to Get DVD Shrink and DVDdecrypter working perfectly in Ubuntu using Wine. I’m going to test it out, next time I reboot
read more | digg story
The Linux Extremist has an interesting article on the thought-processes / theories of Mr Frank Herbert, known to most of us as the author of the “Dune” series of books. Mr Extremist compares Microsoft Windows to the fictional enslavement of the human race by cold, hard machines. Not bad for 1964 thinking…
For anyone else wishing to survive a potential machine uprising, the following is required reading:
How To Survive a Robot Uprising
How To Survive a Robot Uprising (Google Video)
An excellent step-by-step videos-based guide. There is no longer a reason to have any machine in the house/office which is Windows-only.
Original post by Items dugg by funkypenguinza and software by Elliott Back
