I was using the vpnc the other day on my Backtrack 4 R2 system to log in to VPN. I noticed that there was nothing that would give me the status of whether or not the tunnel was up. So I wrote a small one-liner to help me:

while [ `ps aux |grep vpnc|grep -v grep|awk '{print $2}'` ] ; do printf "Connected\r"; done


Silsilay, the latest movie by Khalid Mohammed, a critic famous for his Sunday Times articles, is a disaster to say the least. Mr.Mohammed, who has torn apart most of the movies in his journalism career, to my disappointment, has not proven himself any better than the pack he tore apart. I think if he himself saw the movie impartially he probably would have given it negative five stars.
Silsilay, as the movie is called, is a movie of three stories running one after the other albeit aimlessly. The first story is of a film actress (Bhoomika Chawla) who falls in love with a bookie (Rahul Bose) who is two-timing his girl-friend, who in turn is two-timing him…sounds complex…don’t bother…it’s not complex but just kiwi drainex!
The second story is of a young girl (Riya Sen) who looks stunning in the movie and is afraid to lose her virginity and is consoled by her overly promiscuous friend to do *it*. Ashmit Patel steps into the story as her boy toy (read “snuggies”) and Jimmy Shergill, who is her co-worker from work and is looking to gain her attention. Some good (aimless) smooches result between Ashmit and Riya and Khalid Mohammed succeeds in spinning a story that is as ridiculous as Riya and Ashmit’s acting. For god’s sake Riya, Nirma soap advertisements were better!
As if the torture was not enough, Mr.Mohammed had a life-saver (or at least as he thought) a still more ridiculous story. Well, some B-grade films would have called this 3rd story a *saga*…but I frankly think that Khalid Mohammed doesn’t think!
It’s a combination of a love triangle…sorry…love quadrilateral with a diagonal (please figure out what this means on your own…watching the movie wouldn’t help anyway). In this story Tabu plays a housewife whose husband (KK) is going out with a (super hot) air hostess (Celina Jaitley) and whose son suffers from Oedipus Complex ( where a person falls in love with his own mother). As if this carcass did not stink the theatres…there was more bull**** coming across in the form of Shah Rukh Khan in between stories and scenes. Mr. Khan there are many ways to win Filmfare awards…this is probably the last way to *buy* the awards. Mr.Khan does a saving act by signalling to the audience how he behaves when nature calls arrive…how he insanely goes about dancing for no reason whatsoever.
This is all a part of the crap that I call Silsilay!
-Rajat.
Awesome Japanese Artifacts!

The New Year brings in interesting things (or so we hope). My friend came up to me with an “infected” computer with a fantastic piece of malware installed. The malware was presented the user with a completely different HTML page when something was searched on Google. Browser Helper Objects (BHOs) are Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) that are installed in Internet Explorer (IE) and have a complete access to the DOM tree of the browser window. The name of the DLL was xyusx.dll (or something like that). This DLL was packed so that it wouldn’t permit a clean disassembly. The usual tricks seemed to work and I was able to unpack the DLL.

The procedure is simple. Open the DLL in OllyDbg. Search for the PUSHAD instruction (this instruction stores all the registers on the top of the stack) and set a breakpoint (F2 key in OllyDbg) on that instruction.

Press F9 to continue the debugging. Press F8 to execute the instruction, and then set a hardware breakpoint on the top of the stack in the Dump Window as shown in the image. You can do this easily by right clicking on the ESP register and clicking on “Follow in Dump”.
Once you reach the POPAD instruction or the hardware breakpoint is activated, this shows that the registers that were saved on the stack are now going to be restored in the respective registers. This indicates that the program has now finished extracting itself and is ready to execute the instructions.
I used OllyDump to dump out the contents of this DLL and then used LordPE to repair the import table. This process, however, needs more work due to the nature of the automated import address table repairing as some things can be missed.
Once this repairing was finished, I opened the file in IDA Pro to disassemble the unpacked DLL. This did give me a lot of information about this DLL, however, I’m still in the process of completing a good disassembly of this DLL.
As for now, I can say that this DLL installed a bunch of spyware CLSIDs into the system.
Some of the CLSIDs (out of the 45 that it uses) by this malware are listed below:

{CF46BFB3-2ACC-441b-B82B-36B9562C7FF1}
{67C55A8D-E808-4caa-9EA7-F77102DE0BB6}
{1557B435-8242-4686-9AA3-9265BF7525A4}
{55DB983C-BDBF-426f-86F0-187B02DDA39B}
{A24B57F8-505D-4fc5-9960-740E304D1ABA}
{4B646AFB-9341-4330-8FD1-C32485AEE619}
{CD3447D4-CA39-4377-8084-30E86331D74C}
{DEBEB52F-CFA6-4647-971F-3EDB75B63AFA}
{8F2183B9-F4DB-4913-8F82-6F9CC42E4CF8}
{92A444D2-F945-4dd9-89A1-896A6C2D8D22}
{1F6581D5-AA53-4b73-A6F9-41420C6B61F1}
{1126271C-A8C3-438c-B951-7C94B453B16B}
{938A8A03-A938-4019-B764-03FF8D167D79}
{44218730-94E0-4b24-BBF0-C3D8B2BCE2C3}

This DLL also seemed to communicate to :

89.188.16.10
89.188.16.16
65.243.103.56
65.243.103.60
65.243.103.62

Whatever you do to these servers is upto you. Some google searches allude that this is a “Vundo infection”. I’m also not sure what solutions people are posting to this problem but I’d not feel safe if this malware was on my computer and I’d definitely format my Windows install, patch it and change my passwords! I’m not completely dne with the disassembly and reversing of this malware yet, but I’m sure I’ll post more when I delve into this disassembled code deeper.

I was looking at some Oracle databases recently and I saw that the Oracle Auditing Tool (OAT) is an awesome toolset but you just need to download the classes12.zip which are the Oracle JDBC drivers for Java into that same directory. I downloaded the classes12.zip from the Oracle site and placed it into the same folder as OAT. On linux, the .sh files will then need some editing. Just replace classes111.zip to classes12.zip and off you go.
Patrik Karlsson has done an awesome job of providing these tools. You can do the whole gamut of operations using this tool from first guessing the Oracle SID to checking for default passwords using opwg.sh.
sudo ./opwg.sh -s 192.168.1.101
The above command will give you the Oracle SID for the remote database.
Once you have the sid and the credentials you can run queries using oquery.sh
sudo ./oquery.sh -s 192.168.1.101 -u DBSNMP -p DBSMP -d db_sid_found -q "select 1 from dual"
The source of the OAT is also provided here: http://www.cqure.net/tools/oat-source-1.3.1.zip. I found an interesting decompiler for Java too (when I overlooked that the sources existed on cqure.net website) and it’s called jd-gui. It works wonderfully on linux.

This has been a weird one, finding version information on the operating systems.
On Ubuntu, the following gets the version information
  cat /etc/issue
  cat /etc/lsb-release

On Linux, finding the kernel version
  uname -a
  cat /proc/version

On Windows, from Start-> Run -> cmd.exe
  winver
OR
  systeminfo

This is very simple but still there are a few times when memory fails and we’re not able to do the obvious.

To see the information about the hardware mapping :
  lshal

Finding your CPU Information
  cat /proc/cpuinfo

Finding memory information
  cat /proc/meminfo

Maximum number of SYN requests that the host will remember which did not receive an ACK from clients:
  cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_max_syn_backlog

Finding data bus-size or bit-size i.e., whether my CPU is 32-bit or 64-bit:
  sudo lshw -C cpu | grep width

This had me stumped but it’s not that tough. The persona website getpersonas.com tends to install personas without any permissions. But you can disable it by typing “about:config” in the Firefox address bar and remove any entry in the following property: lightweightThemes.usedThemes
There it is…you’ve now disabled personas!

Finally, the CSCI 599 course on Search Engines concluded. The presentation went off pretty well.
The worst part was that an effort of 5 straight days went down the drain trying to go through the Nutch code. I think the Nutch developer community needs to get a little more matured and help newbies like me else new people would not join the movement! Eventually, I had to make my own focused crawler, query interface web data crawled and query interface.
I also got my CSCi558L scores which were ok…94,99,100 so things look ok so far but now the main effort is just starting off to get the Worm fingerprinting with ITrace going. Let’s hope things turn off well.