Oct 22, 2008

Add URL bar to your Windows XP taskbar

You can add an Internet URL address bar to your Windows XP taskbar. Doing so will let you type in URLs and launch Web pages without first launching a browser. It will also let you launch some native Windows XP applications in much the same way as you would via the Run menu (so you could type in calc to launch the calculator or mspaint to launch Microsoft Paint. Here's how you add the address bar:

1. Right-click on the taskbar, select Toolbars, and then click Address.

2. The word Address will appear on your taskbar.

3. Double click it to access it.

4. If that doesn't work, your taskbar is locked. You can unlock it by right-clicking on the taskbar again and uncheck Lock the Taskbar.

NOTE: You may also need to grab the vertical dotted lines beside the word Address and drag it to the left to make the Address window appear.

Oct 17, 2008

Boost up your firefox speed

Yes, firefox is already pretty damn fast but did you know that you can tweak it and improve the speed even more.That's the beauty of this program being open source.

Here's what you do:
In the URL bar, type “about:config” and press enter. This will bring up the configuration “menu” where you can change the parameters of Firefox.

Note that these are what I’ve found to REALLY speed up my Firefox significantly - and these settings seem to be common among everybody else as well. But these settings are optimized for broadband connections - I mean with as much concurrent requests we’re going to open up with pipelining, you’d better have a big connection.

Double Click on the following settins and put in the numbers below - for the true / false booleans - they’ll change when you double click.

Code:
browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs – true
network.http.max-connections – 48
network.http.max-connections-per-server – 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy – 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server – 4
network.http.pipelining – true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests – 100
network.http.proxy.pipelining – true
network.http.request.timeout – 300

One more thing,Right-click somewhere on that screen and add a NEW -> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. Since you’re broadband - it shouldn’t have to wait.

Now you should notice you’re loading pages MUCH faster now.

Oct 13, 2008

Create your own shortcuts for shutdown and rebooting:

First, create a shortcut on your desktop by right-clicking on the desktop, choosing New, and then choosing Shortcut. The Create Shortcut Wizard appears. In the box asking for the location of the shortcut, type shutdown. After you create the shortcut, double-clicking on it will shut down your PC.But you can do much more with a shutdown shortcut than merely shut down your PC. You can add any combination of several switches to do extra duty, like this:

shutdown -r -t 01 -c "Rebooting your PC"

Double-clicking on that shortcut will reboot your PC after a one-second delay and display the message "Rebooting your PC." The shutdown command includes a variety of switches you can use to customize it. Table 1-3 lists all of them and describes their use.

I use this technique to create two shutdown shortcuts on my desktop—one for turning off my PC, and one for rebooting. Here are the ones I use:

shutdown -s -t 03 -c "Bye Bye m8!"
shutdown -r -t 03 -c "Ill be back m8 ;)!"

Switch
What it does

-s
Shuts down the PC.

-l
Logs off the current user.

-t nn
Indicates the duration of delay, in seconds, before performing the action.

-c "messagetext"
Displays a message in the System Shutdown window. A maximum of 127 characters can be used. The message must be enclosed in quotation marks.

-f
Forces any running applications to shut down.

-r
Reboots the PC.

Hope you found this post useful

Oct 9, 2008

Hack Windows Screen Saver Password

This is an interesting hack and not many people know about it.This requires no canned hacking tool, we will crack the password manually!!! First of all, why do we need to crack the Windows Screen Saver? How does it restrict us? If a Screen Saver is password protected, then whenever it is turned on, then in order to turn it off, you need to enter a password.It does not allow us to do anything on a system until and unless we enter the password. We will keep seeing the screen saver until we authenticate ourselves by entering the password.No not even CTRL+ALT+DEL works in this case. Windows stores the Screen Saver password in the user.dat file in the Windows directory.


If you have multiple profiles on your system then it is stored in the user.dat file in the c:\windows\profiles\username directory.(On Win 3x systems it is stored in the control.ini file The user.dat file constitues the registry of the Windows system, thus we can say that the Windows Screen Saver Password is stored in the registry.First of all, you need to change the attributes of this file and make it editable by right clicking on it and unselecting the Read Only Option else you will not be able to edit it.Once this is done, open this file in WordPad (Any text editor will do except MS WORD And Notepad.)Now look for the string: ScreenSave_Data You will find an even number of characters after Data, this is the Screen Saver Password encrypted and stored in the hex system.Each pair or hex values represent a single ASCII plaintext character.This means that if there are 10 hex values then the password is of 5 characters, each pair of Hex values standing for a single plaintext ASCII character.So in order to get the Plaintext password you just need to decrypt these hex values into ASCII.

Oct 7, 2008

Cracking Windows Password

Cracking The Windows Login Password:The Windows ( 9x) password is passed through a very weak algorithm and is quite easy to crack.Windows stores this login password in *.pwl files in the c:\windows directory.The .pwl files have the filename which is the username coresponding to the password stored by it.A typical .pwl file would be as follows:

Note: This .pwl file has been taken from a Win98 machine running IE 5.0

###############CUT HERE##############

ã‚…–
ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ
ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ
ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿR

p u.ÐX+|rÐq”±/2³ Êå¡hCJ‚D × `ÍY¥!íx}(qW¤ãƱ
4+\¾õ+%E°ËÔýmÇÔ ÞI»‚ B àלøÐ…'@

############CUT HERE#############

Lets go through the contents of this .pwl file.I am not sure what the first line signifies, but my guess would be that it is the Name to which the computer is registered to.The next four lines have just been entered by Windows and are not readable.The last two lines is the password but in the encrypted form.There is no way to get the plaintext password by just studying the Windows algorithm and these lines.To actually crack the password you need a simple but mewl cracker coded in C called Glide.I have included the code below.If you have a sound C knowledge you can study the code and actually experience how a password cracker works and how a password is encrypted in Windows i.e. more about the Windows encryption algorithm.

Newbie Tip: All exploits, crackers, mail bombers practically everything related with Hacking has been written in either Perl or C. If you really want to be considered an elite hacker, you have to know how to program, without a sound knowledge of either C (C++) or Perl you cannot hack successfully.Almost all exploits available on the net have an important part edited or missing, without which it has no use.Some exploits may be needed to be edited in order to be run in your platform.In order to do all this programming is needed.

If anybody needs this program then he or she can post your e-mail id as a comment.I will sent it to your id.

Oct 5, 2008

Cracking Password

Hello friends in the last post i gave you some knowledge about the passwords and in this post I am going to tell you some ways with the help of which you can easily crack password and became a password cracker.But all of this requires patience.

The most common method of password cracking is password guessing, although it requires a lot of luck, it can be successful sometimes.To start to guess the password, you first need to gather all kinds of info about the victim.(See the Guidelines of keeping a password for more details.)The most common and the most successful method of password cracking is the use of password crackers.Now what exactly are password crackers? Now to understand what a password cracker is and how it works, you first need to understand how a person is authenticated.

When you are creating a new account or registering or running the setup(basically whenever you create a new account by entering the Username and Password.) you might be asked for the Username and Password.The username is mostly stored in plain text, but the password that you enter is stored in an encrypted form.Now when you enter the password, it is passed through a predefined algorithm and is thus encrypted and is stored on the hard disk.

So next time when you use the account and enter the password, the text (password) you type is passed through the same algorithm and is compared with the earlier stored value.If they both match, the user is authenticated else the authentication fails.The algorithm that is used to encrypt the password is a one way algorithm, by that I mean that if we pass the encrypted password through the reverse algorithm, we will not get the original plain text password.

Lets take an example to make it more clear: Say your plain text password is xyz123 and it is passed through an algorithm and stored in the a file as 0101027AF. Now if you get his encrypted password and know the algorithm which xyz123 is passed through to get 0101027AF, you cannot reverse the algorithm to get xyz123 from 0101027AF.

When you are typing in your password, the computer does not display it in plaintext but instead shows only stars i.e. ******** so that if someone is shoulder surfing, he cannot find out the password.The text box has been programmed in such a way.On most forms Unix you will not even see the asterisk marks and the cursor will not move, so that neither does a person shoulder surfing, find out the password nor does he find out the length of the password.

Password Crackers are of two types-:
Brute Force and Dictionary Based.

Dictionary Based password Crackers try out all passwords from a given pre defined dictionary list to crack a password.These are faster but more often than not are unsuccessful and do not return the password.As they do not try out all combinations of possible keys, they are unable to crack those passwords which have symbols or numbers in between.

Brute Force Password Crackers try out all combinations of all keys which can be found in the keyboard (i.e. Symbols, Numbers, Alphabets) both Lower Case and Upper Case.These kinds of Password Crackers have a greater success rate but take a long time to crack the password.As they take all possible keys into consideration, they are more effective.Now that you know the two main types of password crackers lets see how they work.As passwords are encrypted by a one way algorithm, password crackers do not extract the password from the file but instead take the combination of letters, encrypt them by passing the characters through the original algorithm and compare this value with the stored encrypted value.If these two match, then the password cracker displays the password in plain text.

Oct 3, 2008

Introduction to Password

First of all, what exactly is a password.A password is best described as a verification or an authentication tool or object. Passwords are used to ensure legal and proper access to only those people who have the authority or the permission to view the data.A password is required in many places,you are required a password, to access your Inbox, you are required a password to dial up to your Internet Service Provider and in some organisations you also need to enter a password to start the system.At all places the Username and Password pair is used to authenticate the user.Usernames are used to identify the user and the password is used to authenticate the user and for every unique username there is a unique password.Take the example of the Lock and Key, for every lock you need a unique key to open it and enter.Here the Lock acts as the Username and the password would be the key.So passwords are as important as the key of your house.

Your house remains safe as long as only you who is the rightful owner has the key and no one else finds it.Similiarly, the concept behind passwords is that it is only the rightful owner who knows the password and no one else knows it.Everyday we hear about password stealing,computer break ins etc.Sometimes the user chooses very lame passwords which are easily guessed by hackers.There are certain guidelines which I would like to tell you which you must keep in mind while choosing a password:

1. Never keep your password same as your Username
2. Never choose your own name, Date of Birth, spouse's name, pet's name, child's name etc as your password, those are the first ones which are tried by a hacker.
3. Some people are so lazy that they keep their password to be 'Enter' (Carriage return).
4. Try to choose a word which is not in the dictionary and contains both numbers and alphabets,and if possible use both Lower Case and Upper Case alphabets and also symbols like
(#,$,%,^ etc) as they can be cracked only be brute force password crackers which take too long a time to crack.
You may say that choosing of weak passwords is responsible for the large number of hacks, but people themselves are the weakest chain in the whole authentication process.Most people usually use lame passwords like those I mentioned above, and those who use excellent passwords are not able to remember them and then write the password down on a piece of paper and stick it on their monitor.One should try his level best to remember weird passwords if he wants to keep his system secure.The best places where you can find the passwords, would be beneath the keyboard, behind the CPU or even on the sides of the monitor.Some people have trouble remembering the large number of passwords that they are asked for,while using various services, as a result they use the same password everywhere.Thus knowing even a single password might help in some cases.

Oct 1, 2008

Beginners guide to Hack UNIX Part-2

Things to do when you are in: Some of the commands that you may want to try follow below:

who is on (shows who is currently logged on the system.)
write name (name is the person you wish to chat with)
To exit chat mode try ctrl-D.
EOT=End of Transfer.
ls -a (list all files in current directory.)
du -a (checks amount of memory your files use;disk usage)
cd\name (name is the name of the sub-directory you choose)
cd\ (brings your home directory to current use)
cat name (name is a filename either a program or documentation your username has written)

Most Unix programs are written in the C language or Pascal since Unix is a programmers' environment.
One of the first things done on the system is print up or capture (in a buffer) the file containing all user names and accounts. This can be done by doing the following command:

cat /etc/passwd

If you are successful you will a list of all accounts on the system. It should look like this:

root:hvnsdcf:0:0:root dir:/:
joe:majdnfd:1:1:Joe Cool:/bin:/bin/joe
hal::1:2:Hal Smith:/bin:/bin/hal

The "root" line tells the following info :
login name=root
hvnsdcf = encrypted password
0 = user group number
0 = user number
root dir = name of user
/ = root directory

In the Joe login, the last part "/bin/joe " tells us which directory is his home directory (joe) is.
In the "hal" example the login name is followed by 2 colons, that means that there is no password needed to get in using his name.

Conclusion: I hope that this file will help other novice Unix hackers obtain access to the Unix/Xenix systems that they may find. There is still wide growth in the future of Unix, so I hope users will not abuse any systems (Unix or any others) that they may happen across on their journey across the electronic highways of America. There is much more to be learned about the Unix system that I have not covered.
I will try to cover them in few next post.

Beginners guide to Hack UNIX Part-1

Hello friends in this post all references made to the name Unix, may also be substituted to the Xenix operating system.

Brief history: Back in the early sixties, during the development of third generation computers at MIT, a group of programmers studying the potential of computers, discovered their ability of performing two or more tasks simultaneously. Bell Labs, taking notice of this discovery, provided funds for their developmental scientists to investigate into this new frontier. After about 2 years of developmental research, they produced an operating system they called "Unix".

Sixties to Current: During this time Bell Systems installed the Unix system to provide their computer operators with the ability to multitask so that they could become more productive, and efficient. One of the systems they put on the Unix system was called "Elmos". Through Elmos many tasks (i.e. billing,and installation records) could be done by many people using the same mainframe.
Note: Cosmos is accessed through the Elmos system.

Current: Today, with the development of micro computers, such multitasking can be achieved by a scaled down version of Unix (but just as powerful). Microsoft,seeing this development, opted to develop their own Unix like system for the IBM line of PC/XT's. Their result they called Xenix (pronounced zee-nicks). Both Unix and Xenix can be easily installed on IBM PC's and offer
the same functions (just 2 different vendors).

Note: Due to the many different versions of Unix (Berkley Unix, Bell System III, and System V the most popular) many commands following may/may not work. I have written them in System V routines. Unix/Xenix operating systems will be considered identical systems below.

How to tell if/if not you are on a Unix system: Unix systems are quite common
systems across the country. Their security appears as such:

Login; (or login;) password:

When hacking on a Unix system it is best to use lowercase because the Unix system commands are all done in lower- case.

Login; is a 1-8 character field. It is usually the name (i.e. joe or fred) of the user, or initials (i.e. j.jones or f.wilson). Hints for login names can be found trashing the location of the dial-up (use your CN/A to find where the computer is).

Password: is a 1-8 character password assigned by the sysop or chosen by the user.

Common default logins:

login; Password:

root root,system,etc..
sys sys,system
daemon daemon
uucp uucp
tty tty
test test
unix unix
bin bin
adm adm
who who
learn learn
uuhost uuhost
nuucp nuucp

If you guess a login name and you are not asked for a password, and have accessed to the system, then you have what is known as a non-gifted account. If you guess a correct login and pass- word, then you have a user account. And, if you guess the root password, then you have a "super-user" account. All Unix systems have the following installed to their system: root, sys, bin, daemon, uucp, adm.Once you are in the system, you will get a prompt. Common prompts are:

$

%

#

But can be just about anything the sysop or user wants it to be.

In the next post we will see its remaining part.