Sprayfly

Long Awaited

Firefox 2 has finally arrived. Although I am unsure whether it is just chance, the release coincides with the recent release of Internet Explorer 7 by Microsoft. The new version of Firefox brings added security, an improved User Interface and better RSS integration as a starter.
There are however, no massive changes and it still leaves more to be desired. For the moment, I’m sticking with flock which gives me much better Web 2.0 integration (del.icio.us, blogging, flickr etc). It also looks nicer.

Heres a screenshot anyway:

Has anybody else tried this out yet? What do you think?

Goodbye WEP!

I decided I would try to break my wireless network today using a few handy network tools. It is a D-Link Wireless network with 128 bit WEP encryption. To perform the crack I was using my Windows XP computer, a Netgear WG111 USB Wireless dongle and the popular aircrack-ng set of tools.

Data Capture

The first part of the hack involves capturing ‘IV’ packets from your wireless network. Using airodump.exe, you select the wireless adapter you wish to use and the wireless channel you are targeting. You then tell the program where to save the captured packets and leave things running for a while. To break a 128 bit WEP key you need around 1,000,000 packets to be safe although it can be done with fewer.

Too Slow…

The unfortunate truth is that a wireless access point with nobody connected doesn’t send out many packets at all. After half an hour, you will be lucky to have 300!! To speed things up a little, I connected with another computer and started transferring some big files wirelessly across the network. Within about 15 minutes, I had enough ‘IV’ packets captured.

The Crack

All that is left to do is to feed the captured data file to aircrack-ng.exe through a command line. Within a matter of seconds, it should figure out your wireless key and display the message “Key Found!”. I have blurred out some of the characters below to protect my key

The Point

The point is, don’t rely on WEP encryption. I certainly don’t, my access point normally runs WPA-PSK encryption which while not entirely secure, offers better protection. This attack was done from a Windows computer but using the Linux version of the same tool, cracks can be performed within a few minutes!

Disclaimer:
Please remember that it is illegal to access other peoples wireless networks without their permission. This hack was done on my own wireless network to prove a point. I do not encourage people to break wireless networks.

Drat!

Don’t you just hate it when you accidentally delete the ‘Show Desktop’ shortcut that sits in your quick launch bar. Well there is an easy way of producing a new one to save you some trouble next time.

Just a text file

Thats right, ‘Show Desktop’ is just a text file but with a .scf extension stuck on the end. So to make a new one, all we need to know are the contents of this text file. To save you googling around, here they are

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

How to go about making it

This is easy. In any folder, or on the desktop, right click and select New –> Text Document.
Immediately rename the file as ‘Show Desktop.scf’ and when prompted if you are sure you want to change the extension, click yes. Now, edit the file in your favourite text editor (notepad is the default windows text editor, I hope that you have something better!). Paste in the lines of text quoted above and save. Magically, the file adopts the pretty little icon and if you double click on it, the desktop is displayed. Now just drag this file onto your quick launch bar. Voila!

Update Multiple Files on a Windows Machine

I recently needed to update all SWF files on a website I was working on with a newer version. However, these files were in multiple folders and there were hundreds of them, therefore it was out of the question that I do this update manually. However, no matter how much I searched, I just couldn’t find the utility to do this. There seem to be thousands of search and replace tools out there but the vast majority are for searching for strings in text files.

Who other than…

Well I didn’t think it would come to this, but the people who came to my help were… Microsoft!
I managed to find some documentation for a command line replace tool on the microsoft resources site.

The syntax for this tool is quite simple:

replace [drive1:][path1] FileName [drive2:][path2] [/p] [/r] [/s] [/w] [/u]

Lets break that down:

• replace is the initial command
• drive1 specifies the drive containing the new file (such as C:)
• path1 refers to a location such as \Program Files
• Filename refers to the name of the file to be replaced
• drive2 and path2 are like drive1 and path1 but point to the directory containing the files to be replaced

Samples

So how is this used then?
Imagine that we want to replace all instances of flash_index.swf in P:\public\ with the latest version, C:\update\flash_index.swf

The syntax would be:

replace C:\update\flash_index.swf P:\public\

Lets not forget that you can also add the /s flag at the end. This searches all subdirectories so would also update the relevant files in P:\public\site1\ and so on.

The syntax would be:

replace C:\update\flash_index.swf P:\public\ /s

There are a few other ways that replace can be used. These are documented on the Microsoft Site. This tool is great if you are running your website on Windows Servers and need to make global updates quickly and easily. Do make sure you test it first before doing anything drastic. Of course, you would be silly to be running your site on a Windows Server in the first place but that is besides the point!

Hope this helped somebody out there then!