Today in my CIS4361 Secure Operating Systems class I was drifting off as the professor was doing a quick review of filesystem attacks when I heard the strangest phrase since the BouncyCastle provider for JCE: Smurfing. Apparently this smurfing, as it were, is when an ICMP echo packet is spoofed from the target’s IP address to a router, called the smurf amplifier, which then sends the request to all of the nodes attached to it who then send ICMP echo reply packets to the target. Essentially, this inundates the router and target with echo reply packets and should lead to all out network outages. Pretty neat, and with a name like smurfing, it has to be good.
Resources:
It’s called ScatterChat by Hacktivismo/CDC. Very nice tool that uses the Gaim source along with the Tor network to route IM traffic as well as encrypt it using RSA key files. Very slick.
ScatterChat
From TOR Park Website:
You may have heard about those heavily advertised second-rate software packages like Anonymizer, SafeSharing, InvisibleIP, SecretSurfer, etc. Well, not only do they charge you money and/or a subscription fee, but they are bloated and full of useless components. They also require an installation which leaves tracks on your computer. How is that anonymous? Try Torpark; its small, portable, clean, free of spyware/adware, and best of all its free of cost.
From TOR Official Website:
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.
A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently. Law enforcement uses Tor for visiting or surveilling web sites without leaving government IP addresses in their web logs, and for security during sting operations.
Today on digg, there was an article about a “Deadly F5 Attack” at a highschool. Man, that’s sick. I guess if you wrote a script to maliciously infect a machine to execute F5 on every machine it might be deadly but no, guess what this kid did? He wrote on his blog and told all of his friends to go to the school’s website and hit F5. Now, what’s funny about this is:
- It’s a kid’s blog. Seriously.
- Who listened to this guy?
- F5, what’s that do again? Refresh. On what systems?
- Why do they run their webserver on the internal network?
- Don’t they know they’re going to get dugg/slashdotted now?
So there you have it. Watch your keystrokes, or your next blog entry could be from jail. Lovely.
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