via: handlewithlinux.com

A good password has the problem of being difficult to remember. And sometimes you might need to get in to a system where the root password is long forgotten (or left with the system administrator before you).
Luckily there are ways of getting access to systems without having the password. This is of course in a sense also a security risk. That’s why you should always be aware that having unattended physical access to a computer system means the same as having root access to the operating system. Unless the information on a system is encrypted, it’s only as save as the room it’s in.

The method to use to reset the password if you lost the root (or only) password depends on the configuration of your system. But it mostly comes down to two separate tasks:

– get write access to the root partition

– change the password/circumvent control

Here are some things you can try from easy to more complicated. (more…)

Toshiba laptops aren’t like most laptops where you can remove the BIOS battery and let it sit for a few hours to reset the BIOS. So what do you do? There are three forms of BIOS password removal being used currently by Toshiba:
1. Parallel port wraparound connector
2. Shorting a jumper, with power and with no power
3. Challenge/Response code

(more…)

Tools Needed : MDD pyCrypto Volatility 1.3 Beta Volatility Plugin from Moyix ManTech Memory DD (MDD) (http://www.mantech.com/msma/MDD.asp) is released under GPL by Mantech International. MDD is capable of copying the complete contents of memory on the following Microsoft Operating Systems: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2008 Server. After downloading MDD from the Mantech site you need to run (more…)

Here’s a .pdf by Fastback68 which appears to to compiled from qasimtoep’s old website explaining how to reset a Dell BIOS password using a paperclip.The laptop that was used in this demonstration is a Model 630 type PPX.

There are a lot of people who have a dell or similar laptop that they are not able to use because of a special password chip that can’t be cleared by resetting the CMOS using software or by removing the battery. (more…)

The month’s victim comes courtesy of Yahoo, or should I say Yahoo’s HotJobs.com. On October 28^th, popular internet research and analysis company Netcraft discovered a vulnerability on the Yahoo site that was being exploited to steal user authentication cookies. These cookies contain user login credentials that can be used to access any of Yahoo’s services, including e-mail. These cookies were being sent remotely to a site in the United States under the control of the attacker.

Yahoo has since corrected the flaw and released the following statement to netcraft:

The team was made aware of this particular Cross-Site Scripting issue yesterday morning (Sunday, Oct. 26) and a fix was deployed within a matter of hours. Yahoo! appreciates Netcraft’s assistance in identifying this issue.

As a safety precaution, we recommend users change their passwords, should they still be concerned. Users should always verify via their Sign-in Seal that they are giving their passwords to Yahoo.com.

How it happened:

The attacker managed to find a flaw at hotjobs.yahoo.com that allows visitors to inject obfuscated JavaScript into the page. The script can be configured to steal authentication cookies. The authentication cookie can then be used to allow the attacker to pose as the user.  This type of attack, and loyal netleets readers already know, is called cross-site scripting. Earlier in the year netcraft found a similar flaw at ychat.help.yahoo.com.

This attack was probably executed using the CookieMonster tool that has recently affected netflix.com and bankofamerica. CookieMonster is a cookie stealing toolkit that works with both http and https sites. It siphons authentication cookies from vulnerable sites. These cookies can be used to hijack a users account.

Theregister.co.uk best describes CookieMonster as follows:

The vulnerability stems from website developers’ failure to designate authentication cookies as secure. That means web browsers are free to send them over the insecure http channel, and that’s exactly what CookieMonster causes them to do. It does this by caching all DNS responses and then monitoring hostnames that use port 443 to connect to one of the domain names stored there. CookieMonster then injects images from insecure (non-https) portions of the protected website, and – voila! – the browser sends the authentication cookie.

A CookieMonster blog listed several popular sites that were allegedly vulnerable back in September. Those sites include southwest.com, expedia.com, usairways.com, register.com, newegg.com, ebay.com, any many many more.

What can be done:

In addition to the steps outlined in this XSS tutorial, sites that contain cookies for authentication must not allow cookie values to be translated on the client side. In the early days of cookie based authentication, many sites simply stored authentication information in the cookie, which can be read in any text editor. Today, cookies merely act as a reference point for server side authentication, however if the cookie can be used from any client, it defeats the purpose of even hiding the true value.

Perhaps the easiest thing that could have been done on Yahoo’s part would have been to configure their site to use http-only or https-only cookies. If only http is allowed, malicious javascript cannot be injected.

Via: netleets.com

An Oracle DB user which has been granted CREATE ANY DIRECTORY can use that system privilege to grant themselves the SYSDBA system privilege by creating a DIRECTORY pointing to the password file location on the OS and then overwriting it with a previously prepared known binary password file using UTL_FILE.PUT_RAW from within the DB.

This paper will show how the issue can be exploited and most importantly how to secure against it. This is an original vulnerability affecting current versions of the DB and please note that Oracle Corp’s Security Department have already been informed in accordance with ethical procedures and have given their permission to publish.

Proof of concept code tested on 10.1, 10.2 and 11g on both Linux and Windows and is available below.

Here is the paper.

Here is the code.