Author Archives: ngharo

November 2012 Meeting Recap

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We had a great turnout this meeting.  At least 4 new people showed up!

The night started out with introductions and updates on any member projects going on.  It was interesting to hear the new people give a quick overview of what they’re interested in.  We hope to see them again next month.

We started the fun with Anarchy giving a remote demo of BeEF and Metasploit.  It was very interesting and raised many questions (which is always a good thing).  He demonstrated how to take over a browser session using a BeEF JavaScript inclusion in IE.  BeEF relied on XHR requests to a HTTP server it had launched to execute code on the client’s browser session.

Darkwind gave another demo of FLEX pager decoding using his modified scanner radio which piped audio into his laptop that had software running to decode the FLEX protocol.  Always interesting to see potentially private information flying around over old school pagers.  Still very popular in the medical and alerting agencies.  There was a lot of interesting discussions happening and projects to look at while the projector showed incoming pages.  T3 had his oscilloscope and was looking at ethernet signals, which is very neat if you haven’t seen it.  One can identify physical problems in cable just by looking at the patterns.

F4R4D4Y donated items (covert lock-picking set and roll of solder) for the free junk giveaway which went to Castor and CoderDX.  Thanks for everyone pitching in a few bucks to keep the server up and beer flowing!

Til next time…

3D Printer Fund

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There has been a lot of buzz about 3D printers over the last year.  Prices are coming down and resolution has been increasing.  Klaiviel, our resident lockpicking guru, is attempting to start a business around it.  We feel that DC414 as a whole needs their hands on this technology.  We’re starting a 3D printer fund starting now.

There are many options to go with but we want to get the ball rolling while research is happening in parallel.  Price range we’re looking at is between $500 and $1,000 for quality printers.

This won’t happen without help from people like you.   Once purchases / assembled / hacked, our goal is to make the printer accept jobs from online. We’d queue up jobs and have a webcam feed to view progress when printing remotely.   Notifications would be sent out to the author upon start, completion, and possibly other metrics we can get out of the printer.

  • Donate $25+ gets you free stickers
  • Donate $50+ gets you a free shirt
  • Donate $100+ gets you free prints for 6 months
  • Donate $150+ gets you free prints and priority for 6 months

Any size donation gets you on the thank you list.

As of now we have $233 in the fund.  Make your donation now (look to the right) and lets get this ball rolling.

BarCamp – Post Conference Report

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DC414 got a lot of exposure at BarCamp.  We were the only peeps that setup in “the commons” where most everyone would pass through while entering the building.  This was also the area that lightning talks, introductions, and closing events took place.

Wall of Sheep
The wall was a great success for the most part.  Initially, we had to manually sniff and enter sheep onto the wall.  This was becoming a pain in the ass.  We finally got it automated by taking a log from ettercap and piping it into a ruby script which would post to simple webservice.  The source can be found here.  In the afternoon we started getting flooded with fake logins to gmail.com from a user on the network.  Some nerd had scripted this to create chaos upon us!  Unfortunately, we were tapped onto the network at such a point were we would not see local IPs for the source of traffic.  I lol’d and set dw5304 on the hunt to track the user down.  We knew he was using ruby as that’s what the user-agent string was.  dw5304 quickly found him and we all had a laugh.  The scripter gave a lightning talk on his mischief later in the evening.  We’d like to expand on the current scripts and tweak our filters to automate even more types of insecure communications.

The overall atmosphere was very, very hacker friendly.  I had fun listening in to Klaiviel, Vlad, and darkwind troll some unfortunate hotel workers on their radios.  We also did a bit of urban exploration in Bucketwork’s basement … with a 1w laser 😉  Klaiviel did an awesome job presenting on lock picking/etc.  It was funny how Klaiviel showed up with like 5x as many locks and equipment as the guy who was hosting the lockpicking session.  There is safe at Bucketworks that they need assistance opening … Klaiviel did a bunch of research and came to the conclusion that he will need to brute force it.  I’m hoping dc414 can come together and make this happen.  dw5304 dropped a lot of knowledge to people coming by our setup.  Much thanks to all the equipment and dedication he brought to BarCamp.

Some very smart folks were creeping around and while I personally did not see many presentations, I still learned a lot.  We gave out a ton of stickers, flyers, window clings (thanks cmoney and Anarchy).  With that we should see new peeps start showing up to meetings.

Using Unetbootin to create bootable USB drive from iso

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I had used Unetbootin to create a USB installer from a Ubuntu ISO image. All went OK in creating and installing the USB image following UNetbootin instructions, so I thought.

The Problem
UNetbootin created menu entries in the bootloader containing invalid arguments.
When booting, it would load the kernel, then kick me to a shell stating
init not found pass init= to kernel
Googling reveals many other users having the same issue.

The Solution
Bootable Linux CDs usually always contain a configuration file for the bootloader. I mounted the ISO image loopback (# mount -o loop image.iso /mnt/mountpoint) and found Ubuntu 10.x is using Grub, which is pretty standard across all Linux distros. Looking at this config file in /boot/grub/loopback.cfg in my instance, I was able to see how Ubuntu was expected to boot.

Here’s what the default menu entry in Ubuntu Netbook image looks like:
menuentry "Try Ubuntu Netbook without installing" {
linux /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu-netbook.seed boot=casper iso-scan/filename=${iso_path} quiet splash --
initrd /casper/initrd.lz
}

Passing kernel=/casper/vmlinuz initrd=/casper/initrd.lz boot=casper to UNetbootin’s bootloader and it booted right up.