11/30/2015 Programming Contest

Programming Contest are not very different to Capture the Flag, as you know a CTF is a special kind of information security competitions where categories can be Web, Forensics, Crypto, Binary, or something else, The main Idea  is solve challenges, meanwhile Programming Contest is the same but here I can notice clearly an academic approach which includes mathematics , physics, statistics, data structures, and other topics that maybe I don't know yet, This entrance is to express How I feel in my first Programming Contest sponsored by RPC (Red de Programación Competitiva).

As always I was late at the event, starting at 1 p.m of 28 day of November, Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira was the host of this competition, the idea of me participating in this contest was to know more about how it is,What kind of problems I need to face in the future, and the most important if it's funny because if you don't like this just quit out.

My team was conformed by two  more people Leiver a fellow class of the operations research and a new friend that certainly looked pretty smart Sebastian, both of them have a lot of experience in this kind of competitions, is obviously that a team is a conformation to speak also It was to generate synergy, new ideas, discuss problems, and share knowledge in how to solve this or that problem, but that did not happen here apparently I do not know many issues, nor have methods in mind I just could think myself in the problems and maybe share my thoughts, because that was the only thing that happened. To me this experiment was interesting because I'm confident with myself that I need to learn much more, and  increase my expertise in Computer programming, of course there is a goal behind this,and it needs to be part of my personal toolkit as a hacker.

Things that I learn :

If you're going to use c++ you can use this trick,

#include <bits/stdc++.h>

There is no need to include any other header files here and it's interesting because in stack overflow there is a question related to this :

How does #include <bits/stdc++.h> work in C++?: 

It is basically a header file that also includes every standard library and stl include file. The only purpose I can see for it would be for testing and education, please refer to https://gist.github.com/eduarc/6022859 to see an example, I don't exactly know if it's true that this increase the compilation time

trick  that didn't make sense to me was use:

#define fast ios_base::sync_with_stdio(false);cin.tie(NULL)

And It simply optimize cin and cout by making its execution faster, using a kind of syncronization; Off course participants in this competition like in the Ctf's Wargames, need to practice, practice, and practice to get a decent standard math and programming level, here we need to know what type of problem is, and based on that we can use one or other method, something funny to me was when the competition runs out of time everybody was talking about a DP, P,Complexity,Graphs, that was blowing my mind...Something new in this short weekend.

Stay tune !
Reference:
[1]Codeforces
[2]Competitive Programming
[3]Key Advantage of Competitive Programming
[4]PicoCTF: A Game-Based Computer Security Competitionfor High School Students
[1]Developing Small Team-based Cyber SecurityExercises 

1/02/2015 Notes about Cyber Attacks

In this post I'd like to share with you  some  interesting notes that I've been collecting for a while, about cyberattacks and other cyber'put your word here lol' that we hear everyday in the news and maybe knowing that all the journalist and press in general are always doing mistakes in the usage of the words.

According to  the book "Inside Cyber Warfare"  This is an increasing field that has been taken as part of the patrimony of all nations.

There is a growing awareness of the vulnerability of a nation’s critical infrastructure to
network attack. Transportation, banking, telecommunications, and energy are among
the most vulnerable systems and may be subject to the following modes of attack:
• Insider threats
• Anonymous access to protected networks via the Internet and Supervisory Control
and Data Acquisition (SCADA)
• Counterfeit hardware
• Employee abuse of security guidelines leading to malware propagation inside the
firewall

So what would it happend if your country is under one cyber attack? What Would you do ?, here  is something that you could do assuming that everything is connected (knowing that this is happening right now with the Internet of Things concept ).

Keep this things :

1. A battery-powered radio capable of receiving NOAA alerts and two-way radios (walkie-talkies)
2. solar-powered or hand-cranked radio as well
3. Cash reserve should be kept within reach
4. Social Security cards and other essential documents should also be held in a secure container,since access to a computer won’t be guaranteed
5. Prepare a central point to speak with your family members take out power lines and cell phone towers

Online safety tips

 • Limit the amount of personal information you post on social media sites, chat sites, forums and online games.

• Know and use privacy settings provided on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

• Be suspicious of unknown links or requests sent through email or text messages. Don’t click on unknown links or answer strange questions sent to your mobile device, regardless of who the sender appears to be.

• In your email, turn off the option to automatically download attachments. Save and scan any attachments before opening them.

• Verify the authenticity of requests from companies or individuals by contacting them directly, especially if you are being asked to provide personal information.

• Pay close attention to website URLs. Malicious websites sometimes use a variation in common spelling (petfun.com instead of petfun.net, for example) to deceive unsuspecting computer users.

Links :

The History of Cyber Attacks Timeline: 

 http://www.nato.int/docu/review/2013/cyber/timeline/EN/index.htm

Wikipedia's definition :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber-attack 

Norse's Map of Real time cyberattacks:
http://map.ipviking.com/

4/04/2014 The Fall of Hacker Groups

As we know during decades there were  legendary hacking groups , This article posted by strauss in phrack magazine in april 4 is really nice and you must read  here http://phrack.org/papers/fall_of_groups.html.

 Hacking is, in its very essence, an underground movement. Those who take part on it have always been the ones who (ab)used technology in ways beyond the knowledge of the larger userbase. It is tightly linked to intense efforts in unveiling previously unknown information as well as in sharing these discoveries. These premises hold true for as long as we know hackers: since computers had barely no users up until the informatic massification of today. The nature of the hacker interests intrinsically poses difficulties: growing knowledge on anything is hard. It requires heavy research, experimentation, and can turn into an endless journey if objectives are not carefully set. Just like in any field of scientific studies, it calls for a good amount of colaboration, an attitude which, luckily for hackers, was greatly enabled by the advent of computer networks and, most notably, the Internet. Computer networks increasingly made it possible to transmit unlimited and uncensored information across their geographical extent with little effort, with little costs, and in virtually no time. From the communication development standpoint, one would expect that the events that followed the 80s to our days would lead to a geometric progression in the number of hacker communities. In effect, hacking has arguably grown. Hacker communities, definitely not.

 Just take a moment , and think on this wise words of wisdom.

7/03/2013 Introducing sources.debian.net

sources.debian.net is a new service[1] that allows browsing the source
code of Debian packages on the web with syntax highlighting,search through the source code ,with the possibility of adding contextual pop-up messages . It is updated and contains source code for all suites in the Debian archive. It currently uses around 381 GB of disk space for uncompressed source packages and around 83 GB for the source package  mirror. It is integrated into codesearch.d.n and the PTS. It was created  by Stefano Zacchiroli and the web front-end was written by Matthieu Caneill.

sources.d.nfollows closely the Debian archive in two ways:

1. it is updated 4 times a day to reflect the content of the Debian archive
2. it contains sources coming from official Debian suites: the usual ones (from oldstable to experimental),*-updates (ex volatile), *-proposed-updates, and *-backports (from Wheezy on)

Ensayando sources.debian.net en Osiris

 [1] http://bits.debian.org/2013/07/introducing_sources.debian.net.html

4/13/2012 Ipod Touch Resources and Tools

Recently for my everyday i's searching for a good calculator like g48+ or similar to these 128k ...etc..etc but i thought to myself "it would be  awesome buy a ipod touch and emulate that calculator and other apps...so why not ? "

My  everyday is between  university,home,and finally pubs,but trying to think  like a researcher i need a simple piece of hardware that could help me in some fields...what can i do if i need to sniff packages in a bank or other similar places well ...an ipod Touch  is the  answer to this.So in this blog post i will share some useful links  about ipod or iphone for penetration testing :


[1]http://www.darkreading.com/security/attacks-breaches/219100135/weaponizing-apple-s-ipod-touch.html

[2]http://blog.iavin.com/2011/09/make-iphone-a-penetration-testing-tool/

[3]http://punter-infosec.com/updatejailbreak-ssh-to-ipod-touch-2g

[4]http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/iPhone-Turned-into-PocketSized-Hacking-Platform/

[5]http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/iPhone-Turned-into-PocketSized-Hacking-Platform/

[6]http://www.dragonjar.org/iphoneipod-touch-como-herramienta-de-test-de-penetracion-i-de-iii.xhtml (spanish version)

[7]http://www.dragonjar.org/iphoneipod-touch-como-herramienta-de-test-de-penetracion-ii-de-iii.xhtml (spanish )

[8]http://www.dragonjar.org/iphoneipod-touch-como-herramienta-de-test-de-penetracion-iii-de-iii.xhtml (spanish )

[9]http://www.securitybydefault.com/2010/05/aplicaciones-de-seguridad-en-iphone.html (spanish)

[10]http://labs.dragonjar.org/video-tutorial-ataque-mitm-desde-un-iphone-ipod-touch (video spanish )

[11]http://goo.gl/zP2ko in waybackmachine.org

[12]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q6ShMaUba5Y

Discussion :http://seclists.org/pen-test/2010/Jun/50

Enjoy it,do it,share it. :-D