Before you move to the cloud

The term is new, but concept is not. Throughout the history of computing, IT organizations have been using their own infrastructure to host applications, data, servers etc. Now most of them are renting the infrastructure, with remote servers to host their application or data. Organizations called service providers exist especially to provide, manage and maintain the infrastructure on which their client organization’s application or data are hosted. The client organization gets access controls to manage their applications and data hosted on the remote server. This is the main idea behind cloud computing. More here....

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Using an AirPcap device in Windows with Wireshark

Capturing wireless traffic in a Windows environment is unfortunately not as easy as a setting change. As with most Windows-based software, drivers in Windows are often not open source and do not allow for configuration change into monitor mode. With this in mind, we must use a specialized piece of hardware known as an AirPcap device. Once you have obtained an AirPcap device you will be required to install the software on the accompanying CD to your analysis computer. The configurable options include: • Interface - Select the device you are using for your capture here. Some advanced analysis scenarios may require you to use more than one AirPcap device to sniff simultaneously on multiple channels. • Blink LED - Clicking this button will make the LED lights on the AirPcap device blink. This is primarily used to identify the specific adapter you are using if you are using multiple AirPcap devices. • Channel - In this field, you select the channel you want AirPcap to listen on. Extension C...

Anti CSRF header

Recently I came across an application which was preventing crsf attacks using a unique non-traditional approach. In traditional approach the csrf is thwarted by embedding unique random tokens, called nonce, in each sensitive page. But this application, which was making ajax calls and used jQuery, was creating a header to identify the valid and invalid requests altogether. The idea is to generate a custom header, x-session-token in this case, with every request which is considered sensitive and includes any sort of transaction. For example: xhr.setRequestHeader('x-session-token', csrf_token) At the server level, server checks for this header if found request is fulfilled, otherwise rejected. We need to use xhr calls for making use of this technique, not useful in regular POST and GET requests. Since, I was not aware of this kind of countermeasures, probably, since most of the applications I did were using standard requests. So, I searched a bit and found even Go...

Some one watching where you visited!

Yes... Mozilla has been susceptible to browser-history stealing java script code. Today, Giorgio posted some cool information about the exploit. Mozilla is already working on this. This bug has been reported. Actually they have set up a web site to show the proof-of-concept. Visit www.statrpanic.com in FF,Safari or Netscape and it will tell you which websites have you been already ! But I am not sure it will work in IE or not because my IE is not responding to the website. Clearing history of visited website makes you safe to this attack. I mean this is one way..may be there are other ways to exploit this. But I have found this effective. Try it yourself in FF and then in IE and see the results.

Nilesh Kumar

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