Onkyo TX-NR515 HDMI with ARC Troubleshooting

Recently I had been playing around with amplifiers and sound systems quite a bit and to be honest, this is LIFE if you really want entertainment at home. All the previous 5.1 bundled with DVD/Bluray players system just doesn't come close to it.

This is the Amplifier which I got myself, the Onkyo TX-NR515.

http://www.uk.onkyo.com/en/products/tx-nr515-76085.html

Honestly speaking, this is the best model although its of 2012. On some of the newer models, the number of HDMI ports had been nerfed from 8 to 6. Anyway, what I want to talk about in this post is about the feature known as ARC or Audio Return Channel.

Imagine without ARC. You got x number of device connected to your amp and you have 1 that is connect to the TV or even your over-the-air tv programme for example does not go through the amp and as such, sound sux. Well, if you want to pass it through the amp, you can use a optical cable to link your tv out (if it has one) to your optical in in you amp. Not so good, because 1 extar wire and good optical audio cable is expensive.

With ARC, what happens is that it could use the HDMI connector from your amp out to tv in and use that very same cable to send audio from the tv to the amp in the reverse direction. According to some people, as long as its a HDMI 1.4+, it suppost ARC, but to be on the safe side, you can buy one that explicitly says it support ARC. All you need to do is to make sure you plug it into the ARC support HDMI port (tv, amp all have some designated ARC HDMI port) and then your speakers will be linked. You will have tv sound muted and output to your amp and no more double sound problem, if you know what I mean.

That is if ALL goes well. I have the following TV and it is one of the started model that fully support ARC.

Sharp LC-60LE640X LED TV
http://www.sharpmea.com/cps/rde/xchg/ae/hs.xsl/-/html/product-details.htm?product=LC60LE640X&cat=111

The whole HDMI and ARC link has different name in different company. Anynet for Samsung and its Aquos Link for Sharp. However, recently when configuring the amp with my devices, eventually I hit a wall. This is what should happen if the AquosLink and ARC is working:

• TV turns on the AMP automatically
• TV links speaks to amp. It will default output to amp and mute TV speakers
• TV off turns off the AMP automatically

Well, I do not have any of the above. In fact, even the ARC light did not turn up despite all the configurations done on both the amp and the TV. I had tried to reset both to factory and it doesn't help. I had tried to powered down and unplug wall socket. No luck there too.

Eventually, this is something rather unique I do not see on the internet AT ALL. What I did was to disconnect ALL devices. That means all the HDMI. And I start to reconnect the TV one first with ARC. Jackpot. We got Aquos Audio SP. Then I add in my devices slowly one by one, xbox, playstation etc... 

The point is eventually I found 1 device that, after adding its HDMI in, disabled by HDMI links and ARC. That happens to be the new IPTV box I had gotten from China recently. But I need to stress that its neither the HDMI is not working or there is something wrong with the box either. It works perfectly connected to my TV directly. 

Diyomate K9 IPTV

http://www.diyomate.com/productInfo.asp?PID=483

I still have not found the reason why it failed, but my suspicions is from the HDMI cable provided along with the box. I am not sure if it is the official HDMI, but it is a white flat HDMI like this.

I had read somewhere that flat HDMI cables are not as good as the fat ones because of the cables space is smaller, but I am not sure if that is the problem. I guess, there is only 1 way to find out. Just change the cable and see if it works!

I will update again on the results.

Install Chrome Offline

Ever had a problem trying to install Chrome on a new PC which does not have Internet set up yet? Or trapped in a client site with limited access?

The first question most people asked is : Is there even such a thing as a Offline Installer for Chrome.
Well, apparantly there is:
https://support.google.com/installer/answer/126299?hl=en

You will need to choose the one which suits you. I think the main differences is where Chrome is installed. So for most users, you would want to choose to install only for yourself, while Integrators will want to install for everyone using that PC or laptop.

Grab your Offline Chrome today!

• For 1 account only
• For everyone on the machine

VMWare Failed to lock the file...

Although I had switched to Virtual Box for a while, I still have no choice but to open up some older VMs in VMWare to migrate or retrieve information from them. One such VM gave a similar error as above and in fact, it is not even a persistence VM. The very thought that I have to rebuild this VM strike horror in my heart, but luckily the good news is that I did not need to do that to resolve this issue.

It turns out that this usually happens after you had not power up the VM for a while and over a few version of VMWare upgrade. Somehow the lock file just get corrupted. Go into your VM Machine's directory and you will see some directories with *lck* and maybe 1 or 2 tiny files inside. Well those are are source of the issues.

Simply delete all those directories with the tiny files with the lck extension or keyword in them. That fixed my problem and the VM is back booting up happily. If you want to be safe, you can always make a copy of the VM or a copy of those directories before you go ahead with the deletion.

It is a simple problem, but VMWare seems to make it into such a big issue that your VM no longer starts. But luckily the fix is just as simple.

Windows Update Unlocked and Manual Trigger

Ever seen this before? Well, this is an old version of Windows, but it would look somewhat similar when you have policies that preset and prevents you from doing a Windows Update. Usually there is nothing you can do about it and hope that you will eventually get the patch, thanks to your company, but if you are the owner of this machine and has admin rights, then read on.

Usually this is caused by GPO or similar policies preventing you from updating. Or you are not in the administrator group. To solve the GPO, you will need to fire up regedit.

1. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Policies \ Microsoft \ Windows \ WindowsUpdate \ AU. 
2. Delete the keys AUOptions and NoAutoUpdate.
3. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ WindowsUpdate.
4. Delete the key DisableWindowsUpdateAccess.

Alternatively, you can also use the Group Policy Editor. 

1. Fire up GP Editor by running "gpedit.msc" in command prompt.
2. Go to Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Update.
3. Set "Configure Automatic Updates" to "Not Configured".
4. Got to User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Update.
5. Set "Remove Access" to All  and "Windows Update features" to Not Configured.

On server, you may be able to run "gpupdate /force" to restart the policies, but a reboot is one sure way to get it done.

Next, we sometimes wants to fire up Windows Update and do a on demand update. But in a company wide deployment, often you will get a no access page at Microsoft because the Windows Update Server is set to local. So, here is the way to get it done, via script of in command prompt.

You can skip this steps sometimes, but I find that the sure way to trigger the update is sometimes to shutdown and restart the Windows Update Service like this:

net stop wuauserv

net start wuauserv

After this, you can start the actual trigger to Windows Update:

wuauclt /detectnow

This should make the yellow shield at the tray pops up. You may want to see a update status by:

wuauclt /r /ReportNow

This will communicate with the update server and takes a few minutes. 

And when something does crap out, there is always a very detail log in %systemroot%/WindowsUpdate.log. You will find all your problems inside be it wrong server, connection timeout etc.

Now, the above can definitely be put into a script to be run by schedule and you have your own "Automatic Update" so to speak. Have fun updating Windows (and other Microsoft Products)

Patch Tuesday July 2013

Usually I do not talk much about Patch Tuesday from Microsoft, but this time round, it totals to about 30 or so updates on most system with Windows and Office. I think that is would the mention. Not only that, there are 6 rated CRITICAL and many which does not have full details on what and how it is exploited as Microsoft got the vulnerability in private. Doesn't that worry you? It should. For all you know some of these vulnerabilities had already been used in the wild, so I suggest you roll in these patches as soon as possible. (How about NOW??)

So, what are fixed in this round? Here is a summary of it:

• Kernel driver bug due to TTF (yes, I know your WTF look, why would a TTF font be injected into kernel...?) This allow escalation and there is full source code available.
• Several .Net Framework and Silver patches 
• Vulnerability in GDI+. Seriously, I think they will never get this fix since it comes back every time.
• IE. For once, IE 10 is badly hit. Usually most vulnerability would not affect IE 10 (on Win8 especially). Well, this is really the patch you need to install ASAP since IE will be your first point of contact.
• Directshow with GIF files. Makes you think how a simple file format thing like PDF, PNG (oh yes, last month we just had one), DOCX or sort. It does seems to have a trend of attacking file formats nowadays.
• Windows Media Format. WMF. There we have it, just to prove my previous point.
• Windows Defender. It's a path transversal. Well, even the big giants has faults sometimes. But the scary part is Microsoft does patch it... Do you see other AV vendors patching their main program much (I know you get updates, but those are AV signatures, they are different things)?

And other patches involving SD card removal, new camera models, language pack and fonts. 

So, you can see its going to be a busy busy week. And whoever is using those exploits will probably be sweating or trying their last strike to make good use of it before you patch your computer. 

DVDFab and BD-RE

I had just recently gotten a Blu-ray write finally. Now, say goodbye to my DVD writable, or so I thought. While Data and other files has absolutely no problem with a BD-R or BD-RE (Yes, I do not know why, but they decided BD-RW doesn't sound good), it becomes a complication when it comes to the media like music and movies.

Lets leave the AudioCD part out of these, since its still in the legacy CD format. Take a look at DVD. I had always used DVDFab to "squeeze" DVD9 into DVD5 and it works like a charm. Lose some sound quality, but the video is usually 100% well kept. (Yes, don't we all hate the FBI notice delay and ads and to be honest, I think DVDFab should sell this as their prime point. Not sure if the FBIs are so happy about it though.

OK, this is where I am finally going to talk about why we can't do without DVDFab for Blu-ray. I had check out many (Yes, about 10 or so) who claim they can squeeze a Blu-ray without (much) loses. WEll, before that, let me stress that most Blu-ray out there simply are dual layers. Well, not that you get great quality or something, there are usually about 29GB (Single layer only houses 25GB) and I can't help thinking, they had done it on purpose so that people cannot copy it 1-1. And for me. BACKUP is a must. Especially when you own a Blu-ray, you would share with friends (and god knows, maybe even their dogs) all over. I do not want to have to pay almost USD40 and then, well own a very expensive coaster. So I insist on backing up my Blu-ray.

Well, why not buy a BD-RE DL? Yes, why not? It's just about 8X the price of the single layer! This is where DVDFab comes in. In most of my "test" (I own the Blu-ray by the way!), most of the "Extra" bytes comes from the previews or additional language tracks. And in Blu-ray, audio track is crazily large, especially when they are in 7.1 Digital or something. It's crazy! And I don't really care about the Russian language, for example. So these goes and all done nicely by DVDFab. In fact, I do not really even need to give up on quality on most of the movies. So its like 1080p, without some audio and definitely without FBI warnings and previews (by the time I watch these preview, the show is probably out anyway). And all this via DVDFab.

The current DVDFab comes with 2 major version, version 9 comes with the newer interface, but I prefer the old interface more like the above. There is a trial version which you can try for 30 days and decide for yourself if you want to buy it.

Check it out at:

http://www.DVDFab.com

Last, but not least, DVDFab does not require AnyDVD or other decrypter to decrypt the content of the DVD or Blu-ray! So, that's a bonus!

Well, I do not work for DVDFab in case you are wondering and there is no referral bonus or anything from my link. 

SDXC exFat Problem

After you had finally gotten your very first 64GB SD card, you will eventually hit this problem sooner or later. Yes, everyone, unless you are the type who is not concern that your tablet just doesn't work with your card or simple could stand how slow the card is somehow.

The major problem with exFat is that its a more Windows format and it's teh default format for formatting SDXC card anyway, even from the official SDCard.org:

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

But most tablets are Android based and as such more towards *nix and somehow exFat just doesn't play well there.The problem will start anytime from not detecting the SDCard at all to very slow performance especially when many files are involved. In some extreme case, its even because there are 2 partition created and it start to seriously confuse the OS. Just search "SDXC exFat Problem" and you will know what I mean.

I know its probably not right, but I recommend to keep your 64GB SDXC on Fat32. And Microsoft definitely does not agree with me because they had disable such a feature on their default format utility. You can only format it to exFat or NTFS, which neither works well on Android. But of course there is a easier way here:

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

Make sure you read through and decide on whether you want to use the DOS utility or the GUI one. Just format it to Fat32 and suddenly many of your problem is gone.

Remove the Hidden Partition

Don't you always hate it when your laptop or PC comes with a recovery partition which you may not actually need anymore because you had upgrade your OS or not? Well, you will also find that inside Windows (normally) you will not be able to remove this partition safely. Well, the worry is over because under the administrator command prompt there is a way to do so.

1. Open a command prompt as administrator.
2. Run Diskpart application by typing Diskpart in the command prompt.
3. In the “Diskpart” prompt, enter rescan command and press Enter key to re-scan all partitions, volumes and drives available.
4. Then type in list disk and press Enter key to show all hard disk drive available.
5. Select the disk that contains the partition you want to remove. Normally, with just 1 hard disk, it will be disk 0. So the command will be:
   select disk 0
   Finish by Enter key.
6. Type list partition and press Enter key to show all available and created partition in the disk selected.
7. Select the partition that wanted to be deleted by using the following command, followed by Enter key:
   select partition x
   where x is the number of the EISA based recovery partition to be removed and unlocked its space. Be careful with the number of this partition, as wrong number may get data wipes off.
8. Finally, type in delete partition override and press Enter key.

Once the partition has been deleted, exit from Diskpart, and now users can use the much familiar and much easier Disk Management tool in Windows (diskmgmt.msc) to manipulate the freed unallocated partition. Users can create a new volume (partition) with this space, or simply merge it to existing partition by extending the size of the existing partition.

Evernote v4.6.4 Upgrade Issues

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere. Use Evernote to jot notes, create to-do lists, clip entire Web pages, manage passwords, and record audio. Everything added to Evernote is automatically synchronized across platforms and devices and made searchable. Evernote will even recognize printed or handwritten text in photos and images.

Due to a recent bleached, all users are advised to change password and upgrade to the latest version, but however to some specific users of v4.6.3 (maybe more, but I won't know first hand), the upgrade process seems to failed in every way possible giving MSI error codes.

I tried upgrade inside the application or even downloading the standalone version, but no success. In the end, I figured that they probably omitted a certain version in the upgrade path, so I uninstall v4.6.3 completely. And I reinstalled. And it works!

Well, I guess this is a typical example of a upgrade management issues in software, but at least it didn't need a formatting or Windows Refresh to save the day. If you are having problem with Evernote, try this and hopefully you will still be a happy user of Evernote like me.

Adobe Photoshop Flickers in Windows 8

Did you encounter flickering or basically image not staying put inside Adobe Photoshop CS6? Well, I guess that's the reason you are here in the first place. But fundamentally, the problem neither lies with Adobe nor Microsoft. I can bet you are almost 100% using a AMD graphics card!

Basically its the AMD graphics driver for now. As of today, its still not fixed and to temporary fix this, Adobe actually recommend to disable graphics acceleration inside Adobe Photoshop for now.

Change the GPU Drawing Mode to Basic:

1. In Photoshop, choose Edit > Preferences > Performance.
2. Select Advanced Settings.
3. Choose Basic from the Drawing Mode pop-up menu.
4. Click OK to close the dialog boxes.

While its not the best way to do it, I guess everyone will have to live with it until AMD fixes this or get a Nvidia card to replace it.

Who Reset My Password

Today I am going to talk about yet another simple and effective hack. This time, we are going to go into the scenario of grabbing password from forums, portals etc. Imagine this scenario. You are user A and you want to get into user B's account. We can safely assume that User B's email is inaccessible, otherwise, we all know we do not have a problem then.

Suppose as A, I decide I wanted to go reset my password instead. More often than not, it will be sent to A's email address, a link that enable user A to reset my password. In other times, they may even allow other means as well such as mobile phone or messenger, but the concept is still pretty much the same, except it just complicate the trace hiding part sometimes.

Now, after A check the email and a link will appear. If the link is embedded in HTML, uncode it and look for something like this:

uid=12314800&uname=xxxxxxxx&mail=yyyyyyyy

Now. isn't that cute. But what we are interested is the UID most of the time. And I don't need to point finger at what sort of program usually have this type of parameters. Now comes the interesting part. I have a link for A to reset A's password, but what if I CAN reset B's password instead? OK, this is where the complication may or may not help. Basically what you are interested is to obtain B's UID. To my surprise, it's something more easy than you think. Some portal, you will even be able to get that from the "reset password" page, while others, its just a matter of keying in the password incorrectly once on the login page.

Now, lets UID replace. Note that if the site uses some sort of hash check on the URL, this is probably not going to work. But then again the hash is usually going to be a combination of the parameters plus some unique identifier, with some luck, you might even be able to break the hash. In one case I encounter, the hash is basically the whole URL excluding the hash=ZZZZ parameter right at the end.

Assuming its not, replace B's uid with A's uid and you are sent to the password reset page. Go ahead and don't be shy about it. After which, go back to the login page and log into B's account successfully. And B may or may not even know the password had been changed.

You may laugh and think the hack is silly. 10 sites I saw and 10 I entered within last 3 days is not so laughable. If you maintain a portal, I think you should re-look at your password reset workflow seriously.

Adobe Flash Player Download Woe

At version 11.6 now, still full of bugs, yet Adobe Flash player is still plagued with a fundamental fatal error in their update. People all over are still getting the XX % failed to download and to make it worse, Adobe fail to check if the update was even successful at all before deleting the install. In short, when you need to retry, you can't just retry. You will need to download the installer again. Well, of course you can make a copy of it, but if the download problem doesn't get solve, you will still be stucked.

To make things worse, Flash is plagued with critical vulnerability and perhaps one of the biggest issue is that user is not able to update their player thus helping in the exposure of the threat. While Adobe may not see this in this light, it is definitely something I feel they should fix since it had been there since a long time ago.

The most direct solution is to download directly from the source, but instead the full installation package instead of the minimum internet download installer.

Download the full package from:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html

OR simply stop using Flash altogether.

Windows 8 BSOD DPC WATCHDOG VILOLATION

One fine day at work, one fine Windows 8 which was shutdown properly last night, but it did not boot up like it always had in the morning. Instead, what greeted me was a BSOD, well the new BSOD anyway saying something about a "DPC_WATCHDOG Violation". Now, isn't that puzzling. First, its about a watchdog, which I obviously did not bought one and then there was a violation. Did a bad dog run into Windows 8?

After some 30 minutes of read up (using another OS on another partition), I finally found the root of the problem. Well, at least for most other users. It comes down to 3 software.

1. AVG Antivirus or similar suites
2. Kaspersky Antivirus or similar suites
3. ATI Radeon Catalyst 

Well , there are not in order, but for me, I had AVG. And luckily I had this OS (Windows 7) on another partition and simply out of my mind, I rename c:\program files (x86)\AVG to AVG1 and restarted Windows 8.

TADA. OMG, it was really AVG! I had seen success stories from other users for KAV, KIS as well. Seems like these AV companies tried to compete on who gets their product Windows 8 compatible and they made some pretty fatal mistakes along the way. For ATI, it may be a bit more involved to skip start it, but since I did not encounter that I would let other users who had to tell their stories.

Guess, what is the first thing I did after I recovered my Windows 8?
UNINSTALL AVG 2013!

From that day onwards, AVG and Kaspersky is banned from all my Windows 8 machines.

My Letter to my Hacker

A while ago, I found a readme.txt sitting right on top of my D**-NET Honeypot and this was the beginning of a whole turn of event that is, let's say, funny at the very least. I opened the readme.txt in a text editor and this is what I saw:

FUCKING PIG
Don't you have anything else beside than porn on your PC?
For the past 2 month all the fuck shit you have given me is nothing but porn!
600GB of fucking porn you shit head.
You did not even download The Avengers 2012 1080p BRrip X264 2 2GB YIFY even though you search it! All you did was downloaded another fuck show!
Fuck! Are you a seller in the night market or what?
And you had even given me the fuck shit trojan you gotten from the porn site!
I am so fucking pissed that I want to fucking delete all your donwloaded porn for you now!
Eat shit and die you pig!

Some part of the swearing I did not appreciated and obvious I deleted it here. Well, angry? Actually not... I had him / her monitored for the past 2 months and I guess since he had left me a note, I should be a polite guest and write him one. but he / she was actually so frustrated that he / she actually delete my files and removed the RAT from the honeypot.

Well, lucky Whisperer 4 was on the Honeynet and it got his / her email when he / she updated the RAT config via email SMTP. That's why you should NEVER use unencrypted SMTP. :P So naturally, I send he / her an email, POLITELY.

Thanks for staying on my PC for the past 2 months.
Firstly I must thank you for being a nice hacker by uploading your RAT msi with both your client and server inside. It was a well written piece of code, but I am pretty sure you did not wrote that anyway.
Secondly, I thank you for actually screening through those files on D: and confirmed that they were ALL porn. I did not really have a look through all of them myself.
In order to evade me, you must had packed your files several times when you perform a remote upgrade, but that was why my AV had flagged you on the second week you were in on XX XX 2012. I had to even put in an exception rule in my AV for your RAT, but I guess you did not found out.
Your random changing of ports was good, perhaps a function build in to your RAT, but it gave me lots of trouble to put in firewall rules so that your RAT can connect properly outside.
You other tools wasn't impressive but I guess its your fault for not testing it against a W2K8 server.
I guess you should at least had thank me for the 600GB of porn which you so patiently downloaded. I thought you would had realized by the first 50GB or so...
Lastly, I would like you to know I actually downloaded The Avengers 2012 1080p BRrip X264 2 2GB YIFY, but its on M: drive. Why did you not look there, but kept staying on my C: and D: ? Was it for the porn?
Thank you for participating on the malware collection exercise on my honeynet. 

How many of you laughed? I don't know. I sure did the hell laughed my head off.

Google Chrome Your profile cannot be opened correctly

There had been a recent error affecting quite some users on Chrome, after a upgrade. It seems that the user web data is corrupted or not readable by the new Chrome. While its ok to just click ok and go on, each time you relaunch this, it will happen. I finally found the solution and its nothing more than just deleting a file away.

Solution:
1. Close Chrome
2. Go to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default
3. Delete the file "Web Data"

That's all. Just relaunch Chrome and its solved.

A little update about myself

I know I had not been updating my blog much and probably quite disappointing to my loyal followers as a results. Most of my updated had been placed on Facebook, but that I notice is only for limited amount of people I know. So I will actively try to come back to Blogger and post my articles here.

Recently I had gotten several hardware and had immerse myself deeping in the world of Android (hacking). I have a few phones on GB, ICS from WildFire S to Galaxy S2, several tablets from Nook Tablet to Gemei G9. In short, plenty of room to play with experimental Android stuff. I had also gotten myself lots of chance to try out patching and flashing with Odin, Zerg rush etc and custom ROM had really open my eyes to many things. I will find some chance to post some steps on some of the steps I took. Probably fun.

I also went deeper into Android hacking about masking IMEI, IMSI etc All these I probably will be talking about it in the near future about using specific software and even rom patching to archive. All these can have many uses in term of gaming, overcoming software limitations or maybe it's just simply privacy.

In any case, I wanted to say is that, Thanks for not giving up on my blog yet. I'll back!

Empty Recycle Bin at Logoff and Shutdown on Windows XP

I had been looking for a simple solution for legacy systems (Windows XP) to perform a simply empty recycle bin during a shutdown and even better if it can be integrated into a logoff. To my surprise there were tons of requests for years and nobody gave a solution properly which does not require any 3rd party tools.

Most of the users suggest to turn off Recycle bin totally, but it can save lives sometimes, so that not what we want. Secondly, if we need to install a tool, we are just expanding our exposure to risk since the tool may have vulnerability and who knows what it can do when run as SYSTEM during a shutdown.

I found the simplest solution is to make use of Microsoft's built in shutdown and logoff script function:

Shutdown scripts:
https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/gptext_assigncomputershutdownscripts.mspx?mfr=true
Logoff scripts:
https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/gptext_logoffscripts.mspx?mfr=true

However, do take note that Shutdown scripts are run as SYSTEM and logoff scripts are run as the user logging off.

A simple "Empty the Recycle Bin" scripts using just batch file:

ATTRIB %systemdrive%\RECYCLER\* -R -S -H /S /D
DEL %systemdrive%\RECYCLER\* /F /S /Q
RD %systemdrive%\RECYCLER /S /Q

It's 3 lines to make sure it deletes and finish the job. Just copy and paste into a batch file which is your logoff / shutdown script.

There we have it. A simple and do-no-need-3rd-party solution. I hope you will find it useful.

Reverse Bruteforcing of Accounts

I may had talked about this in the past somewhere, not sure if its here, but in any case, this still works even today and there is no harm mentioning it again.

Given a black box system for pentest, you know there are some minimum security set in:

• There is a lockout for X retries (usually not 65535...)
• There are a large amount of user (easily deduced from company size)
• The users are lazy and like to choose easy passwords (always a given. Even if there is password limit, it will still be simple passwords like P@ssword123 or qwerty12345 which passed the password requirement)

Point 3 is where we would base this attack on. In order to show them how bad their passwords are, we probably need to crack some majority of it and bruteforcing is required unless we can dump the hashes (in Windows) or offline crack their salted password (from Linux). Traditionally, bruteforce will choose a useraname (example admin) and try to guess the password (admin, password, admin123, iamgod...) and before you know it, the account is locked (Shit! damn...). See point 1 above.

So, lets think out of the box. How many user would use lets say the password "password" (if its allowed by the password policy). Probably a lot. That's why I am going to introduce another to bruteforce such a system. This is what I call Reverse Bruteforcing. Instead of using a username and bruteforcing the password, we choose a password and bruteforce the username instead. Of course, in some case, we might even have the username (from the emails servers, or client contact list etc). But in the worst case, this will work.

So, we would go:

"password" - user1, user2, user3 etc...

This will not lock out the accounts as quickly as traditional bruteforcing, but it will eventually depending on how they set it up. If its time based (x attempts in x mins), then by spacing out the bruteforce, we might actually overcome it totally. Go online and get a list of commonly used password and mix in some variation with the company's name, slogan etc and you have a good list to start with.

Actually in some of my previous pentests, this methods proves to be quite effective and can be easily automated and while it run, you can proceed with your Metasploit or other attacks. Its a quick win any day! (P.S. My best win is root, root without locking the account up :P)

CM9 for Nook Tablet First Alpha

The first Alpha for Nook Tablet CM9 is out. However as stated being an alpha, not everything works and the hardware video decoding is of course still unfixed. However, if you feel that you want to have a shot at how CM9 looks like, go ahead and grab the binaries from xda-developers:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1534192

Download Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4

Since Lightroom 4 had been out there are many good reviews all over the net, so I will not repeat them. But I found out that I actually have a problem downloading the trial version to see for myself. After some minutes of debugging, I realized that the Coldfusion download server used by Adobe does not seems to be Chrome friendly.

The links are here:
http://trials2.adobe.com/AdobeProducts/LTRM/4/win32/Lightroom_4_LS11.exe
http://trials3.adobe.com/AdobeProducts/LTRM/4/win32/Lightroom_4_LS11.exe

So, I have to fire up the trusty IE (its not bad, just not my choice of browser). And all a sudden it starts to download the 718MB trial happily.

Well this is just an update for anyone who has similar issue with the download.
Do drop a comment here (for encouragement) if this post helps you!