I’ve always known how to do basic IP sniffing, but with all the recent news focus on the Data Mining of the NSA and AT&T I decided to do a little research and dig into IP sniffing. Obviously the NSA uses some pretty sophisticated software and hardware to handle all the IP data that they collect, but there are plenty of open source tools that will do pretty much the same stuff for a smaller network.
The best program for packet capture and analysis is Ethereal. It captures packets and displays them in a nice GUI. It can also save the packets to a file and open and process captured packets files. It has the ability to process the packets by applying filters. For example, you could filter out all arp traffic, or only capture http. Ethereal also allows you to filter by TCP stream. It can display all the data portions of a packet in the stream that they came in. In this way, you could reconstruct an html page, or smtp email. However the purpose of this article is not to be a guide on Ethereal, but to show you how to arrange your network to sniff your internet connection and capture all packets coming and going across your internet pipe.
There are many reasons that you might have to want to sniff your internet connection, or even to capture and record all packets that are passing through. One reason is that it is a fascinating and great way to learn about networks and how packets flow through the network. Another reason could be to find and defeat a hacking attack or malware. You could also monitor your network to determine what users are doing and watch them. (like the nsa) Continue reading ‘Network Layouts for IP Sniffing’
Somebody obviously wasn’t thinking when they set the default power options in Windows. I have been setting up new desktops and laptops from Dell the last few days, and every single one has the power options set like this:
This is from a Dell laptop. Why would anybody in there right mind want the laptop to go into standby in 25 minutes if it is plugged in. For that matter, why would they wait 1 hour while it is on battery. And all the desktops are set up like this too! Why anybody would want to have their desktop computer go into standby is beyond me. I keep my computer turned on, so I can have stuff running on it while I am away, and so that when I need to get to it I can without having to wait for it to come up. Standby defeats that. And hibernate is even worse.
While I’m on a rant, why would Dell disable the internal nic when the laptop is on battery power? That gave me the biggest headache one morning a while back. I even went so far as to call Dell to see if the motherboard was bad, cause the nic kept disappearing.
I’ve had a very busy last few weeks, working on some different project for at work, and finishing up finals for my night classes. I’ve learned several interesting things in the past two weeks at my job.
The first thing that I learned was that Dell support people will bug you until you fix your computer. A hard drive went bad in one of our production servers. So I called Dell Gold support (which thankfully has american techs.) to get a replacement. After a lot of discussion, the tech told me to run a firmware update which would fix the issue. So I had to explain to him that it was a production server, and to do the fix he wanted would require me to schedule downtime and then go in to the hosted environment on a Saturday and perform the fix. Continue reading ‘Lessons learned from IT this week’
Here is how to tell if you are a Philadelphian. I know I don’t actually live in Philadelphia, but I have lived 20 miles west of Philly my whole life, so I understand practically all of these.
You know you’re from Philly when:
You punctuate every sentence with, “You know” at least twice.
You want olive oil, not mayonnaise on your “hoagie”.
You hate the Redskins
You hate Dallas.
You realize that your favorite dessert is “wooder ice”.
You find yourself using “yo” and “youse guys” when talking long-distance to family members.
You know how to spell Schuylkill.
Continue reading ‘You Know You’re from Philadelphia if…’
I have been using the google personal homepage www.google.com/ig as my home page, since the day it came out. I use it on several browsers on several different computers. This morning, when I opened up Firefox at my work computer, I got a google capcha screen, that I have shown below: (Click to view full size)
I figured it must be some virus or spyware, but multiple scans revealed nothing, and I keep a close eye on my computer too. So I tried IE7 and got the same result. When I tried to access the homepage from my home computer via my vnc connection, it came up just fine. So I rebooted my work pc. Same thing. I then tried it from another work computer(a brand new Dell laptop right out of the box no spyware there). And got the same capcha screen! So my conclusion is that google is blocking my IP address from the home page. Everytime I reopen my browser I have to reenter a capcha code. This is pretty annoying, since I open my browser a lot. If it doesn’t go away in the next day or two, I am definitly going to move my homepage to something else. Has this happened to anyone else?
Update:
I learned from some comments on Digg, that this is related to some Di Vinci Code Quest that Google is running from the personalized homepage. I’m not sure why I was affected, but it seems that this has happened to a lot of people. The Quest is ending soon, so it should soon return to normal.
