“I don’t have Internet access at home.” What a terrible thing to hear! It is so sad when people tell me that the only way they check their email is by visiting public, community-sponsored, unprotected venues like the library. Internet access is almost as essential as utilities. When my sister informed me that she didn’t subscribe to Internet in her apartment complex because it was too expensive, I compared that to having no running water at home. Its like she hasn’t bathed since she moved in!
Taking pity, I set out to solve her dilemma. Luckily, the great thing about living in an apartment complex is that you are usually surrounded by a neighborhood of trusting technology dummies. At least 5 open wireless signals will abound everywhere … except where you need them the most, in your room. The only place that I could detect a signal was next to the kitchen window. Sadly, it would be too cluttered (and too trashy) to move the computer in the kitchen. However, we could bring the Internet connection to us in the computer room.
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The are a couple of things that are essential to any hacker’s walk of life. To name a few, there’s the ubiquitous flash drive for data transfer. You have the crossover cable for even faster data transfer. There’s the WiFi antenna for high gain and strong amplification. Possibly, you might find a video capture card in the computer. Of course, there’s the ubiquitous laptop and desktop computer. But what software is on these computers? Undoubtedly, you will find at least two operating systems, most often Windows and Linux. But with Linux, there are several different distributions. Is there a specific one? With hackers and crackers, there is only one Linux distro out there. It is called Backtrack.
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Last week on the freeware review, I wrote about the simplicity of packet sniffing and analyzing with Ethereal. I revealed how easy it was for anyone to tap sensitive data like login information, credit card numbers, social security number, and mission-critical emails traveling on the network. As promised, I will reveal how to actually prevent packet-sniffing software from reading your sensitive data.
As I previously explained, packet analysis passively listens into a network and then extracts the important data, which is usually in plaintext. The key to hampering packet analysis is encrypting that data sent on the network so that it is not read in plain text. The encrypted data that packet analyzers gather is pretty useless without an encryption key. While it is possible for crackers to obtain the key, encryption makes the process a lot longer (and sometimes nearly impossible). There are a couple common ways to do this.
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