Security Hacks

1521 Articles

Automated Paintball Sentry

June 26, 2009 by 32 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vYKwih8Izk]

Reader, [Ben Godding], sends in the video for his senior design team’s automated paintball sentry. The frame is made of plasma cut aluminum. The paintball gun uses a custom hopper mounted remotely from the gun body. It has two webcams offering a 160 degree field of vision, and the image processing is done by a dual core pentium CPU booting windows xp off a compact flash card. The computer interfaces with the 1/4scale RC servos using a PIC24. The paintball sentry can either be configured via a computer GUI when a monitor is available or a baclkit keypad and 4×20 charachter display in the field.

Related: [Jared Bouck]’s paintball gun turret

Slowloris HTTP Denial Of Service

June 17, 2009 by 40 Comments

[RSnake] has developed a denial of service technique that can take down servers more effectively. Traditionally, performing a denial of service attack entailed sending thousands of requests to a server, these requests needlessly tie up resources until the server fails. This repetitive attack requires the requests to happen in quick succession, and is usually a distributed effort. However, [RSnake]’s new technique has a client open several HTTP sessions and keeps them open for as long as possible. Most servers are configured to handle only a set number of connections; the infinite sessions prevent legitimate requests from being handled, shutting down the site. This vulnerability is present on webservers that use threading, such as Apache.

A positive side effect of the hack is that the server does not crash, only the HTTP server is affected. His example perl implementation, slowloris, is able to take down an average website using only one computer. Once the attack stops, the website will come back online immediately.

Update: Reader [Motoma] sent in a python implementation of slowloris called pyloris

[photo: cutebreak]

Ekahau HeatMapper Maps Out WiFi Signals

June 16, 2009 by 36 Comments

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The term ‘warwalking’ isn’t used very often, but the Ekahau HeatMapper adds a new tool to the pod bound hacker’s arsenal. The tool maps out wireless access points as well as their signal strength within a facility. A test of the HeatMapper on a map made with AutoDesk Dragonfly accurately determined the location of a router within 3 feet and helped tune the angle it needed to be at for maximum range. Ekahau made a fantastically cheesy promotional video for their product, which is viewable after the jump. The program is free of charge, but unfortunately only runs on windows, so mac and *nix users are out of luck, though it might run under wine.

Continue reading “Ekahau HeatMapper Maps Out WiFi Signals” →

Bucky’s Animal Spirit

June 4, 2009 by 18 Comments

[vimeo = 4570300]

When an unsuspecting person walks up to [Rob Ray’s] ATM machine, they are greeted with a surprise that doesn’t involve giving them their money. When they insert their card, the video above plays followed by a game where you control a beaver trying to save money during a recession. Surprisingly, people usually found it humorous and didn’t immediately freak out that their card was in a machine that wasn’t their ATM. His site has all kinds of pictures of various users as well as the construction of the project.

[via Wooster Collective]

Keykeriki: Wireless Keyboard Sniffer

June 4, 2009 by 27 Comments

[vimeo = 4990390]

Remote-Exploit.org is releasing Keykeriki, a wireless keyboard sniffer. The project is both open source hardware and software. you can download the files on their site. Right now you can’t get a pre made board, but they plan on releasing one soon. The system can be upgraded with “backpacks” or add on modules. One of these is going to be an LCD that displays the keystrokes of the keyboard you are sniffing. Another is supposed to serve as an interface to your iPhone.  Right now it has the ability to decode Microsoft wireless keyboards, but the Logitech pieces should be added soon.

Marc Weber Tobias Vs Medeco

May 22, 2009 by 20 Comments

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This month’s Wired magazine has an extensive profile of [Marc Weber Tobias]. He’s a professional lock picker that delights in coming up with new techniques for taking on high security locks. In recent years, he’s run afoul of the US’s premier high security lock manufacturer, Medeco, by publishing Open in Thirty Seconds with [Tobias Bluzmanis]. Medeco still denies that this is even possible. Wired decided to to test the team by purchasing six new cylinders and timing them. Each one was open in under nine minutes. You can see a video of this on Wired’s site.

Last fall we covered a decoding attack against Medeco locks by [Jon King].

[via blackbag]