Helping my mum

That’s how you add pages to your favourites, mum.

So you wanna try and get hands on with computer security?

A great place to start off, although it may seem a bit childish, it’s actually really informative on invasion security techniques. It’s called http://www.hackthissite.org and it’s essentially a playground for people that want to practice invasive security without doing something nasty in the “real world”.

Also, check out Nmap from http://www.insecure.org, it’s essentially a port scanner but with a HUGE range of functionality and  the perfect tool for mapping out networks. Plus it’s open-source!

Another big giant of the security world is Metasploit found here http://www.metasploit.com, this is an open-source exploit framework which integrates very nicely with Nmap. It allows users to build exploit to test the services running on their systems.

And if you REALLY wanna get stuck in then do as much learning as you can on shell code, which is by my knowledge code which spawns a shell.

So with that all together, lets say you’ve used Nmap to map out a network and revealed a vulnerable service running on an arbitrary port. Next you build your own shell code in which to inject into that service, then once that is complete you can use Metasploit to actually do the injection. You may even find the shell code already available in the Metasploit framework.

Happy hacking!

Windows Live Writer makes writing this blog a lot easier

I’m writing this blog from within Windows Live Writer which looks a bit like the Windows WordPad Application. This makes my life a lot easier as I don’t have to go through my web browser to do some blogging!

I prefer this straight away just because of my familiarity with the look and feel of it.

Here’s what it looks like right now:

How surreal…

It’s directly connected to my WordPress.com account so I can post it straight away, great!

Well that was strange…

I just went to access NetBeans IDE 6.9.1 on Windows 7 and it had stopped working for some reason!!

So now I’ve reinstalled it, if it happens again I’ll post some pictures which would be cool, but to be honest I’d rather my software to just work when I need it to!

I had used it the day before and it ran perfectly, it may be because I installed Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 after it, did an update and then restarted. That’s when it stopped working randomly Perhaps a clash of paths…

Just getting started..

This is my first official post as a blogger. I guess the point of this blog is just for me to vent about my time as a student and also to share the stuff I learn along the way. I’m half way through my degree already, in my second year studying computer science. I guess this is the ”Hello World!” of my blogs..

For those that don’t know what that means, according to the look up script within WordPress it’s this

The classic first program a programmer writes in a new programming language. It came from the C and Unix world, and all it does is display “Hello, World” on screen. The “Hello, World” example is often used as a tutorial for starting to learn a programming language, since it demonstrates the framework necessary to do a simple function.

So that’s me on getting started.