The Other 16 “GodModes” For Windows 7

posted by Tom
Jan 8

A lot of you activated the newly uncovered “GodMode” earlier this week. How about another 16 of them for your troubles?

After revealing GodMode to the blogosphere, CNet snagged an interview with Windows division president, Steven Sinofsky. The Microsoft executive gave a little insight into why GodMode exists, explained the name and even revealed more undocutmented features for Windows 7.

According to CNet, Sofinsky said several similar developer features provide direct access to all kinds of settings, from choosing a location to managing power settings to identifying biometric sensors. Sinofsky also clarified that GodMode is a term coined by bloggers. Also interesting to note that Microsoft says it has yet to encounter the problem so many of you had trying this little trick with Vista. Some of you using 64-bit Vista say activating GodMode caused your machine to crash. Sinofsky says the folks at MS have yet to replicate this problem. Read More…

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10 Steps to Being Found on Search Engines

posted by Tom
Jan 7

Ways to help search engines find and prioritize your site content

Let’s do an experiment. Go to Google and type in the most commonly used version of your organization’s name. Do you show up first in the resulting list of sites? What if you type in a short phrase describing the type of work you’d like to be known for? Do you show up in the top page of those search results, too?

Your placement on search engines like Google or Yahoo Search is important. At a minimum, it should be easy for your current constituents to find your site using your organization’s name. Showing up on the first page of search results for key terms — for instance, something like “Cincinnati women’s shelter,” if that describes your organization — can also make a huge difference in your site traffic, not to mention in potential donors, volunteers, and clients’ ability to find and connect with you.

You don’t have complete control over where and how your Web site shows up in search engines, but you have more power than you might think. The process of site tweaking and outreach that’s used to enhance your search engine placement is called search engine optimization (or SEO for short). While SEO is often described in ways that make it seem like a mystical art form, in fact none of the key steps are particularly hard to understand. They are often, however, time consuming, and most require at least the ability to update your site’s text, if not basic HTML skills. Read More…

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Can service providers prevent DDoS attacks?

posted by Tom
Jan 6

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been popular for a simple reason: they work. The results of a DDoS attack can be crippling. An attacker can use a DDoS attack to shut down a business, for example, or prevent a political adversary from sharing opinions. Before the rise of DDoS attacks in 1999, attackers usually launched denial-of-service attacks from a handful of networked machines. When tools like Trinoo and Tribe Flood Network 2000 were widely released, launching a flood from thousands of machines became quite easy. Today, most DDoS attacks are launched from botnets, which are comprised of tens of thousands of machines or more. Some current reports claim there are a few botnets boasting more than a million infected machines.

During the past few years, service providers have been implementing more proactive defenses, using automated sensors and blocking technology to look for unusual traffic patterns that are often associated with a DDoS attack. Mechanisms, implemented in tools like Arbor Networks Inc.’s Peakflow, Cisco Systems Inc.’s Guard DDoS mitigation appliances and Mazu Networks Inc.’s Enforcer, look for the tell-tale sign of a SYN flood.

Before discussing SYN flood detection mechanisms, it’ll be useful to review the process of a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection. Read More…

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What is a denial of service (DoS) attack?

posted by Tom
Jan 6

A denial of service (DoS) attack is an incident in which a user or organization is deprived of the services of a resource they would normally expect to have. In a distributed denial-of-service, large numbers of compromised systems (sometimes called a botnet) attack a single target.

Although a DoS attack does not usually result in the theft of information or other security loss, it can cost the target person or company a great deal of time and money. Typically, the loss of service is the inability of a particular network service, such as e-mail, to be available or the temporary loss of all network connectivity and services. A denial of service attack can also destroy programming and files in affected computer systems. In some cases, DoS attacks have forced Web sites accessed by millions of people to temporarily cease operation.

Common forms of denial of service attacks are: Read More…

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Identifying File Types

posted by Tom
Jan 6

These extensions at the end of a file name refer to the type of file it is. This information is used by your operating system to launch an appropriate program when you click on the file name. Example: file.txt is a text file and can be opened by a text editor program. Read More…

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WordPress Cheatsheet

posted by Tom
Jan 6

WordPress Codex has extensive documentation on the different template tags available for use in themes, but having a cheatsheet of all the available template tags can definitely come in handy.

Ekin Ertac has created a really useful WordPress Cheatsheet that lists out all the available template tags and their purpose, along with listing several other useful information for creating or modifying themes. The cheatsheet is available for download in PDF format.

Download WordPress Cheatsheet

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How to install and run a FULL Windows XP from a USB drive

posted by Tom
Dec 30

Full article here

What is this about?

To keep the introduction short, Microsoft denies that booting Windows off a USB drive works.

See this page for example. It says:

Q: Can a USB storage device be the primary (and only) means of storage?
No. USB-based mass storage devices cannot be the primary hard disk storage solution on a regular system …

Or this one from the microsoft newsgroups:

Windows cannot boot from an USB drive. If your computer supports
booting from such device, you can load a boot loader to the USB device
which starts Windows XP from the HDD.

Anyway, the web is full of those. I was wondering about the same thing, as i did not want to put a Windows partition on my Linux.based work laptop, and thought it was a good idea to run Windows XP off a USB Hard drive that i just plug in when i need it, and boot from it. To put a long story short, this is exactly what i do now, thanks to the fantastic research of the people credited below. However, it took me significant time to figure out all the painful little problems, and i was not fully happy with the current official guide by Dietmar (no pun, he was the first to make ANYthing public). I wanted an easy guide that allows creating a modified version of the Windows XP CD, for painless and transparent installation to as many systems as you want. Read More…

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Thanks for Nothing Adobe (Acrobat users beware).

posted by Tom
Dec 6

Attackers continue to target Adobe products because the software is widely used and not always upgraded with the latest Adobe updates. Security researchers have also been devoting a lot of time to finding vulnerabilities in the company’s software. While antivirus vendors push out signatures that can detect malware attempting to exploit vulnerabilities, experts warn that new malicious code is developed daily and not all attacks can be detected.

Adobe issued another advisory last Tuesday warning of ongoing PDF attacks targeting a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat. Some security firms have detected limited email attacks containing malicious PDF files attempting to exploit a remote code execution vulnerability in Reader and Acrobat 9.2 and earlier versions.

Adobe has reportedly said it did not plan an emergency patch to repair the hole because it did not want to disrupt its quarterly update process.

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The Feds can own your WLAN too

posted by Tom
Sep 28

Introduction

Millions of wireless access points are spread across the US and the world. About 70% percent of these access points are unprotected—wide open to access by anyone who happens to drive by. The other 30% are protected by WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and a small handful are protected by the new WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) standard.

At a recent ISSA (Information Systems Security Association) meeting in Los Angeles, a team of FBI agents demonstrated current WEP-cracking techniques and broke a 128 bit WEP key in about three minutes. Special Agent Geoff Bickers ran the Powerpoint presentation and explained the attack, while the other agents (who did not want to be named or photographed) did the dirty work of sniffing wireless traffic and breaking the WEP keys.

This article will be a general overview of the procedures used by the FBI team. A future article will give step-by-step instructions on how to replicate the attack. Read More…

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Command-Line Shortcuts for Beginners

posted by Tom
Jul 22

After careful research done in the Windows XP online community, I’ve decided these command-line shortcuts are best for beginners:

• shutdown for shutting down the system
• convert for converting a FAT file system to NTFS

To get more information about any command, type command name /?. Then press Enter.

Shut Down the System

Although shutting down the computer from the Start menu is faster and easier, the shutdown command can also be issued at a command prompt to shut down the computer. The shutdown command also offers parameters to log off a user, restart the computer, and abort a system shutdown. If you ever have to boot to the command-line to troubleshoot a problem, you’ll want to know how this command works. To shut down the computer and experiment with other options:

1. Close all open programs to avoid loss of data.
2. Open Command Prompt from the shortcut created in the previous section or by clicking Start, pointing to All Programs, pointing to Accessories, and clicking Command Prompt.
3. At the command prompt, type shutdown -s. Press Enter or Return on the keyboard. A shutdown dialog box opens.
4. To abort the shutdown in progress, at the command prompt, type shutdown -a.

Other options include -r to restart the system, -m \\computername to shut down a remote computer, and -l to log off of the computer. To see all the options, type shutdown /? at the command prompt.

Convert a FAT File System to NTFS

If your file system is configured as FAT instead of NTFS, you’re missing out on quite a few extra perks. Using NTFS, you get increased security, file compression, disk quotas, and encryption—features you don’t get with FAT. For the pros and cons of both file systems, read Charlie Russel’s article, NTFS vs. FAT: Which is Right for You? If you do decide to convert, it’s quite simple: Read More…

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