Friday, October 28, 2011



On the whole Internet, there are approximately more than 150 million active websites up and running. As a result, it often becomes a real challenge for the users to identify safe websites that are trustworthy and reputed. Have you ever wondered to know the reputation of a website before placing the order? Need to know whether a given website is child safe? Well, here are some of the ways to identify safe websites on the Web.

1. WOT or Web Of Trust {www.mywot.com}:
WOT is a great place to test the reputation of your favorite website. WOT gives real-time ratings for every website based on the feedback that it gets from millions of trustworthy users across the globe and trusted sources, such as phishing and malware blacklists. Each domain name is evaluated based on this data and ratings are applied to them accordingly. A snapshot of WOT ratings for gohacking.com is shown below:
As shown in the above snapshot, the reputation of each website is shown in terms of 4 components where green means excellent, yellow warns users to be cautious and red indicates potential danger.
 Trustworthiness signifies the overall safety of the website. A poor rating may indicate that the site is associated with threats like Internet scams, phishing, identity theft risks and malware. For more information on phishing, you may refer my other post on how to identify and avoid phishing scams.
Vendor reliability tells you whether a given site is safe for carrying out buy and sell transactions with it. An excellent rating indicates superior customer satisfaction while a poor rating indicates possible scam or bad shopping experience.
Privacy indicates about “to what extent the site respects the privacy of it’s users and protects their personal identity and data”.
Child Safety indicates whether the content of a given site is appropriate for children. Site contents like sexual material, nudity and vulgarity will have a poor Child Safety rating.
In most cases, the WOT ratings are found to be highly accurate. To check the reputation of any given website, just visit www.mywot.com type-in the address of your favorite website and click on “Check now”. This tool alone can tell you a lot about the reputation and safety level of a website. However, in addition to this, I am giving you another 3 handy tools to identify safe websites on the Web.
2. McCafee SiteAdvisor:
McCafee SiteAdvisor is a free tool that is available as a browser add-on. It adds safety ratings to your browser and search engine results. You can download it from www.siteadvisor.com.
3. StopBadware:
Using this tool, you can check whether a given site is said to have involved in malware activity in the past. To check this, go to http://www.stopbadware.org/home/reportsearch and enter the URL or domain name of a website and click on “Search Clearinghouse ”. If the search does not return any result, that means the site was never involved in any of the malware activity in the past.

4. Google Pagerank:
Google PageRank is another great tool to check the reputation and popularity of a website. The PageRank tool rates every webpage on a scale of 1 to 10 which indicates Google’s view of importance of the page. If a given website has a PageRank of less than 3, then it is said to be less popular among the other sites on the Internet.
However, PageRank will only tell you how much popular a given website is and has nothing to do with the safety level of a website. So, this tool alone cannot be used to evaluate a website’s safety and other factors.
 PageRank feature is available as a part of Google Toolbar. You can install Google Toolbar from http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/toolbar/ie/index.html.

I hope you like this article. Waiting for your comments…

Thursday, October 27, 2011



 Researching the topic of installing XP from USB, and after learning a lot from this and other forums,  Based on all the available knowledge, is it possible to install XP from USB using no third party tools, except what's available to me in a standard Windows 7 installation? I realise that there are now lots of good tools available online for a variety of installation scenarios, but there is something satisfying about managing to do this "out of the box".

The scenario. Available to me were:
Legitimate Windows XP with SP1 setup CD.
Target computer: has 1 blank Harddisk and can boot from USB. Aim to install XP here. No CD drive.
"Work" computer: standard Windows 7 installation, used for preparation.
Blank 1 Gb USB stick.
The restriction was that I could only use whatever tools are included in Windows 7 on the Work machine. No third party applications. In addition, I aimed to make the fewest possible tweaks along the way.

The steps that worked successfully to install XP from USB, exactly as written, from the first to last step. Some additional remarks are at the end.

Steps 1 - 5 are performed on the Work computer.
Steps 6 - 10 are performed on the Target computer.

Step 1) Partition and format the USB stick in Windows 7, which makes it bootable:
Start Command Prompt, start diskpart.
Enter commands: select disk 2, clean, create partition primary, active
Exit diskpart, unplug and replug the stick.
Format the stick via Windows Explorer (I chose FAT32).
Note: the value in "select disk 2" depends on the number of harddisks and other USB storage devices you have! You have to check what value is appropriate for your system (use "list disk"). I have two Harddisks and disconnected all other USB storage devices, hence the value is 2 for me (numbered from 0).

Step 2) Copy contents of Windows XP with SP1 setup CD in whole to the USB stick.

Step 3) Copy these files from \I386 folder to \ on USB stick:
setupldr.bin -> bootmgr (rename), ntdetect.com, txtsetup.sif

Step 4) Edit \txtsetup.sif to add two lines in [SetupData] section:
BootPath = "\I386\"
SetupSourceDevice = "\Device\Harddisk0\Partition1"

Step 5) Use Notepad to create a file named boot.hdd at \ on USB stick with these two lines:
[Operating Systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" /fastdetect

Step 6) Boot from the USB stick on the Target computer. This starts the text-mode portion of Setup.
Follow the instructions on-screen, creating/formatting a partition on the Harddisk as needed in the process. Make sure to install Windows XP in the first partition, in the WINDOWS directory.

Step 7) When Setup reboots, reboot from the USB stick again and enter Recovery Console. If you try to boot from the Harddisk at this point, you'll get a hal.dll error.

Step 8) Using the Recovery Console, rename c:\boot.ini to boot.bak. Copy \boot.hdd from USB stick to c:\boot.ini

Step 9) Reboot, this time from the Harddisk. This starts the first GUI portion of Setup. Proceed as normal, but you are asked for the location of various files several times along the way. Each time answer with D:\I386, where D is the drive letter of the USB stick at this point. Trial and error works here. Have to do this about 20 times total.

Step 10) When setup reboots again, reboot from the Harddisk. This is the last GUI portion of Setup. Proceed as normal.

Done! This process took me 61 minutes from start to finish, which included 30 minutes for copying the contents of the CD onto the USB stick. The process is non-destructive in the sense that it does not modify the contents of the USB stick in any way.

Remarks

 
Using Windows 7, partitioning with diskpart and formatting via Windows Explorer is actually sufficient to create a bootable USB stick. The resulting stick will boot in most modern PCs, and a lot of older ones. When formatting, Windows 7 correctly enters drive number 80h in the BPB of the partition on a USB stick (unlike Windows XP, which enters 00h, leading to issues with bootability). However, creating a bootable USB stick is not always an easy or guaranteed process. It worked for me on my hardware, but your milage may vary.

Conventionally, setupldr.bin is renamed to ntldr, but I had to use bootmgr instead, because naturally the VBR code placed by Win 7 loads that one.

As is well-known, XP setup can be performed from a properly prepared local source on the USB stick, using $WIN_NT$.~BT/$WIN_NT$.~LS. What's less known is that setup can be booted and performed from *any* directory, using BootPath and SetupSourceDevice. These two settings are honoured if placed in txtsetup.sif in the current directory next to ntdetect.com. SetupSourceDevice overrides the need for a CD drive.

The value of SetupSourceDevice can be any valid NT device path. When booting from a USB stick, the stick normally gets assigned as \Device\Harddisk0. The fun thing is that other paths also work, for example "\GLOBAL??\D:", where D is the drive letter assigned to your USB stick when booting from it. (Bit of trial and error needed here). The trick is that all Win32 device paths are actually a subset of all NT device paths, attached under \GLOBAL??. Note that paths other than NT device paths don't work (such as ARC paths, or direct Win32 paths such as "D:" or "\\.\Physicaldisk0".

There is no need to prepare winnt.sif

The deal with having to prepare a boot.ini file in advance and copy it over using Recovery Console is because of the ARC path problem arising from booting from USB, which leads to the (in)famous hal.dll error. Sadly Recovery Console doesn't allow file editing, so the correct boot.ini has to be prepared in advance. This issue is well-documented, so just in brief:
When booting from USB under XP (and its setup), the USB stick is assigned multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0), and the internal harddisks are assigned multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1) onwards. When booting from the harddisk, it is of course assigned multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0). Since the setup was started by booting from USB, an incorrect boot.ini file is created on the harddisk (with a multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1) entry). In order to correct this and allow booting from the harddisk, the boot.ini file on the harddisk needs fixing.

Monday, October 10, 2011


Hacking is the art of problem solving. People who engage in computer hacking activities are often called hackers. Basically Hackers are the people who do things in a smarter way which a normal person cannot. Whether its finding a solution or exploiting loopholes in programming.

Most of the people misconceive that hacking means "law breaking" which is NOT TRUE. All hackers are not criminals and neither hacking is illegal. Hacking is a sort of a power. A power of innovation , its up to a person whether to use these to be a superhero or be a wicked evil. So there is nothing wrong in learning hacking but its important to use your skills for good purpose and not to take undue advantage of your hacking skills.

And how to distinguish between these superheroes(good hackers) and these villians ( bad hackers )-which are actually called crackers. Cracker was the term coined to distinguish evil hackers who steal our credit card numbers , defacing websites etc. Hackers stayed true to the Hacker Ethic, while crackers are only interested in breaking the law and making quick money. All the bad guys of the hacking world doing piracy, defacing websites, stealing credit card information etc. are supposed to be called 'crackers' who actually are less talented than the elite hackers

If i talk in terms of US laws then it says, it is intentionally accessing a system without permissions or may be exceeding authorized access, and thereby obtaining information. The laws basically emphasize more on government computers, but intrusion made on any individual's pc without his/her knowledge will also be called as a crime.

But this term is not being used by the media and because of its ability to sensationalise has made an evil image of the word hacker, although its not. In many cases, computer hacking helps prevent identity theft and other serious computer-related crimes.


Types of hacking

Friends i searched on many site under the topic types of hacking and i have found that most of the sites have only tell some different ways of hacking and not the proper categories of types of hacking.

So i am just giving division of types of hacking done by different hackers or whatever you call :-

1. Local Hacking
2. Social Networking Hacking
3. Remote Hacking.


Step 1 : First you need to create 3 email account. And sign up for facebook with those fake accounts. So now you must be having 3 new facebook accounts. ( don't forget to confirm your Facebook account)


Step 2 : Now u have to send friend request to the Vitim from all those 3 fb accounts. (but you should be clever enough so that your requst must be accepted.)


Step 3 : U would be thinking what if the victim won't accept the request, here comes your talent. Just make the user name with the names of victim’s friend or may be suppose if his interest is in hacking then make the user name like grey hat hacker , virus , facebook hacked and so on. Even you can attract the victim by using a pic of beautiful girl if victim is a guy or may be any handsome guy if victim is a girl..lol


Step 4 : Now go to www.facebook.com and click on “Forgot your password” Then you need to identify your victim's account by using his Facebook E-mail, Facebook name or Facebook name + Facebook friend's name. It would be easier to identify the victim with his or her Facebook name. When you got the account, just click on "This Is My account".


Step 5 : Once you identify you're at victim’s profile, Facebook suggests you to recover the password by the existing email address. You can bypass that by clicking on "No longer have access to these"?


Step 6 : Now Facebook will ask a secret question (If the victim has one), to bypass that, you'll need to type the wrong answers three times. After that Facebook will try to help you recover the password by the support of 3 friends.


Step 7: Just select your three fake profiles that your victim added to his friends.(The friends must be registered more than three weeks).


Step 8: Then you'll get the code on your fake profiles, with those 3 codes you can easily change the password.


Note : Your fake account must be friend with that person with atleast 3 weeks. And all those 3 accounts must not be friends together.
for eg:- If you want to hack "A" with your "B" , "C" & "D" accounts then "A" should be friend with "B" , "C" & "D" atleast from last 3 weeks and also remember that "B" , "C" & "D" should not be friends with each other.