FRHACK OS is an updated/modified version of the latest BackTrack 4 ISO with many updated tools and fixes.
This means it’s a fully fledged linux pen-testing/security environment.

Some included tools & Updates

gcc-4.2
sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin
spoonwep-wpa-rc3.deb
airsnort-0.2.7e.tar.gz
wepbuster-1.0_beta_0.6
jbrofuzz-jar-15
wfuzz-1.4
tor-0.2.1.19
privoxy-3.0.8-stable-src
ophcrack-3.3.1
vncrack_src-1.21
fuzzgrind_090622

A new version (coming with bug fixes, included rainbow tables, wordlists, extras etc.) will be available for FRHACK 01, [...]

It’s been a long time since we’ve heard about a problem with FreeBSD, partially because the mass of people using it isn’t that large and secondly because BSD tends to be pretty secure as operating systems go.
It’s a pretty serious flaw this time with root escalation, thankfully it’s only a local exploit though and not [...]

Apache.org has been hacked quite a number of this times, last week it happened again and the whole infrastructure was down for a few hours while they sorted out what had happened and how to remedy it.
Apparently one the remote SSH keys was compromised allowed attacked to upload code, the scary part is they could [...]

This is a serious bug, it effects all Kernel versions released since May 2001! That goes all the way back to the early 2.4 versions.
It’s also exploitable according to the report – This issue is easily exploitable for local privilege escalation. In order to exploit this, an attacker would create a mapping at address zero [...]

MultiISO LiveDVD is an integrated Live DVD technology which combines some of the very popular Live CD ISOs already available on the internet. It can be used for security reconnaissance, vulnerability identification, penetration testing, system rescue, media center and multimedia, system recovery, etc. It’s a all-in-one multipurpose LiveDVD put together. There’s something in it for [...]

Kon-Boot is an prototype piece of software which allows to change contents of a Linux kernel (and now Windows kernel also!!!) on the fly (while booting).
In the current compilation state it allows to log into a Linux system as ’root’ user without typing the correct password or to elevate privileges from current user to [...]

You may remember back in February the BETA of BackTrack 4 was released for download, the team have made many changes and have now released BackTrack 4 Pre Release.

For those that don’t know BackTrack is the top rated linux live distribution focused on penetration testing. With no installation whatsoever, the analysis platform is started directly [...]

Lynis is an auditing tool for Unix (specialists). It scans the system and available software, to detect security issues. Beside security related information it will also scan for general system information, installed packages and configuration mistakes.

This software aims in assisting automated auditing, software patch management, vulnerability and malware scanning of Unix based systems. It can [...]

The Remote Exploit Development Team is happy to announce the release of BackTrack 4 Beta. In this latest version of BackTrack 4 there have been some conceptual changed and some new and exciting features. The most significant of these changes is the expansion from the realm of a Pentesting LiveCD towards a full blown “Distribution”.
Now [...]

We did mention nUbuntu long ago in our famous 10 Best Security Live CD Distros (Pen-Test, Forensics & Recovery) article.
After that it stopped development for quite some time, thankfully some new blood has picked it up and development has started again!

With over a year of inactivity, the latest alpha of nUbuntu 8.04 has finally surfaced.
With [...]

Lynis is an auditing tool for Unix (specialists). It scans the system and available software, to detect security issues. Beside security related information it will also scan for general system information, installed packages and configuration mistakes.
This is a tool that might be useful for both penetration testers performing white box tests and system admins trying [...]

It looks like it might be time to update our very well received list of the 10 Best Security Live CD Distros (Pen-Test, Forensics & Recovery) since we have Russix now and Backtrack new version is on the way out.
Russix is a Slax based Wireless Live Linux. It has been designed to be light (circa [...]

Ah Metasploit development cycle seems to be picking up, I guess with greater community support the bugs get ironed out and the new features introduced faster.
Good to see an update so soon after Metasploit Framework v3.0 was released.
I keep closely up to date with Metasploit as it’s pretty much the best free tool out there [...]

The guys at BackTrack e-mailed me to let me know their Version 3 BETA has been released recently, and perhaps our readers would like to know about it.
For those that don’t know BackTrack evolved from the merging of two wide spread security related distributions – Whax and Auditor Security Collection. By joining forces and replacing [...]

Interesting, a new arena for marketing spin and sales talk – the auctioning of exploits.
WabiSabiLabi is pushing hard for a good price for a ClamAV vulnerability and exploit that it has gotten hold of, it’s dosing it up with a good portion of spin to make it seem like the next big thing – I [...]

Gentoo Pulls the Plug after Getting Pwned
Gentoo pulled quite a few of it’s servers recently following the discovery of a fairly severe flaw in it’s systems.
Just to show that Linux systems aren’t invulnerable and immune to all security issues.
Ubuntu suffered quite heavily recently too, so don’t assume just because you use Linux you’re safe.

[...]

Since Ubuntu is getting so fantastically popular nowadays I thought this might be useful to some of you.
I personally think Ubuntu is great, the features, ease of installation, stability and especially the work they have done on things like wireless drivers make it a breeze to get up and running.
It is a pretty secure distro [...]

The Kcpentrix Project was founded in May 2005 , KCPentrix 1.0 was liveCD designed to be a standalone Penetration testing toolkit for pentesters, security analysts and System administrators
What’s New in KcPentrix 2.0
Now release 2.0 is a liveDVD, It features a lot of new or up to date tools for auditing and testing a network, from [...]

Trinity Rescue Kit or TRK is a free live Linux distribution that aims specifically at recovery and repair operations on Windows machines, but is equally usable for Linux recovery issues.
It is possible to boot TRK in three different ways:

As a bootable CD which you can burn yourself from a downloadable isofile
From a USB stick/disk (optionally [...]

Or half-open scanning technique is the first of three to come series about stealth scanning… The other two are Xmas/Fin/Null and idle/zombie scan techniques…
Intro
This is a series of three to come articles about stealth scanning, everything that I am going to present is hping oriented so if you want to learn this techniques you’d better [...]

Sguil (pronounced sgweel) is probably best described as an aggregation system for network security monitoring tools. It ties your IDS alerts into a database of TCP/IP sessions, full content packet logs and other information. When you’ve identified an alert that needs more investigation, the sguil client provides you with seamless access to the data you [...]

Nemesis is a command-line network packet crafting and injection utility for UNIX-like and Windows systems. Nemesis, is well suited for testing Network Intrusion Detection Systems, firewalls, IP stacks and a variety of other tasks. As a command-line driven utility, Nemesis is perfect for automation and scripting.

Nemesis can natively craft and inject packets for:

ARP
DNS
ETHERNET
ICMP
IGMP
IP
OSPF
RIP
TCP

UDP

Using the IP [...]

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
This is everywhere today. Every major news site has this ‘magic’ number in it. Digg.com had stories with more than 24.000 diggs (that’s actually the first time I see that many).
In case you’ve been in a cave for the [...]

Techm4sters e-mailed us recently to let us know about their new security distro called ProTech, we haven’t had time to download it and test it yet but it certainly looks promising.
- What is PROTECH? Protech is a very light live security distribution based on Ubuntu Linux.

- Is this like Nubuntu? It is similar, yes! But [...]

Damn Vulnerable Linux (DVL) is a Linux-based (modified Damn Small Linux) tool for IT-Security & IT-Anti-Security and Attack & Defense. It was initiated for training tasks during university lessons by the IITAC (International Institute for Training, Assessment, and Certification) and S²e – Secure Software Engineering in cooperation with the French Reverse Engineering Team.

Damn Vulnerable Linux [...]

BackTrack is the result of the merging of the two innovative penetration testing live linux distributions Auditor security collection and Whax. By combining the best features from both distributions and putting continous development energy, the most complete and finest security testing live distro was born: BackTrack

BackTrack v.2.0 is finally released, it’s been a long wait [...]

This is a bit of hacking in the original sense of the word, taking a $60 router and giving it the capabilities of something costing in the hundreds or thousands (enterprise level).

Of all the great DIY projects at this year’s Maker Faire, the one project that really caught my eye involved converting a regular old [...]

The first round results of the Linux Reverse Engineering Hacker Challenge are out!
http://www.hackerchallenge.org
It was expected that an intermediate hacker with Linux experience should be able to defeat the protection(s) in less than 10 hours. Participants may earn up to $4100 USD.

A total of 93 individuals registered to participate in the first Hacker Challenge. Individuals were [...]

A working version of the exploit used to escalate priveleges to root in the recent Debian breakin, ah another root kernel exploit.
It’s to do with the way the kernel handles file persmissions (or lack of) on core dumps.
Linux kernel is prone to a local privilege-escalation vulnerability.

A local attacker may gain elevated privileges by creating a [...]

Ah, I wonder what happened?
I’ve always been a great fan of Debian, all the way back into the early days of woody and backporting apt packages.
What a name too, gluck to me usually means g’luck or good luck

Early this morning we discovered that someone had managed to compromise gluck.debian.org. We’ve taken the [...]

OH MY GOD, NOT ANOTHER SENDMAIL FLAW?
What’s that? Yah number 1001010102121.

Recently, Mark Dowd of ISS discovered a signal handling vulnerability in Sendmail. We don’t see major bugs in software that’s as popular as Sendmail very often (at least, in the Unix world anyways), and that’s probably a good thing. According to sendmail.com, Sendmail still handles [...]

An open-source security audit program funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has flagged a critical vulnerability in the X Window System (X11) which is used in Unix and Linux systems. A missing parentheses in a bit of code is to blame. The error can grant a user root access, and was discovered using [...]

I came across this while browsing, has some pretty solid stuff, goes deeper than most basic Linux security guides.
It has some good sections like this on protection against fork bombs:

Fork bombs are programs that keep creating child processes until system resources are all used, they actually aren’t remote exploits because they require a local user [...]

Introduction
kArp is a linux patch that allows one to implement ARP hijacking in the kernel, but control it easily via userland. You may configure, enable and disable kArp via ProcFS or the sysctl mechanism.
kArp is implemented almost on the device driver level. Any ethernet driver (including 802.11 drivers) is supported. The kArp code is [...]

The fact is Windows is getting ripped apart with viruses, spamware, spyware, zombie clients, trojans worms and whatever else you can think of.
Mac and Linux aren’t (at the moment), there are already Bluetooth viruses, so why not Linux and Mac..
Some may say it’s because they are inherently more secure, the architecture and user privelege seperationg [...]

4. Brief How-to …. Creating Multiple clients to Single site tunnels.
Example of using PKI to create a client-to-site VPN:
For a road warrior or roaming/multiple user scenario, static keys based VPNs don’t scale well. You will need to implement a PKI if you have Hub and Spoke architecture of VPN.
From the OpenVPN.net website:
Static Key advantages

Simple [...]

3. Brief How-to ….. OpenVPN and Site-to-Site Tunnels.
OpenVPN can be implemented either Site-to-site or client-server model. I will take example configurations of both models.
If you want to implement site-to-site configuration, the best way is to use static-keys instead of PKI. Using static keys, you can have your VPN tunnel up and running in a jiffy.
First, [...]

2. Why OpenVPN
Here, in this article, I will lay down the emphasis on one important Open-Source SSL VPN software written by James Yonan and contributed by several others, which proposes security without the inherent complexity of IPsec AND using a trusted design of client component and VPN server.
Usually VPNs require end points which are trusted. [...]

Requirement: To connect to a VPN server in a different country.
Situation: A country which has proxies at every gateway.
Issues: VPN based on IPSec is fussy when it comes across networks which are NAT’ted/ proxied. The Security Parameters Indexes don’t match and clients do not get connected.
Objective: To connect VPN server in a corporate network using [...]