HackingTheUniverse

You are browsing the archives of 2009 March.

Cold boot attacks involve a cold reboot of a computer into an environment designed to retrieve information from memory even after the ram chips have not been refreshed by current for several minutes. It seems that ram chips hold memory content much longer than the specifications call for. If a computer system is not gracefully [...]

Cyber attack and defense gaming environments are becoming more commonplace as the realization grows that there is a serious need for training and skills development in this area and skills that go beyond abstract “book learning” and need hands-on lab time. Virtual environments makes this easier to accomplish.
What is a Cyber Exercise? - [sans.org]
A [...]

Born near Hamburg, Germany in 1885, Hermann Weyl was a mathematician whose work had a strong influence on both physics and number theory. He worked on combining general relativity and the laws of electromagnetism. He worked with Lie algebras, symmetry and created the first version of gauge theory which attempted to describe both electromagnetic and [...]

Skylon is a spaceplane design that is under development by Reaction Engines, a British company. The basic idea is to fly (like a conventional airplane) up through the atmosphere into space, using a lot less thrust than conventional rockets which “blast” their way straight up into space, requiring vast amounts of thrust. By flying [...]

Stephen Wolframs new Wolfram Alpha project is an attempt to create a mechanism that can respond to human language questions by mining information from the web and computing an answer to the question. Wolfram calls it a “computational knowledge engine”.
Wolfram Alpha is Coming — and It Could be as Important as Google
A Computational Knowledge Engine [...]

Nagios is an open source (free) network and computer system monitoring framework that runs on linux. It uses plugins on the monitored hosts that can be developed in any language or script.
Nagios - [nagios.org]
Nagios Community Wiki - [community.nagios.org/wiki]
Nagios Exchange - [nagiosexchange.org]
Nagios 3.x Documentation Table of Contents - [nagios.sourceforge.net]
What Is This?
Nagios® is a system and [...]

The following link includes a video that demonstrates how it is possible to launch exploit code with the new PDF vulnerability simply by selecting the file icon, switching to thumbnail view, or just hovering over the file icon. Each of these actions triggers a Windows Explorer shell extension which reads information from the PDF [...]

It is difficult to fully grasp the concept of scales that are involved in space. The ratio of empty space to matter is HUGE! The size of planets and even stars is dwarfed when compared to the space between them. We try to understand things and visualize them by comparing them to [...]

War dialing gets an upgrade
This interesting story has implications for VOIP, SCADA and maybe more.
The co-founder of the Metasploit Project aims to upgrade wardialers this week, speeding surveys of blocks of phone numbers using voice-over-IP lines and storing data on who — or what — answers the phone at each number.
Dubbed Warvox, the software [...]

Etherape is a passive network monitoring tool that collects information and displays it graphically. As etherape it marks the nodes by IP address or mac address (according to settings) and then draws lines connecting them to represent traffic and colors the lines by protocol. As the traffic volume increases, the size of both [...]