52WoC Twitter Dashboard Widget

So I've been playing with a few of the 52 Weeks of Code challenges by DreamInCode.net.  Basically every week they have a new programing challenge for the community.  My app is a Mac OS X Dashboard Widget that tracks the #52WoC hashtag on Twitter, and shows the last 10 uses.  It's a fun little app, and for all who want to use it to keep up with the programming challenges, I've made it available for download.

Getting Back

So I've been away from the blogosphere for a while I suppose. I've been busy with some, self improvement type stuff. In a treatment center. Going to AA meetings. Working on getting my life back together after diving head first into the realm of drug addiction. I've been thinking about starting an addiction blog. I really don't know why I'm posting this here other than the fact that I haven't posted in a while, and it's 12:13 in the morning and I'm just kinda looking for something to do.

TJX Hacker

Albert Gonzalez is a confessed computer hacker recently making headlines after having served 18 months in prison for the largest identity-theft attack in history. He has a possible sentence of 15 to 25 years in federal prison.
Dr. Barry Roth submitted an evaluation to the court after 10 hours of interviewing Gonzalez. He stated that Gonzalez is "very bright and quick in some ways, but, very slow and ill-equipped in other ways." He went on to state that Gonzalez has had major issues with insecurity as well as social awkwardness and impairment.
Interestingly enough, Gonzalez's obsession with computers started at a very early age. In middle school, he went from being outgoing to being a loner, spending all of his free time focusing on his computer rather than chasing girls and making friends.
His mother tried to take him to a psychologist during this time, but he would have nothing to do with it. She moved the computer out of his room, but that had no effect on his usage. In Dr. Roth's evaluation letter, Gonzalez's father "arranged a fake arrest with friends in the police force" as part of an addiction intervention.
WHen Gonzalez was in high school, he hacked the computers of India's government, as well as NASA. Instead of being punished, the FBI and NASA officials showed up at his high school and simply demanded it not happen again.
After high school, Gonzalez studied computers at a Junior College in Miami, however, he dropped out during his first semester due to poor grades and lack of a challenging curriculum. After this, he worked for a now out-of-business internet company in New York. At 21, Gonzalez had developed a drug and alcohol addiction, and was arrested in 2003 for using cloned ATM cards.
As part of something called Operation Firewall, the Secret Service turned Gonzalez into an informant after discovering that he was an administrator on Shadowcrew, which is an underground forum dealing with selling stolen credit card data and information. Gonzalez also taught law enforcement agencies as well as the American Banking Association the techniques of cyberthieves.
However, during all of this, he was living a double life. While lecturing the law enforcement agencies, Gonzalez was also building up his criminal network contacts, and still inventing new methods for attacking companies. It wasn't until he was arrested in 2008 for hacking into Dave & Busters that they caught on to the TJX hack.
A statement from his mother stated that Gonzalez is "very remorseful and will definitely never commit any crime again."

Image courtesy of law enforcement.

source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/gonzalez-remorseful/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Group51

So I've gotten involved with this new Ethical Hacking/Computer Security group. It's called Group51, and has a very connected community. Upon membership approval, you can get access to their VPN "darknet", their internal network to learn and experiment with. They also have forums, group projects, articles, and a large selection of networking and information gathering tools. I suggest ya'll give it a look, it's a very interesting concept.

Creator of StalkDaily twitter worm -> a 17 y/old kid

As many people have become aware of, a Twiter worm broke loose on Saturday, April 11th, which became known as the "StalkDaily Worm." The creator of website StalkDaily.com, 17 year old Mikeyy Mooney, came clean Saturday evening, in an interview with BNO News. He stated that he created the worm simply out of boredom, a common theme in malicious computer code. He admitted to having an interest in finding vulnerabilities on sites. He did in fact bring light to a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) flaw, that could have been used much more maliciously. The kid did a service by letting Twitter see the problem in their code, and he got some free advertising for his own website in the process. He says that the code did not steal any sensitive data, or passwords. Examining the code seemed to support his claim, the script grabbed the user's twitter cookies to make use of Twitter's API, but no computers were compromised, no accounts were used to steal financial information, no one's computer was sending cryptic communications to missile silos.
He started by making several accounts, with the worm code embedded into the Bio section on the profiles, the fact this was allowed was the XSS bug he brought to light. Unlike other worms, where you are safe if you don't click suspicious links, this worm worked by just viewing the infected profile. The script waited for three seconds, before taking the user's cookies. After which, the worm would add itself into the target's Bio section, and send out Tweets linking to Mooney's site. No damage, no ruined finances, just a worm being exposed to the public.

LG phones using linux? Verizon browser is firefox?

So, today, I used my LG enV2 phone to access my web server. Out of curiosity, I checked the logs to see what the browser identified as. To my surprise, I found the following entry:

128 "http://sync350.dyndns.org/randomfileImadetotest.txt" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7 Novarra-Vision/7.3"

On this ebay auction, the same model phone is selling for $255. You cannot tell me that the hardware is worth that much, considering that Linux is open source, as is Firefox. I mean, I'll give them credit that they had to port a linux distrubution onto a phone, I'm not saying its the easiest thing in the world, I'm just saying that these phones are overpriced for the software on them. Then again, I suppose that's a given, considering the prices for ringtones/music/games/etc.

Just some food for thought I suppose, something I found interesting.

Links of the Week

I've decided that I will start doing a topic called "Links of the Week" every Sunday, where I will post my favorite links that I have come across throughout the particular week. So without further adieu, here are the Links of the Week:

1. Household Hacker: How to Snoop Security Cameras

2. Astral Voyage - Astral Projection - Science and Astral Projection

3. Elance - Freelance Tech jobs

4. Shareaholic - The browser add-on extension to share, bookmark, save and e-mail web pages quickly

5. Twitter Games To Make Tweeting Fun