Friday, November 06, 2009

What does your Sunday look like - a couple days early

I’ve been trying to post on Facebook at least once a week.  Lately that has been in a series of “What does your Sunday look like” and either short descriptions or pictures or both of what mine looks like.

This week I am doing it a bit early.  First, because I have some time, second because I have been so busy this week doing some incredible stuff with some incredible people, and wanted to share.

This week my company had its annual technology conference.  We had approximately 170 people attend.  The last two days were classes that were done by SANS (http://www.sans.org).  I went through “Metasploit for Penetration Testers (Security 553)” and “One-Day Version Cutting Edge Hacking Techniques (Security 517)”.

Now, I generally have a fairly healthy paranoia when it comes to security and computers.  I have always said that there is no such thing as a secure system.  However, when I have said this, it has been due to the fact that my systems have been hacked and that I had been told that no system is secure.  I did not have any “real” knowledge of how to do hacking.  I’ve run a few scripts, I’ve investigated more intrusions than I can count, etc.  However, now, i have actual knowledge from a hacking perspective.  I now have run through some of the MANY MANY tools and techniques that there are to break in to patched systems.  I was introduced to Metasploit - a Framework to assist research, development and use of vulnerabilities.  I have used that framework to break into systems.  I have used that framework to set up pdf’s, word docs, and html files that let me have a command line interface on a system.  I have looked at a tool that you can use to boot a windows box and get passed the local administrative password - oh, and it works in XP, Vista, and, as we tested today, works against Windows 7 too.

So, that’s what my last few days have looked like.  what have yours’ looked like?