A Virginia DEF CON community
During the last meeting, we were discussing Zeek (formerly Bro) and narrowing down choices for sniffing accessories (tap vs span port). We settled on the Great Scott Gadgets lan taps. The pro version is enclosed and complete for $40, and the Throwing Star version is in kit form and just $15. Because I’m (a) cheap, (b) addicted to flux fumes, and (c) a ninja, I opted for the throwing star. I just slapped it together in about ten minutes, and it seems to be working just fine.
Only a couple members could make tonight’s meeting, but it was a positive meeting anyway. I was working on my Vic-20 recovery when Kevin arrived, and we pretty quickly ended up in a conversation about Zeek. He needs to master it for work, and I need to master it just because. I found a lab from FAU that might be helpful. Here’s the link:
http://ce.sc.edu/cyberinfra/docs/workshop/Zeek_Lab_Series.pdf
We did a bit of research on network taps, and settled on Great Scott Gadgets’ Lan Tap Pro (or, if you’re cheap and handy like me, the Throwing Star Lan Tap Kit). both are passive LAN taps, and will pipe all traffic that passes through them into your Zeek, Snort or other IDS box.
We’re looking forward into the new year and planning some exciting talks and presentations. Maybe we’ll talk about Zeek in February if we’re ready, and Dan wants to talk about social engineering research tools, possibly in March.
Next meeting is Monday February 24. I hope you can make it.
Today I migrated the DC540 website to an overseas VPS. Somehow an overseas VPS, with just 2GB of RAM, responds faster by multitudes than shared hosting at Hostgator. I guess Hostgator has reached maximum oversubscription. Please let me know how YOU experience the website, and let me know if I missed any bugs. Took me longer than I should have to get the events plugin working, for stupid configuration reasons that I am too proud to admit.
Let’s try this again —
Several regulars can’t make January 27.
I can’t make January 20, conflicting meeting.
How do any stragglers feel about January 21 (Tuesday)?
Thoughts?
I have an assignment to crack an Office password for a document. I have tried using john and hashcat with several large wordlists, and had no luck, so I decided to go all-in and just leave a Kali instance running john in incremental (brute force) mode for “as long as it takes.” It’s been two days so far.
I have it running within ‘screen’ so that I can occasionally login to the system remotely to check progress without risk of losing it. I was excited at one point yesterday seeing that it was in the middle of checking seven-character passwords, but then I checked back later and it was checking six-character passwords. This morning, five. I wanted to understand — I assumed (without doing a deep dive on the mechanics) that it would just go literally incrementally. aaaaa, aaaab, aaaac, etc. That was an incorrect assumption.
John’s incremental mode actually operates on “trigraph frequencies.” While I understand the concept of trigraph frequencies (certain sets of three characters occur more frequently than others, and this can help with decryption efforts, I have my doubts as to whether this helps in cracking passwords. Passwords aren’t always natural speech, after all.
Anyhow, it’s been running for two days now, and I’ll post about it again when it’s done just to give an idea of whether it’s successful, and if so, how long it took vs the complexity of the password.
If anyone else wants to try using similar or other methods, let me know, and I’ll send you the hash (generated by office2john). No, I can’t send you the actual document. That would be unethical.
Didn’t know this existed. Sounds like a great thing for potentially hostile locations, cons, etc. Take your macbook, lock all the ports, don’t worry about somebody using USBKiller or BadUSB on you.
Currently penciled in for January 21 (third Tuesday) since several members are unavailable during the fourth week. If you prefer another date, indicate on website or Twitter via comments.
Options include:
Original 4th Monday (27th)
3rd Monday (20th, MLK day)
some evening in between.
Several people indicated being unavailable on the fourth Monday in January. Options: 4th Monday anyway, 3rd Monday (MLK day), some other day. I’ll pencil in 4th Monday anyway until we achieve consensus.
I can safely say that I believe this show will be recognized, when the rest of the world catches up and watches it, as right up there with Breaking Bad as some of the best television ever written.
Someone on Reddit posted this, and I’m really glad I didn’t have a mouthful of coffee when I saw it. Laugh with me, fellow devotees!
New Store Who Dis Dismiss