PullThePlug/OTW is looking for someone to do content updates on www.overthewire.org to join the management team - if you have free time on your hands and want to contribute let us know! drop us an email at management@overthewire.org

Thanks

PTP/OTW Management Team

Because all blog entries appear on the main page here, I thought it would not be very nice to spam it with such things as changelogs every couple of days, and I've decided to use my own web space for that purpose.

I will still be posting project related material here that I deem worthy, though.

Oh, and if you have any suggestions, please let me know (here or there) as I will be very happy to hear them.

EOFYI

dunno if this is funny:

When I do external network perimeter assessments, the first steps almost always end up being exactly the same. I scan for open ports, check dns records, get whole website and look for interesting files, compile a list of potential usernames, and do other types of information gathering. The thing about all that is it takes time and time is one thing I don't have a lot of. Running tools such as nmap, httrack, and nikto all at the same time is not a very good idea and running them one after another requires monitoring their progress whole day long (and sometimes even longer), which I can't do. Manually running the tools means downtime between execution of those tools. Most of the time I have more than one project going at a time and because of that I may forget what stage each project is at and skip a test and end up coming back to it later. Wastes time. So, to save myself time and spare myself the hassle of remembering things I decided to write a tool that would do everything for me. Well, at least the initial part of an assessment when my input is not really required. And so lazyfoot was born.

As of right now it is still not complete, but it does most of what I wanted it to do when I first thought of it. Lazyfoot was not intended to be a tool all by itlsef, but rather a means of running other tools without me having to issue the commands. It was also not designed with only one target in mind. Lazyfoot is ideal for when you have a list of targets rather than just one machine, which is why all inputs to the program are text files.

Here are some possible features that I have in mind and might implement in not too distant future:

• goog-mail.py (gathers e-mails from google search results)
  I may rewrite the tool in ruby to include it in the lazyfoot for better portability.

• dns hijacking
• e-mail notification of completion
• compress (+email?)
• reverse dns lookup
• search saved sites for forms
• banner grabbing from nmap scans + telnet
• searching milw0rm + securityfocus for banners

And anything else that would make my life easier.

I was also thinking of, perhaps, splitting lazyfoot in stages such as "passive", "stealthy", "intrusive", and "all out". This way I could put things like grabbing dns records and search for e-mails in the "passive" stage, and nmap scan in "stealthy", and so on. This seems like a cool idea but I am not sure if it would be all that useful.
Another idea I pondered is to write plugins (httrack, nmap, whatever). Also seems cool, but having one executable with on/off switches is probably more practical.

Hm.

Anyway, I'll keep you posted.

My work involves building large, complex automation systems for Fortune 50 type companies. We have recently branched out to offer overhaul/rebuild of our competitors equipment (they are, fortunately for us, not interested in servicing their own stuff). We have a piece here circa 1997 at the moment. From a technology point of view, it was obsolete in the late 1970's. They obviously have held on to a design for far too long. Last year they sold no systems. We won every bid.

It's obvious to me that as a company, particularly a North American company, you innovate or die, as my competitor did. I've been mulling this idea over and trying to parallel it to IT in general and OS design in particular. What was the last neat or great thing that Linux has innovated? 2.6? The new CFS (scheduler)? Nothing? How about Windows? Vista?

If I ponder long enough I will think of some, I'm sure. The neatest thing I've played with in some time was OSX. All of OSX's flaws and flames aside, the concept of the mach microkernel with another kernel running atop seemed kinda cool. The execution in OSX seemed to leave a lot to desire (I referred to it as Frankenstein when nemo was giving me the guided tour during his research for the phrack article).

I would hate to see OS's like Linux slow innovation to the point where they become some sort of ancient Rube Goldberg contraption like the beast on my shop floor, but the new corporate control of the development (read the domains of the maintainers) may head it there.

If none of these folks innovate, will it be stagnant, or is it ripe for the next 'Linux' to come along and create the new innovation.

More thoughts later.

In my line of work I need to run nmap, nikto, dig, and bunch of other tools against several targets almost on daily basis. Because I am lazy I created a tool to do that for me. It's called lazyfoot, where foot stands for footprinting. It's wirtten in Ruby, isn't fancy and only around 300 lines of code long.

So far the main functions are:
nmap
nikto
httrack
whois
dig

It also looks for some files after in the sites httrack got, and does chown & chgrp because it has to be run as root. I need to figure out how to properly do version numbering because right now it's a mess.

This little thing is is still under development but already saved me a bunch of time. Maybe you'll find it useful too.

EDIT:

http://www.missingvowel.net/lazyfoot/development/

EDIT 2:

I guess I should give some usage examples....

Contents of IP.txt:
192.168.1.1-255

Contents of weblist.txt:
mywebsite1.com
yourwebsite2.com

this is just a place holder to see what it all looks like.