Mark Sanborn . net

BSDTalk - A cool podcast that discusses FreeBSD. They interview many FreeBSD developers and have some interesting discussion.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Linux Users - An interesting article with 7 great tips for beginners learning Linux. Although the advice the author gives is very basic and common knowledge, he explains his advice very well. I think Linux beginners would get a lot of value out of reading this. Read more »

FreeBSD is founded on the idea that compiling is faster/better than using pre-made packages. To make compiling easy FreeBSD uses a “package management” system called ports; however, it is difficult to find the port to compile since FreeBSD’s package management system is really just empty directories with build instructions. These directories are categorized by the package application so that you can browse them, but it is difficult sometimes to find a package. Read more »

If you remember from my post on my Initial Impression of FreeBSD 7.0 I am fairly new at using FreeBSD. After my recent Wordpress SQL Injection Attack I went around updating everything that I could get my hands on. A FreeBSD server happened to be one of those things that need updating. Read more »

Well, today one of the blogs that I maintain for someone was compromised by an SQL injection. The hacker had apparently injected an invisible iframe that contained that loaded a website that contained a trojan. They had also placed invisible links to casinos, porn, and other shady sites. Read more »

Sometimes we have sensitive data that we want to get rid of. Since deleting a file doesn’t actually prevent it from being recovered we need to do some extra steps to ensure that it can’t be recovered. In this post we will use DD to complete this task. DD is often the tool digital forensics use to duplicate hard drives we will use it for a more destructive use so that our data can’t be recovered. Read more »

Sometimes we need to know the MAC address of a specific computer for multiple reasons. For example, I needed to know the MAC address of one of my computers so I could tell the router to assign a specific IP address via DHCP. Another reason you need to know the MAC address is so you can block a specific computer from talking to you. Maybe you need to know the MAC address so you can allow only that computer to communicate with you. There are many reasons for knowing a MAC address of a computer. Some reasons good other times it is used with bad intentions. Like port sniffing packets with a specific MAC address. Read more »

Computer viruses hit one million - Apparently Symantec just published a report that says their are now over a million known computer viruses. This is funny since I can’t really even remember that last time I have seen/had one.

So neighbors steal your wi-fi, kill the link or… have fun! - This is a great article that shows how you can exploit people that connect/hack your wireless network. Instead of disconnecting them they turn all their web pages blurry and upside down.

25 Games for Linux - As many know Linux is not really know for gaming since the game developers like to ignore us Linux users. Fortunately here is a good list of fun games that work natively in Linux. Read more »

Back in the day there used to be a program called lophcrack that was fairly good at cracking Windows passwords. Fortunately it wasn’t very effective for cracking strong passwords. Today I ran a newer cracking program on my computer called, ophcrack. As some of you know I tend to have extremely secure passwords contain numbers, letters, and other special characters. Not only did ophcrack find my password it found all but one character in my password in less than 20 seconds. That leads me to believe that it can crack pretty much any length of password in minutes. Read more »