Hacking Dojo week 2

So this week was a little interesting in how it came about. And why I'm not posting on it until so late tonight. Monday, for class, due to issues with work, I was going to be late. I loaded up skype on my Galaxy S, to either start listening, or something, and saw that Thomas Wilhelm had bail on us last week. Worked out for me, I was 20 to 30 minutes from being somewhere I could take the class.

This Week's Class:
So the 2011-04-04 class was on Passive Informtion gathering as listed in the ISSAF. The class is canceled didn't mean that we got a free week. Instead we were told to pull the video from 3 months ago, off the site, and watch it.

The topic was searching for as much information for a target, based on scope, without touching the target's servers at all.

One of the things I caught in the video was the use of Personal Wiki's to keep track of your notes during the course of the attack. Something a little better than a text editor. I can see the point, to a point. Easier to make call outs, add images, links and other things than a text editor. So I spent some time today looking for a personal wiki. I'm trying Zim right now, but might just do a local install of media wiki. I've used Leo in the past, but that's less a wiki and more an outlining tool. (Offensive Security uses Leo for their stuff).

Some of the tools covered were remote whois and dns look up servers. How Google caches work and how they don't cache images but hit the servers for them (Google cache only copies text everything else it pulls live from the web site). How to use the Wayback Machine at archive.org, and how to search a couple of other things.

A lot of what was covered here, was in the recon chapter of Dissecting the Hack: Th3 F0rb!dd3n N3tw0rk and Hacking: The Next Generation.

Also, if anyone is interested in signing up for the class. I found out yesterday the course cost is going up by $50.00 soon, but if you get in now, you'll be locked in at the $95.00 price, until you cancel.