new to me tools

I like finding "new" tools. That doesn't mean that the tools themselves are new, just new to me.

In Information Security, I play mostly on the defensive side. Firewalls, nmap scans of my boxes (the ones I'm responsible for), centralized logs, and google advanced searching.

That doesn't mean I don't want to learn some attacker skills. I'm always trying to learn more, to add more value. Even if the majority of my job now, doesn't involve much security (other than the occasional firewall rule).

Therefore I'm reading books on hacking. The one I'm reading now is Dissecting the Hack: The F0rb1dd3n Network. In the STAR section's first chapter I came across 2 tools that seem to be useful. They're plugins for Firefox.

Passive Cache Search: Lets you search the Google cache of a webpage. Usually searching the cached page still pulls down pictures and other multi-media from the site. But Passive Cache is supposed to have a way to do it as text only from the Google cache

Advanced Dork: Tool to help create advanced Google searches. This one should be fun. It's the one I've been playing with the most out of the two.

back and forth

So I fired up my old skype account a couple of months back. I was trying to get it to work on my phone, but it won't without an upgrade and well.... AT&T / Samsung can't get their stuff together to push an update.

Fast forward to this week. I was talking to a co-worker about having long conference calls on a regular basis. I made a comment about upping my minutes on my account and carrying a charger to keep it charged. His comment was to just get a decent headset and use skype with the $3.00 a month dial out.

So I went out yesterday and got a head set. Logitec H530 USB headset. Man what a headache. At least on my Linux box. I've gone back and forth with ALSA and PulseAudio trying to get things to work right. I'm back to ALSA. While I can't listen to things through the headphones off calls. I got skype to work with Alsa and the headset where people said it sounded good on the phone.

I was using PulseAudio while listening in on the maintenance call last night, and when I was trying to ask questions, no one could hear me.

Don't know how it works with other OS, but at least with my Debian box, it's not perfect.

However, it's mostly going to be used with a windows box, so that might be another story.

another book review will be coming.

I'm reading another book that I'm going to write a review on. One of the author's said "nice review" on the Rework review. Considering the author is another one of the people I look up to in the Hacking community, I hope to do his book as much justice.