Botnet

The word Botnet gets its name by joining the words Bot and Net, bot is a short for Robots and Net for Network. In a one line definition, a BotNet is comprised of a network of computers which intends harm to the computer owner and also others. The reason it is known as a Robot Network is because it is "controlled" its master handlers or owners. These handlers or owners turn the infected machine into a zombie, which has no choice but to "obey" their commands. The owners of the infected computers don't even know that their machine is infected.

Botnets still remain the worst problem for computer security professionals. The purpose of a botnet infected computer could range from just stealing data from the local machine to targeting and sabotaging remote machines. Botnets are used to collect information such as usernames and passwords from an infected machine which can lead to compromising credentials, for example username and password to log on to your bank's website.

It could destroy or send over documents of importance such as financial spreadsheets, CAD drawings, confidential documents that could be used in identity theft to its handlers. In some cases, the infected machines are used as mail servers to send SPAM emails or even produce ad-clicks to generate ad based revenue for certain websites. The most malicious use of an infected machine is to infect other machines and make them a part of its own network, and then launch DDOS (distributed denial of service attacks) on another network or website. When a DDOS attack is launched on another network, the website or network under attack gets so overwhelmed by requests that it simply can't keep up and shuts down, denying service to legitimate customers.

Because the nature of an infected machine and its payload could be so different the infection is hard to detect. The most common sources of infection are IRC (internet relay chat), where users join a chatroom and are sent a "file" by another infected user and they accept the transfer. Malware infected websites are also a big source of this problem. You must stay protected by having multiple layers of protection on your network and machines. You must have a firewall (even if it’s a small router based one) on your network, in addition your machines must have spyware and antivirus clients installed on them, and they must be set to do regular updates. There are even some online services such as one from Microsoft (see an article we did aboutMicrosoft’s Live One Care) that can scan your machine of infections. Even with all due software installed, you must do your own due diligence to avoid being infected, do not accept file transfers from unknown sources, do not open emails (with or without attachments) from sources you do not trust, do regular virus and spyware scans of your machine and keep your machine updated with all the patches and security updates from your OS vendor

Creak Windows password

Today we will show you proof of concept on how you can log on to any password protected Windows machine, without knowing the password at all. I am sure you have heard of utilities which will "reset" or "recover the Windows login password for you, but this is way cooler than that, this utility will not write or reset anything to the hard drive. After you are done, on the next reboot the machine will retain its original password. There is no "reset" or lengthy recovery involved. The 5 step process is so easy that after you have seen this, you will be shaking your head

We are going to demonstrate this process on a Windows XP service pack 3 machine, but the process is essentially exactly the same for other versions of Windows such as Windows 7, Vista, Windows Server 2003 or even Windows 2000 workstation and server.

Most of the magic will be done by a nifty utility from Kryptos logic called Kon-Boot, which you can download from its web page located athttp://www.piotrbania.com/all/kon-boot/. This same utility can also be used to log on to Linux systems, but that is outside the scope of this article, we will concentrate only on Windows.

You will need to download the .iso file from the Kon-Boot website and burn it to a CD. If you need instructions on how to burn a CD from an iso image using a free tool, you can read up on it on our article here. Next, make sure that the BIOS is set to boot from the CD drive. With the CD in the drive, boot the machine

Step1:

- After the machine boots from the CD, you will see the splash screen as shown on the left hand side. Simply hit enter to continue

Step 2:

- After hitting enter in the previous step, you will find this second splash screen. This is important as as soon as you hit enter on this screen, you will be taken to the next step, which is booting Windows, there are no other steps to configure here. In a few minutes, the normal Windows boot menu will appear, just proceed as you normally do in your normal logon sequence to Windows

Step 3:

- On Windows Logon screen, fill in the name of the user whom you want to log on as, leave the password blank and hit enter

Step 4:

- Olla! you are logged in! and what's the coolest thing, you have not reset the password for the account at all. It simply let you in because it interacted with the kernel directly using Linux. No alteration was done to any hard drive content at all during the process of logging in.

Step 5:

- Remove the CD from the drive, and reboot. Your machine will now present you the normal ctrl+alt+del screen like it always use to, try logging on with the username we tried before with the blank password! The blank password will not work, you can only get in if you knew what the right password was..this demonstrates that the user password was never reset, it still is what it use to be.

As you can see that this nifty little cd can be of many uses, you do not need to reinstall or repair Windows if you have forgotten your password. If you are locked out, you can use this to log in as well. It also brings raises a question on Windows security. Once again, this method is exceptionally fast and does not actually reset the password. If you have for some reason the need to "recover" and "reveal" a user's password, you can use the tutorial I wrote earlier here and it will actually show you what the password is.

If the method I described above, is being used to gain unauthorized access to then there are really only two ways of protecting against such an intrusion:

1. Block Physical access to the machine or prevent users from hooking in USB devices or booting from CD ROMs and floppies

2. Encrypt your sensitive data. We will cover a step by step article on how to use encryption to protect your data in a forthcoming article

Hopefully this has been informative for you. If you have any further questions, please do leave us a comment or contact us through the Contact Us link on this web site.