Singapore in My Heart

- January 28, 2024

Dear Sir/Ma'am,

I have got your company's contact through my search for reliable suppliers and I am writing to bring to your notice that I am seeking for manufacturers, wholesalers and suppliers who would be interested to supply their products to us at competitive prices. Be kind to send me below information.

1) Your Current Catalog
2) Your price list in FOB
3) Your company profile

You may include any information that will help me learn more about your products.

We are sincerely looking forward to working with you.

Best Regards,

Michael Vandermolen
(440) 428-0019
Senior Sales Manager
Tech King Operations (TKO)
5855 Union Center Boulevard, Suite 100
Fairfield, OH 45014

- January 28, 2024

Social engineering is a nontechnical method of breaking into a system or network. It's the process of deceiving users of a system and convincing them to perform acts useful to the hacker, such as giving out information that can be used to defeat or bypass security mechanisms. Social engineering is important to understand because hackers can use it to attack the human element of a system and circumvent technical security measures. This method can be used to gather information before or during an attack.

A social engineer commonly uses the telephone or Internet to trick people into revealing sensitive information or to get them to do something that is against the security policies of the organization. By this method, social engineers exploit the natural tendency of a person to trust their word, rather than exploiting computer security holes. It's generally agreed that users are the weak link in security; this principle is what makes social engineering possible.

The most dangerous part of social engineering is that companies with authentication processes, firewalls, virtual private networks, and network monitoring software are still wide open to attacks, because social engineering doesn't assault the security measures directly. Instead, a social-engineering attack bypasses the security measures and goes after the human element in an organization.

Types of Social Engineering-Attacks

There are two types of Social Engineering attacks

Human-Based

Human-based social engineering refers to person-to-person interaction to retrieve the desired information. An example is calling the help desk and trying to find out a password.

Computer-Based

Computer-based social engineering refers to having computer software that attempts to retrieve the desired information. An example is sending a user an email and asking them to reenter a password in a web page to confirm it. This social-engineering attack is also known as phishing.

Human-Based Social Engineering

Human-Based further categorized as follow:

Impersonating an Employee or Valid User

In this type of social-engineering attack, the hacker pretends to be an employee or valid user on the system. A hacker can gain physical access by pretending to be a janitor, employee, or contractor. Once inside the facility, the hacker gathers information from trashcans, desktops, or computer systems.

Posing as an Important User

In this type of attack, the hacker pretends to be an important user such as an executive or high-level manager who needs immediate assistance to gain access to a computer system or files. The hacker uses intimidation so that a lower-level employee such as a help desk worker will assist them in gaining access to the system. Most low-level employees won't question someone who appears to be in a position of authority.

Using a Third Person

Using the third-person approach, a hacker pretends to have permission from an authorized source to use a system. This attack is especially effective if the supposed authorized source is on vacation or can't be contacted for verification.

Calling Technical Support

Calling tech support for assistance is a classic social-engineering technique. Help desk and technical support personnel are trained to help users, which makes them good prey for social-engineering attacks.

Shoulder Surfing

Shoulder surfing is a technique of gathering passwords by watching over a person's shoulder while they log in to the system. A hacker can watch a valid user log in and then use that password to gain access to the system.

Dumpster Diving

Dumpster diving involves looking in the trash for information written on pieces of paper or computer printouts. The hacker can often find passwords, filenames, or other pieces of confidential information.

Computer-Based Social Engineering

Computer-based social-engineering attacks can include the following:

Email attachments
Fake websites
Pop-up windows

Insider Attacks

If a hacker can't find any other way to hack an organization, the next best option is to infiltrate the organization by getting hired as an employee or finding a disgruntled employee to assist in the attack. Insider attacks can be powerful because employees have physical access and are able to move freely about the organization. An example might be someone posing as a delivery person by wearing a uniform and gaining access to a delivery room or loading dock. Another possibility is someone posing as a member of the cleaning crew who has access to the inside of the building and is usually able to move about the offices. As a last resort, a hacker might bribe or otherwise coerce an employee to participate in the attack by providing information such as passwords.

Identity Theft

A hacker can pose as an employee or steal the employee's identity to perpetrate an attack. Information gathered in dumpster diving or shoulder surfing in combination with creating fake ID badges can gain the hacker entry into an organization. Creating a persona that can enter the building unchallenged is the goal of identity theft.

Phishing Attacks

Phishing involves sending an email, usually posing as a bank, credit card company, or other financial organization. The email requests that the recipient confirm banking information or reset passwords or PINs. The user clicks the link in the email and is redirected to a fake website. The hacker is then able to capture this information and use it for financial gain or to perpetrate other attacks. Emails that claim the senders have a great amount of money but need your help getting it out of the country are examples of phishing attacks. These attacks prey on the common person and are aimed at getting them to provide bank account access codes or other confidential information to the hacker.

Online Scams

Some websites that make free offers or other special deals can lure a victim to enter a username and password that may be the same as those they use to access their work system.
The hacker can use this valid username and password once the user enters the information in the website form. Mail attachments can be used to send malicious code to a victim's system, which could automatically execute something like a software keylogger to capture passwords. Viruses, Trojans, and worms can be included in cleverly crafted emails to entice a victim to open the attachment. Mail attachments are considered a computer-based social-engineering attack.More info

- January 28, 2024

What is a Water Softener and How Does it Work?

A water softener is a device that removes hardness from water, typically by exchanging calcium and magnesium ions for sodium ions. This process, known as ion exchange, occurs within a resin bed, which is composed of small, porous beads made of a material called ion-exchange resin.

Why is a Water Softener Needed for Well Water?

Well water often contains high levels of dissolved minerals, including calcium and magnesium, which cause hardness. Hard water can create several problems, such as:

Scale Buildup: Hard water can cause scale buildup in pipes, appliances, and fixtures, reducing their efficiency and lifespan.
Soap Scum: Hard water can make it difficult to create a lather with soap, resulting in soap scum buildup on surfaces.
Dry Skin and Hair: Hard water can strip away natural oils from skin and hair, leading to dryness and irritation.
Reduced Detergent Effectiveness: Hard water can reduce the effectiveness of detergents, making it harder to clean clothes and dishes.

How to Choose the Right Water Softener for Well Water:

Water Hardness Level: The first step in choosing a water softener is to determine the hardness level of your well water. There are several ways to do this, including purchasing a water test kit or sending a sample of your water to a laboratory for analysis.
Flow Rate: Consider the flow rate of your well water system when selecting a water softener. The flow rate is measured in gallons per minute (GPM) and determines the size of the water softener you need.
Grain Capacity: The grain capacity of a water softener refers to its ability to remove hardness from water. The grain capacity is measured in kilograins (KGR) and determines how much hardness the water softener can remove before it needs to be regenerated.
Type of Water Softener: There are two main types of water softeners: salt-based and salt-free. Salt-based water softeners use a process called ion exchange to remove hardness from water, while salt-free water softeners use a different process, such as template-assisted crystallization.
Brand and Reputation: Consider the brand and reputation of the water softener manufacturer when making a purchase. Look for brands that are known for their quality, reliability, and customer service.

How to Install and Maintain a Water Softener for Well Water:

Proper Installation: It is important to have a water softener installed by a qualified professional. Improper installation can lead to leaks, damage to the water softener, or ineffective water softening.
Regular Regeneration: Water softeners need to be regenerated regularly to maintain their effectiveness. The frequency of regeneration depends on the hardness of your water and the size of the water softener.
Salt Replenishment: Salt-based water softeners require regular replenishment of the salt supply. The frequency of replenishment depends on the hardness of your water and the size of the water softener.
Maintenance: Water softeners should be inspected and maintained regularly to ensure proper operation and longevity. This may include cleaning the resin bed, checking for leaks, and replacing any worn or damaged parts.

Benefits of Using a Water Softener for Well Water:

Improved Water Quality: Treated water has a reduced mineral content, improving the taste, smell, and appearance of the water.
Reduced Scale Buildup: This can save you money by extending the lifespan of your appliances.
Softer Skin and Hair: Softened water can help to improve the health of your skin and hair.
More Effective Laundry and Dishwashing: Softened water can improve the performance of detergents and soaps.
Increased Energy Efficiency: Softened water can help to improve the efficiency of water heaters and other appliances that use water.

Conclusion:

A water softener can be a valuable investment for well water users, providing numerous benefits and improving overall water quality. By choosing the right water softener and properly installing and maintaining it, you can enjoy the advantages of softened water throughout your home.

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- January 28, 2024

This post is going to be a rather strange post compared to previous ones. But bear with me, in the middle of the post you will see why this post fits the IT security topic.

I'm also terribly sorry for not posting recently, but I was busy with my SPSE and SLAE certification. Both are recommended for Python and Assembly noobs like me. But back to this post.

A little bit of history

Cheating in games started as help for game testers. By using invincibility or infinite ammo testers were able to test the game quicker, which meant less money spent on testing. I personally use cheat codes in games, depending on my mood. Sometimes it feels good to slash all the opponents while I'm invincible, sometimes it is more fun to play the game without cheats. One can argue whether cheating in games is OK or not, but I believe it depends, there is no black or white. But one thing is for sure, it is part of the gaming industry. There is huge demand for cheats. There were even cheat books printed on paper...

The different types of cheats (on PC)

There are different types of cheats in PC gaming. Following is a noncomplete list of these cheats:

Cheat codes

The good old IDDQD type of cheats. These are left in the game by the developers intentionally. Nothing interesting here.

Edit memory

This is my favorite. I will talk about this at the end of the post. Whenever a user launches a new program, the program's whole memory is accessible (read/write) to every other program launched by the user. And since the memory stores the current game state (health, ammo, armor, etc.), these values can be changed easily. In the good old times, there were POKE commands to do this cheats, and the memory address to write into was published by people who found where the game stores the most critical states about the game.

Code injection

This is like patching the game code. For example, one can change the "DEC (pointer to your current health)" instruction with NOP (do nothing), thus becoming invincible. In multi-player cheats, there is the aimbot to help you aim at enemies, wallhack to see through the wall, increase hitbox of the enemy for smoother hit, or in MMORPGs, one can write macros to collect items while the player is not online. I would say the so-called "trainers" more or less fit into this category and the previous one.

Saved game editor

The first time a kid meets a hex-editor (just like the co-author of this blog did with SIM City when he was 10 years old - David). It can teach a lot about file structures, the hexadecimal numeral system, etc. Fun times.

Hacking game server

Not very common, but even more fun. Warning: endless trolling possibilities in multi-player games ahead :) How to hack a game server? Well, I think this might deserve another full blog post ...

Network traffic hacking

One last necessary type of cheating is to modify network traffic between the client and the game server. AFAIK SSL is not universal in gaming, so stunnel is not needed for this hack, but ettercap can help in changing the communication.

Why cheating becomes more critical (and challenging)?

Now in the age of in-app-payments, the game creators are no longer thinking about cheats as funny things but something to be destroyed to the ground. Because cheating decreases its revenue. Or not. At least they think it does. To quote Wikipedia here, "cheating in such games is nonetheless a legal grey area because there are no laws against modifying software which is already owned, as detailed in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."

A lot of online games include anti-cheating components like PunkBuster, nProtect GameGuard, or Valve Anti-Cheat. This whole cheating/anti-cheating industry is the same as the virus/anti-virus industry. A cat and mouse game.

Freemium games

If you have not played with "freemium" games, you should watch South Park season 18, episode 6. - "Freemium Isn't Free." If you did play with freemium games, you definitely have to watch it :) There are many problems with freemium games. It is free to install, free to play. The first 3-4 hours might be fun to play. But after that, it turns out it is impossible to advance in the game without paying money for it. And by spending cash, I mean spending a LOT! Let's have a look at today's example, an arcade racing video game.

For 99.99 USD, you can get 3 000 000 credit. For almost double the price of a new PC game, you can get these credits. In this particular game, I estimate one have to play ~6-24 hours constantly to get this amount of credit. But by playing ~6 hours, I mean 6 hours without progress in the game! Kind of boring. And what do you get from 3 000 000 credit? You can buy one of the most expensive cars, but can't tune them fully. You have to play more (without progress) or buy more. But guess what, there are more cars you can't buy by only playing the game. Those are only available via in-app-purchase.

Even though the player has 58 765 533 credits, it is not possible to buy this car. Only available through real money.

So, what are your possibilities? You are either Richie Rich, and can afford the money to buy these. Or you can be insane, and try to play the game without in-app-purchase. Or give up the game and try another freemium ... Or, you can try to hack the game!

Hack all the freemium games!

Although I was not playing this racing game from day one, I was able to witness the evolution of the cheats against this game. The cheats which worked in one day was not working one month later. The game is continuously updated to defeat the newly published cheats.

Noob start

So, I want to hack this game, what is the first thing a noob like me does? ~~Bing it!~~ Google it!

From the first page result, let's check this tool:

While trying to download that, I just have to give my email address to spammers, or my mobile number will be subscribed to premium rate text messages. What fun.

Another "cheat" program will install malware/adware on your computer. Never ever try these programs. They are fake 99% of the time and after installing those you will have another problem, not just how to hack freemium games.

Beginners start - Cheat engine

When I first heard about hacking games in memory, I visualized hours of OllyDBG/ImmunityDBG/(insert your favorite Windows debugger here). It turned out, there are some specialized tools to help you with cheating the game. No assembly knowledge required. My favourite tool is CheatEngine. I highly recommend to download it and spend 10 minutes to get past the built-in tutorial levels to get a feeling about this tool. It's super duper awesome.

When I first tried to hack this game myself, I scanned the memory for my actual credit and tried to change that, no luck. Keep reading, you will see what happened.

The second cheat I tried with cheat engine was something like this:

Start the game, play the first level, and check how many credits is paid for winning the race. Pro tip: use dual display for full-screen game cheating.
Restart the same level, attach Cheat Engine to the game's process
Scan the memory for the same value at the beginning of the race
Scan the memory for the same value at the end of the game. The intersect of the first and second scan includes the real value where the credit is stored for winning the race.
Change the values (both the real one and some false positives) to something big
Watch the game to crash
Be amazed at the money you received

Nowadays, most of the cheats on YouTube does not work. Except for these kind of cheats. I don't want to recreate that tutorial, so you should watch it first then come back.

Are you back? Great. Do you have any idea what have you just seen? No? Well, in this case, don't try this at home. Copy-pasting assembly code from random internet posts and running on your computer is always a bad idea. It is precisely as risky as downloading free programs from random internet sites.

Although I have not seen people trolling others with this cheat engine type of shellcode, I think the time will come when these will be turned into something terrible. These shellcodes might work, or might harm your computer. The good news is, we can have a look at the code and analyze it.

When you open CheatEngine and try to define a new custom type, you are greeted with a skeleton assembly code. I don't want to detail what all the skeleton code does, let's just focus on the difference between the skeleton code and the code used in the video. This is the "decrypt function":

xor eax, 0baadf00d rol eax, 0e

What does it mean? The actual credit is encrypted in memory. If you want to scan it in memory, you won't be able to find it. But! The encryption is rotating the value to the right (ROR) with 0xE (14 in decimal), and after that, it is XOR-ed with 0xbaadf00d. Decrypting it is the inverse of the functions in reverse order (in this particular case, the order does not matter, but that's not the point). The inverse function of XOR is XOR, and the inverse function of ROR (rotate right) is ROL (rotate left). Now that we analyzed the assembly code, we can be sure that it is safe to execute. Just follow the video and see your coins falling from the sky. For free. In a freemium game. Have fun!

Encrypt memory - applications at financial institutions

Another exciting thing is that I don't recall any thick client applications in the financial industry encrypting the values in memory. And I agree, there are more significant problems with thick client applications than not encrypting the essential values in memory. But still, some thick client applications are regularly updated, maintained. Maybe it is a good idea to encrypt the values in memory. It will make attackers' life harder. Not impossible, but harder. Perhaps the developers of these applications should learn from the gaming industry (or from malware developers for that matter) because it is a shame that an arcade racing game or an FPS is protected better than an application responsible for transacting millions of dollars. Just think about the RAM scraping malware stealing millions of credit card data ...

Moral of the story

Cheating is part of the gaming history, and the freemium games are trying to take away the cheats from the gamers because they want money. Thanks to CheatEngine and some clever hacks, these programs can be still beaten. And guess what, there is CheatEngine for Android - although it did not work for me on the latest Android. And sometimes, hacking all kinds of applications can be more comfortable with CheatEngine, compared to traditional debuggers.

Also, always check the code before executing it! And when you find something cool, publish it, so everyone could enjoy the games!

More information

- January 27, 2024

Facebook Plans To Launch Its Own Cryptocurrency

The social network giant, Facebook is going through a bad phase with lots of ups and down. The recent scandal with Cambridge Analytica has caused the world's largest social network giant Facebook to change its stance on user privacy and to be more transparent about its use of the data it collects.

Since then, some social networks based in Blockchain have been popularized, namely Sphere, Steemit, and Howdoo. However, recently, something unusual announcement is announced by the social network giant Facebook itself, in which Facebook stated that it is investing in a Blockchain-based solution development team, but, the purpose of the project is not yet known.

It was with a post on the Facebook page that David Marcus confirmed his departure from the Messenger team and the creation of a small group dedicated to finding solutions based on the potential of Blockchain technology for Facebook.

David Marcus has not given much detail on the work he will do with his new group, saying only that they will study Blockchain from scratch so that they can use this revolutionary technology for Facebook.

"I'm setting up a small group to explore how to leverage Blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch," stated David Marcus.

Despite being connected to Facebook's Messenger since 2014, David Marcus is no novice in these financial issues related to money transfers. In addition to having introduced the possibility of P2P payments in Messenger itself, David Marcus was President of PayPal and CEO of Zong, a company dedicated to payments on mobile devices.

However, his experience in this segment does not allow us to conclude that Facebook will create or support a crypto coin, but, it also doesn't mean that it will launch or support any crypto coin of its own. Blockchain technology has become famous thanks to crypto-coins, especially Bitcoin, but its potential expands dramatically to other areas.

The potential of Blockchain goes from the crypto-coins to the creation of real ecosystems online, supported by the users of the network. Sharing and storing data is a legacy that Blockchain allows you to explore and maybe the fact that Facebook will use it in your favor.

The lead post in Messenger was then handed over to Stan Chudnovsky, who now heads one of the most widely used communication services around the world, alongside WhatsApp.

Rumors also point out that James Everingham and Kevin Weil, both from Instagram, will also join David Marcus in this new onslaught of Facebook to one of today's most acclaimed technologies.

Related news

- January 27, 2024

Hackerhubb.blogspot.comContinue reading

Sunday, January 28, 2024