Need to Know @IT

Uptime is a measure of the time a computer system has been “up” and running. It came into use to describe the opposite of downtime, times when a system was not operational. The uptime and reliability of computer and communications facilities is sometimes measured in nines (similar to the unit of metallic purity). “Five nines” means 99.999% availability, which translates to a total downtime of approximately five minutes and fifteen seconds per year.

It is often used as a measure of computer operating system reliability and stability, in that this time represents the time a computer can be left unattended without crashing, or needing to be rebooted for administrative or maintenance purposes.

Current record for longest uptime is 11 years, 303 days, 20 hours and 57 minutes on a computer running OpenVMS.

The commands used to find out your system uptime:

- Windows Xp, 2000, Vista:

systeminfo | find “Up Time”

or if it doesn’t work, you can use the microsoft uptime utility (direct link) which runs on any version of windows.

- Unix:

$ uptime

- OpenVMS:

OpenVMS $ show system /noprocess

The uptime of a personal computer is sometimes displayed as a badge of honour on an email signature or web site/forum.

So… what’s your highest uptime?

Ok… the title says all. So… by following the steps below you’ll become invisible to the other users of the Network Neighborhood / My Network Places.

Step-by-step instructions:

1. Click Start and select Run… (or more easy: press CTRL+R )

2. In the Run box, type cmd and hit enter to open command promt

3.  Write inside the window the following command

net config server / hidden: yes

Now, if u done it correct, then you should get this message: “The command completed successfully.”

Note: By doing this, other uses can’t connect to your shares if they don’t know the full path: ex: \\computer1\docs

License Key Finder or License Key Crawler is a simple application that will help you to find s/n (license key) of the programs installed on your PC. This application will scan the registry and files that contain software licenses (Microsoft Office, Adobe, Nero, Media Player, installed games, etc.).

To run the application, just download the file below and run the application LicenseCrawler.exe.

Download License Crawler – download link.

Many web forums have mushroomed on internet and they are setup in a jiffy,so they wont pay much attention to security. An older exploit i’m discussing here is Null Byte exploit.Almost all forums include a picture and avatar uploading system where you can upload your user signatures and avatars.At first look it looks like a normal uploading system,but its a way to upload our own files into forum,or to get into admin area and literally “OWN” the forum. However as this hack is outdated as of now,most have deployed some form of input sanitation to prevent such an attack. Nevertheless,thousands of vulnerable forums do exists even now with even some bigger names crossed here.

How to do exploit it?

In order to exploit this vulnerability,you must input “% 00” (with or without space as the case arises).Now a lot of you are probably asking what the heck it is? Ah well..its the encrypted version of NULL .Its just like the same as we used to exploit the null session in Windows systems.

Now,whenever you will upload a file,you will be asked to specify the directory where the file is located.Now as each file has a particular extension,to signify the kind of file it is.Now what if we can input the “% 00”  at the end of the file ?

The way most forums keep bad files in control and out of forum is by restricting certain extensions such as .exe . php etc. But if we can modify the file and trick the server into thinking that its something else the..

For Example:

C:\webroot\c99.php% 00.jpg

Now when we do this,The operating system will read the file to be uploaded as a PHP file,but the forum server will read it as a .jpg(image) file.And when this happens,you will exploit it to get and upload your files on server,and if you are a bit creative,can access the admin area too.

Cheers and Keep Learning