hakers.info

A report by McAfee for last quarter states that the
‘Count of new Android-specific malware moved to number one, with J2ME (Java Micro Edition), coming in second while suffering only a third as many malware.’ In simple words if you own a Android phone, the chances of it being compromised is 2.5 times more than any other platform.

With industry reporting so many new android exploits and malwares, it is becoming a tedious job for developers to secure their applicaitons. With nearly all IT companies having expertise in Web penetration Testing solutions, they have started building solutions for Mobile Penetration testing. But whats the need of creating a different solution for mobile apps testing? Isn’t it same as web applicaiton testing? If you consider ‘Thin client’ mobile apps, the answer is yes. For thin client mobile apps, penetration testing is almost same as that of Web application testing. But If you consider ‘Thick Client’ or ‘Native Mobile Apps’ which gets installed into the device, the penetration testers have to add some more test cases and the testing environment needs a bit of tweak.
If we compare Web penetration Testing and Mobile PT, what exactly is the difference?? One of the major difference is that the user in the case of Web applicaitons do not have access to the files of application (php,asp,jsp files) whereas in the case of mobile, user has access to the application as it is installed in the device itself. All of the platforms provide some kind of databases for those applicaitons to store data(SqlLite3 in Andoid). In case of web, applicaitons only have privilages to store data temporarily using cookies or cache. One more major drawback with mobile apps is that they can be reversed very easily, whether it’s a dex(android), jar/jad(j2me) or a sis(Symbian).
For Penetration testing of Android Application we have to mainly consider the following things ;-

* Settings up the PT lab/Environment.
In this you will learn about how to setup the test environment using emulator,proxy tools. Using these proxy tools you can force emulator to pass the traffic via a proxy. But this setting only works for browser inside the emulator. For apps to work with proxy you need some different environment setting which is discussed in detail. Click here to read more..

* Using debugging tools like ADB,DDMS.
Using debugging tool like ADB you can run commands on emulator and device itself to perform any kind on action. You can get the shell,view the files stored, databases,install new apps, uninstall apps,pull and push files from the device. DDMS in just a GUI version of ADB. To get more detail about all this click here.

* Reversing Apps.
One of the major drawbacks with Mobile apps is that they can be Reversed. We have many opensource tools for reversing android apps like apktool,baksmali,dex2jar. Click here to read more about this.

Thanks for Watching.. Next article will be on “Deep Dive into Android Malwares”
Njoy!!

Android Debug Bridge (adb) is a versatile command line tool that lets you communicate with an emulator instance or connected Android-powered device. It is a client-server program that includes three components:

* A client, which runs on your development machine. You can invoke a client from a shell by issuing an adb command. Other Android tools such as the ADT plugin and DDMS also create adb clients.
* A server, which runs as a background process on your development machine. The server manages communication between the client and the adb daemon running on an emulator or device.
* A daemon, which runs as a background process on each emulator or device instance.
Source: developers.android.com
To view the Best available description about ADB visit http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adb.html.
To see how adb can be helpful for Penetration testing of Android apps watch the video embedded below.

One of the major drawbacks with Mobile apps is that they can be Reversed. If we look at the Android app architecture, it contains a source code which is developed by user. That source code is compiled and finally created as a ‘.dex’ file which is the dalvik executable. This ‘.dex’ file can be compared with ‘.jar’ file of java. Dex file clubbed with the resources files are archived to become a APK file. So this apk file is just a archive file similar to a zip file whose contents can be extracted using any archive explorer tool like winzip or 7-zip. After extracting files from an apk file you’ll get a ‘classes.dex’ file which contains the actual code of the application. This dex file can be reversed using my opensource tools like Baksmali(click here to download), dex2jar , apktool.
The video attached below will show you how we can use baksmali tool to decompile and compile the application again. The one thing which gets eliminated by this process is the Application signature. After compiling the application we need to add signature to it so that it can be installed on a device or emulator.

.
.

.
.

Hope you enjoyed it!!
We’ll upload some more tutorials for dex2jar and apktool pretty soon!!

When it comes to protecting data in windows, the first thing which comes in my mind is to set password for my windows account. We generally think that setting up the password is more than enough to make our PC secure. In this article we’ll tell you how to bypass this ‘First thing’ of securing windows account, i.e Bypassing Windows Password. It is easier to bypass windows account password. All you need is little bit patience, two pendrive or flashdrives.

Step 1:  We need two pendrives, let say A and B.

Step 2:  Make pendrive A bootable with any lighter version of linux flavor. I prefer “SliTaz”. Because its very light flavor of  linux, its only 30MB in size. You can download “SliTaz” from http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/.  Pendrive B we need to save the SAM file in it.

Step 3:  Make pendrive bootable with any software you like, but I prefer “UNetbootin”. You can download it from http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/.

Step 4:  Now let’s assume your computer is Comp-A and the Target Computer is  Comp-T. Now, boot your computer with Pendrive A, which has bootable linux and copy the SAM file of Comp-A windows (Which contains NO PASSWORD) into pendrive B.

Note:  SAM file can’t be copy or edited when you are logged in to windows, because at that time windows is using the SAM file. SAM file is the file which contains windows user account password in Hash format. Make Sure if you are coping the SAM  file of Windows XP, then It’ll work only in XP in other computer, so operating system should be same in your computer and in the Target computer.
The location of the SAM file is:  “c:\windows\system32\config\sam”.

Step 5:  After coping the SAM file of Comp-A, Boot the Comp-T that is target computer with pendrive A. Now, replace the SAM file of the Comp-T with the SAM file of the Comp-A. Reboot the Comp-T, normally. After that computer boots to windows without asking any windows password.
Now you can get any data from Target computer and you will have admin access to that computer.

Don’t forget to replace the original SAM file back. If you do so, the owner of ‘Target Machine’ will not have no idea what actually happened with his system.

Have Fun……!!!!!!!!!!!

The article describes how to install & configure a Hadoop Cluster in a Linux Cent-OS system. It explains each step of configuration in depth. To configure Fully Distributed Mode (also known as Multi-Node Cluster), we need to have at least two nodes (One as a Master node & Second as Slave node). All the nodes should have a static IP address and they should be connected on a same network.