Hacking Madrid

                                   Reverse Engineering Hostile Code Computer criminals are always ready and waiting to compromise a weakness in a system. When they do, they usually leave programs on the system to maintain their control. We refer to these programs as "Trojans" after the story of the ancient Greek Trojan horse. Often these programs are custom compiled and not widely distributed. Because of this, anti-virus software will not often detect their presence. It also means information about what any particular custom Trojan does is also not generally available, so a custom analysis of the code is necessary to determine the extent of the threat and to pinpoint the origin of the attack if possible. This article outlines the process of reverse engineering hostile code. By "hostile code", we mean any process running on a system that is not authorized by the system administrator, s...

INCIDENT RECOVERY ******************** An intrusion is not the end of the world. Recovering from an intrusion can be a chore, but is not impossible, if you know what to do. This article will look over intrusion recovery and take a brief look at computer forensics -- i.e., what to do if you want to try to get the law involved in the incident. Much like any other part of intrusion response, recovery from attack starts before you've been attacked. It can be very difficult to recover if you don't have recent backups of your system -- back things up regularly; nightly if possible. If you've got important information on your system, a nightly backup just makes sense. I prefer backing up to tape if you can afford a tape drive, but it's not a requirement. What you do need is some form of backup that holds your important system files and binaries, so you can restore if something happens, or a rescue disk that contains clean versions of important system binaries. Also (prefer...