Thursday, October 22, 2009

CyberCede Cyber-Warfare Legitimate Militia Botnet

In a post today on one of our other blogs, cyber-jutsu, we announced that CyberCede is now accepting emails from persons interested in joining the CyberCede Cyber-Warfare Militia.

As a part of this new community organization, I'd like to write a program that can be installed on the systems belonging to militia members, which would allow them to be a part of a global, legitimate, bot-net. Participation would be 100% voluntary.

Who wants to help out in writing such a program?

Metajunkie

google AdSense Account Disabled

cross posted from our cyber-justu blog ...


Some of you may have noticed that the cyber-justsu dojo walls seem a little bare. The Google Advertisements are missing.

Google has disabled our AdSense account.

In an email, they have asserted that our "AdSense account has posed a significant risk to [their] AdWords advertisers".

This would appear to happen frequently enough, that they have a FAQ established to provide more information.

From the FAQ:

"Because we have a need to protect our proprietary detection system, we're unable to provide our publishers with any information about their account activity, including any web pages, users, or third-party services that may have been involved.

As you may know, Google treats invalid click activity very seriously, analyzing all clicks and impressions to determine whether they fit a pattern of use that may artificially drive up an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. If we determine that an AdSense account may pose a risk to our AdWords advertisers, we may disable that account to protect our advertisers' interests.

Lastly, please note that as outlined in our Terms and Conditions, Google will use its sole discretion when determining instances of invalid click activity."

So, we really have no idea why our account was disabled. If any of our readers have been randomly or blindly clicking on advertisements, you have not helped us. In fact, you may have shut down what might have been a great source of passive income for our blogs.

We have petitioned google to reinstate our account. If that happens, I encourage you all to only click on advertisements which are of interest to you. Don't be afraid to click on advertisements, that is why they are there - but please refrain from just clicking because you know it is generating revenue for us.

I don't usually cross-post between these blogs - but I will put this message on all of the blogs.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

Sensei Metajunkie


Saturday, October 17, 2009

What is your favorite programming language?

I'd like to open up a place for folks to leave some comments on what their favorite programming language is, and the sorts of applications they like to code.

So, here it is.

What's your digital poison? :)

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Hacking Code Vs. Code Hacking

I consider the terms "hacking code" and "programming" to be synonymous, or virtually synonymous. In some instances I may say that I had to "hack together some perl code" in order to merge elements from two different databases together. People who know me, and are programmers, would agree that what I ended up with was in fact a hack.

That is not to say that it defeated security in any way, but rather it was probably something less glorious than the same sort of program that might have been designed and then built by a team of professional programmers who were hell bent on selling the world the next great database merge tool with bells and whistles hidden beyond the ken of any human user. What I ended up with may or may not have been elegant - but it did work. It was a successful perl hack.

The term hack and hacker can have both positive and negative connotations, depending upon the context in which they are used. For example, consider this comment made by one IT professional when talking about a particular network engineer's "fix" to protect a large hospital's exposure to the conficker malware: "If he would have spent half the time coming up with that fire-wall hack as he did surfing the web this morning, we might have actually avoided having the entire hospital infected." Clearly, in this instance, the hack was not a success.

Had that network engineer been a member of our cyber-jutsu blog, he might have been better educated. He might have still been accused of implementing a hack, but it would have then been a good thing. Luckily for him, that hospital's CIO doesn't know the difference, and he still has a job.

I recommend a google search for "The New Hacker's Dictionary" to help get you up to speed on all the jargon you'll need to survive here at Hacking Code.

In case you want to check out a good online reference for the same: see Jargon File
There are many copies of the Jargon file being hosted by different sites. Google it and see for yourself.

So, the difference between hacking code and code hacking - to me - would be this:

If I am hacking code, I am programming.

If I am code hacking, I am trying to find a way around or through some sort of code or cypher.

If I'm hacking a web server, I'm probably trying to bypass the security of the web server. If I'm hacking together a web server, I'm writing a bare-bones computer program to do the work of a web server rather than using someone else's fully developed web server program (such as Apache 2).

Some might say that I'm not really a freelance writer or professional blogger, that I'm just a hack. Therein we see the negative connotation of hack as applied to a writer.

To this I say: :>p


That's it in a nutshell. I hope this was edifying.

Hacking Code Blog

Welcome to the Hacking Code Blog.

This blog is about writing computer programs. While I am willing to take it in various directions based upon my readers and comment contributors, the initial focus will be made with a wide-angle lens.

While I am a CISSP, and a GREM (not to be confused with a gremlin), I am also interested in programming things besides hacker tools and exploit code. We will no doubt be covering actual penetration testing tool code at some point, but this blog is dedicated to the actual programming languages we will discuss rather than "hacker techniques". For hacker techniques, and cyber-jutsu in general, I suggest one of my other blogs:


What is your favorite language, and how do you write the obligatory hello world program in it?