Wi-Fi Access Points with Adaptive Antenna Technology

This post is not an advertisement of any sort. Its just my personal experience and thoughts about Wi-Fi Access Points and their respective controllers. I have seen a number of these installations from different vendors. Some of them do not work well, they do not handle the connection from one hotspot to the next as they should, they might have weak signal or they tend to be very expensive.


I believe that if you are looking into this kind of solution you should defiantly take a look at the Ruckus products [1]. They are reasonably priced, the controller handles the connections without any problems and they seem very reliable.


[1] http://www.ruckuswireless.com/products/zoneflex-indoor

Host Discovery; hunting for Windows XP hosts

These are a couple of quick ways to do discover the OS version of your hosts:

A) Use nmap, and run the following command. 
nmap --script smb-os-discovery -p 445 10.0.0.0/24


B) Use Metasploit, and run the following commands.
use auxiliary/scanner/smb/smb_version
set rhosts 10.0.0.0/24
run

The output will display the Operating System on each of your hosts.

As a side note, you can use nbtscan for a quick host discovery
nbtscan-1.0.35.exe 10.0.0.1/24

or nmap 
nmap -sP -n 10.0.0.1/24

Backlight brightness of Apple Displays on a Windows PC

If you ever try to connect a Windows host to an Apple display you will most probably have a brightness problem. Despite the amount of time you spend fiddling with your graphics card settings, you will realise soon enough that the screen stays quite dark. 

The problem is not with the brightness of the colours being displayed but with the back-light illumination within the display. The Brightness Controller utility will "speak" to the screen and allow you to adjust the back-light brightness to your liking. 

Note: I am currently using it with Windows 8.1 and it works fine!

Currently supported displays:

27" Apple Thunderbolt Display 

27" Apple LED Cinema Display 

24" Apple LED Cinema Display

23" Apple Cinema Display HD (Acrylic frame)

20" Apple Cinema Display (Aluminum frame)

20" Apple Cinema Display (Acrylic frame)

In order to adjust this you will have to download this very useful utility called "Brightness Controller" from this website: http://www.holstschumacher.dk/p/brightness-controller.html

Download version 1.4.4 (Feb/2013)

RSA Conference Europe 2012

I was delighted to be invited to attend the RSA Conference Europe in 2012 (9-11/Oct) in London [1]. A number of interesting talks which included Jimmy Wales talking about the freedom of speech on the Internet and the distribution of knowledge through Wikipedia.

I was looking forward to Ira Winkler's talk "What the Security Profession Can Learn From the Intelligence Profession". Very interesting views as always and one of the few people in security that has something new to say, without repeating outdated ideas. 

OSFClone for Computer Forensics

It was about time to have such a bootable live CD/DVD solution to clone any type of OS. You may want to get your hands on OSFClone [1] which is a free and self-booting solution. As it states on the website: 

"OSFClone enables you to create or clone exact raw disk images quickly and independent of the installed operating system. In addition to raw disk images, OSFClone also supports imaging drives to the open Advance Forensics Format (AFF). AFF is an open and extensible format to store disk images and associated metadata. An open standard enables investigators to quickly and efficiently use their preferred tools for drive analysis."

[1] http://www.osforensics.com/tools/create-disk-images.html