War
Tools: Scan, Sniff, Spoof and Hijack
(Excerpted from The Happy Hacker
Book, Second and Third Editions)
"Hello, I don't mean to be rude,
but I noticed you were examining something, er... proprietary
on our system. Would you mind explaining what you were doing?"
Sigh. From time to time I get
an email like that. Sometimes it is less polite than this. In
this case, I had been examining an intranet server. For
some reason it was directly accessible from the Internet instead
of being on a private internal network. I'll bet you can't
reach that box from the Internet any more:) I was just curious,
not trying to break in!
The one thing that defines a hacker
is curiosity: a blinding, insatiable hunger for more, more, more
information. If your objective is to fight those who attack
your computers, your curiosity will be your greatest asset. This
chapter covers some powerful war tools that can satisfy your
curiosity in a legal and constructive way -- and shows how to
use them to battle computer criminals.
Sysadmins tell me that it is far harder
to keep people out of your computer systems than it is to break
in. In this chapter we will get a glimpse of this war between
sysadmins and computer intruders, and learn something about the
tools they both use.
In this chapter you will learn about:
