ETHICAL HACKING NET-185-001N Week 5

This week, I learned more about key-loggers, which can be legitimately used to identify suspicious activity (such as unauthorized users or use of a computer) as well as be used illegitimately to steal credentials to users' accounts or other data, such as Social Security Numbers, bank account details, etc.  Some popular key-loggers include Refog (http://refog.com) and Revealer from Logixoft (https://www.logixoft.com/en-us/index).  A related development, but in the opposite direction, is the USB Rubber Ducky, which is a simple nano-computer disguised as an ordinary flash drive which pretends to be a keyboard to the operating system and therefore can do anything a keyboard can do, but automated and potentially very quickly.  It can be used for automated testing, brute force attacks by plugging in to a computer, or even simple pranks (deliberately typing random letters at intervals to make a user think that they have a hardware problem), or for anything else which keyboard macros are useful for, like doing a repetitive task with mouse keys.  It is available at https://shop.hak5.org/products/usb-rubber-ducky-deluxe. I also learned more about steganography, the art and science of hiding messages, (which usually are text but sometimes are audio) within other media (videos, pictures, text documents, etc.) or even with 'dummy' data to hide another encrypted container.  One of the more interesting details I learned about is that the Microsoft New Technology File System, or NTFS, features Alternate Data Streams (ADS) that allow for hidden metadata or even unrelated information (which is useful for steganography) to be linked to a file.  These ADS do not persist if the file is transferred to most other file systems, for example FAT32, however.  Additionally, I was remind that log files are not very helpful if no one ever looks at them, even after the fact, and that it's best to only log the things that actually might be important, not every little thing that doesn't help anyone detect anything because then finding anything that actually matters is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

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