I have been playing around with some of the bluetooth tools within Backtrack recently and btscanner is one of the main tools I have bene using. The btscanner application in Backtrack Linux provides two bluetooth scanning functions it calls inquiry scanning and brute force scanning. Unfortunately the package installed with Backtrack 5 release 3 will crash when attempting to use it for brute force scanning however I was able to create a fix that isn’t too messy to accomplish. Below we describe the btscanner crash in more detail and provide a way to get btscanner bluetooth brute forcing operating properly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Upgrading WordPress is typically fairly easy but you have to either upload every single file from the download or you have to weed what has been modified and what has not. Typically a list of modified files is provided by WordPress which makes it easy to follow along and upgrade your WP version however it is a pain to upload every single file in the release. The below article has two main objectives which first is to provide you an easy to read summary of enhancements, resolved bugs, and new features and second will be to provide you a zip file with only the modified files in the WordPress upgrade. We will do our best to provide such an article for all future WP releases within a couple days of the public release.

Read the rest of this entry »

I decided to make a post on recompiling your Ubuntu kernel after after taking a look at the instructions on the Ubuntu wiki. Although the instructions were correct it was a big jumbled mess and almost impossible to figure out what was what from the instructions. This post will cover recompiling the kernel that comes with Ubuntu. The reasons for doing this are to keep the current Ubuntu patches and configs and simply add some stuff of your own. This would be useful for adding a patch of some sort or adding support in the kernel .config for a piece of hardware or software which may not be enabled by default.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have had a lot of questions lately about making patches. On Backtrack we get a lot of user submissions and many times we need a patch rather than a modified source file. The reason being is that a patch can be documented and contains the specific changes made to the source file and can also be easily reverted. Patching is also crucial if you fix a bug in a program and would like to submit the fix to the author. In any case being able to create a patch is very  useful if you are working with Linux or any sort of programing stuff.

I decided to make a short post on how to make a patch and apply it:

Read the rest of this entry »

I am getting ready for a password contest at Defcon that Alex and I and a few other guys from the Hashcat team are going to enter and I decided to install John the Ripper on a Cent OS box in case I needed it for anything. John is in the yum repos however the version is pretty old and it is not compiled with NTLM support so I decided to build it from source so that i could apply the Jumbo patch which adds support for a whole lot of different algorithms which are normally only available in the pro version of John the Ripper.

Below I show the steps I took to get it compiled and working on Cent OS 64 bit:

Read the rest of this entry »