Technology Insights

Mac OSX – Make Specific App Default File Opener

InsightsLeave a comment

I have been meaning for a long time to set some configuration parameters for specific file types including which applications open them by default. I deal with a lot of different file types and I am typically having to scroll through a long list of Mac applications to select the one that I want to open the file. Since its not easy to do this in one spot on Mac OSX Mountain Lion without adding a third party application I started looking around to see what was available and ended up with Default Apps by Rubicode. Below I describe installing Default Apps and how it works.

Information Security

exiftool – Backtrack 5 – Forensics – Digital Forensics Analysis – exiftool

SecurityLeave a comment

Many people still seem to not be aware of EXIF data and the information it provides anyone that wants to view it. EXIF data is attached to image files as well as other files and provides all sorts of details from file creation time to exact GPS coordinates. This is the type of data that was extracted from an image uploaded by Vice Magazine that gave away John McAfee’s location when he escaped Belize. On Backtrack Linux there are numerous tools to extract EXIF data including exiftool which is written in Perl and easy to use. Below we will describe exiftool, which is located in /pentest/misc/exiftool/ or /usr/bin, and provide examples to show how easy it is to use.

Information Security

weevely – Backtrack 5 – Maintaining Access – Web Backdoors – weevely

SecurityLeave a comment

Need a quick way to generate a PHP backdoor for a compromised server you want to come back to later, then weevely is your application. I was pleasantly surprised when I started playing around with weevely in more detail as it provides a ton of built in functionality and does a lot more than I initially though that weevely did. The weevely application is built using Python and its current version on Backtrack 5 R3 is weevely v0.7. The weevley.py Python script is located in the /pentest/backdoors/web/weevely directory and some of its uses are described in more detail below.

Technology Insights

List Of Mac OSX Lion screencapture Format Types & Photoshop Image Mode For Each Mac Format

InsightsLeave a comment

When I got my Macbook about 9 months ago one of the first things I did was change the default OSX screenshot format type from PNG to GIF. I edit a lot of images in Photoshop to post in technical articles and for the GIF’s I have been having to change the Photoshop Image Mode from Indexed Color to RGB to apply most filters during the process of editing the image. Photoshop loses a lot of functionality when an image’s Image Mode is set to Indexed so each time I modified an screenshot image and say wanted to apply a filter I would first have to modify the Photoshop Image Mode from Indexed Color to RGB. I recently got fed up with having to do that so I was looking for a solution when I realized if I just change the default screencapture format back to PNG the images open in Photoshop with the Image Mode set to RGB or Red/Green/Blue Color Model. Anyhow when doing so I started to wonder what image formats were available to set as the default screencapture format. Below I describe the details of what screencapture image formats are available in Mac OSX Lion and also what Image Mode that Adobe Photoshop opens each format from the Mac in.